Texas judge allows Dallas woman Kate Cox to abort fetus with lethal abnormality

This story originally appeared in The Texas Tribune.

For the first time in at least 50 years, a judge has intervened to allow an adult Texas woman to terminate her pregnancy.

When Travis County District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble handed down the temporary restraining order Thursday, Kate Cox, 31, of Dallas burst into tears. Cox and her husband desperately wanted to have this baby, but her doctors said continuing the nonviable pregnancy posed a risk to her health and future fertility, according to a historic lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The Texas Office of the Attorney General, which challenged Cox’s claims at Thursday’s hearing, may try to ask a higher court to intervene.

[MORE: Abortion is mostly unavailable in Texas. Here’s what the state’s ‘trigger’ law will do]

“The idea that Ms. Cox wants desperately to be a parent, and this law might actually cause her to lose that ability is shocking and would be a genuine miscarriage of justice,” Gamble said.

At 20 weeks pregnant, Cox learned her fetus had full trisomy 18, a chromosomal abnormality that is almost always fatal before birth or soon after. Before the overturn of Roe v. Wade, Texas law allowed doctors to terminate pregnancies due to lethal fetal anomalies at any point during the pregnancy. But now, Cox’s doctors said their hands were tied by Texas’ abortion laws, which prohibit abortion except to save the life of the pregnant patient.

A week after she first received the diagnosis, Cox and her husband, represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights, filed a lawsuit asking a judge to grant a temporary restraining order, allowing them to terminate this pregnancy.

“It is not a matter of if I will have to say goodbye to my baby, but when,” Cox said in a statement. “I’m trying to do what is best for my baby and myself, but the state of Texas is making us both suffer.”

After a 45 minute Zoom hearing Thursday, Gamble ruled that Cox should be allowed to terminate the pregnancy, and that Dr. Damla Karsan, a Houston OB/GYN, should be protected from civil and criminal penalties if she performs the procedure.

Another district judge, Jessica Mangrum, previously ruled that the state’s abortion bans should not apply to people with complicated pregnancies, including those facing lethal fetal diagnoses. The state appealed that ruling, putting it on hold; the case is before the Texas Supreme Court.

The state cannot directly appeal Thursday’s order, since it is a temporary restraining order. Instead, the Office of the Attorney General would have to file a writ of mandamus petition, asking a higher court to take the extraordinary measure of overturning the emergency order.

“For mandamus relief, you’re supposed to go to the Court of Appeals first, and then to the Texas Supreme Court,” said Charles “Rocky” Rhodes, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. “But the Texas Supreme Court has recognized a somewhat flexible standard, that if there’s not enough time, you can go straight to them.”

Texas Right to Life, an anti-abortion advocacy group, condemned the lawsuit as a gateway to allowing abortions for any reason in Texas.

“Every child is uniquely precious and should continue to be protected in law no matter how long or short the baby’s life may be,” the group said in a statement. “The compassionate approach to these heartbreaking diagnoses is perinatal palliative care, which honors, rather than ends, the child’s life.”

Since the state banned nearly all abortions after the overturn of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, more and more women have come forward with stories of much-wanted pregnancies gone awry, and the ways the state’s abortion ban worsened their situation.

In October, the Texas Tribune documented the experiences of an East Texas woman who was forced to carry a nonviable pregnancy to term. Her twin sons, born conjoined with severe malformations, died just hours after they were born.

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