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UPDATE (Dec. 7, 2023 5:51 p.m. E.T.): On Thursday afternoon, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened legal action if Kate Cox’s abortion takes place.
A Dallas-area woman whose fetus has a fatal diagnosis will be allowed to get an emergency abortion, after a Texas judge granted her request to terminate her pregnancy.
Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two who is about 20 weeks pregnant, filed a lawsuit against Texas on Tuesday after receiving the results of a test confirming that her unborn baby has full trisomy 18, or Edwards syndrome. The diagnosis means “her pregnancy may not survive to birth, and, if it does, her baby would be stillborn or survive for only minutes, hours, or days,” the lawsuit said.
Texas has among the most draconian abortion bans in the country, with few exceptions. But at a hearing Thursday, state District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble granted Cox’s request, allowing her doctor to terminate the pregnancy.
“The idea that Miss 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,” the judge said.
The lawsuit is believed to be the first in the United States to seek court approval for an abortion after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade last year. But patients and doctors have said the language in the Texas law is so vague that there is substantial risk of physicians facing civil or criminal penalties if they provide abortions for people with pregnancy complications.
In July, three Texas women testified in court about the emotional toll from being forced to carry pregnancies that had little to no hope of survival. A judge ruled that the state’s ban was too restrictive for women who had serious pregnancy complications, but the ruling was put on hold after Texas appealed.
Cox has also publicly disclosed her anguish, as well as the bind that the state law had put her family in. In an op-ed published Wednesday in The Dallas Morning News, she explained why she sued Texas:
I’m trying to do what is best for my baby daughter and myself and my family, but we are suffering because of the laws in Texas.
I do not want to continue the pain and suffering that has plagued this pregnancy or continue to put my body or my mental health through the risks of continuing this pregnancy. I do not want my baby to arrive in this world only to watch her suffer.
However, an attorney representing the state argued in court Thursday that Cox and her husband had not sufficiently demonstrated that they would suffer “immediate and irreparable injury” without an abortion and should thus not qualify for an exception.