UPDATE: May 21, 2025
The so-called “life of the mother” act to “clarify” medical emergencies that constitute exemptions under the laws, SB 31, easily passed the Texas House and will soon be on it’s way to the Governor’s desk. Once the Governor has signed the law, it will take effect September 1, 2025.
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Texas women have a 155% higher risk of maternal death than those in California. For Texas Latinas, the risk is nearly tripled.
A new report from the Gender Equity Policy Institute paints a morbid reality for people living in states with abortion bans. Women are dying, being denied care, and are terrified.
Many feel like their elected officials aren’t grasping that reality — or rather, don’t care that 59% of Texans support abortion in all or most cases, according to a poll by Public Religion Research Institute. Instead of repealing the strictest abortion laws in the country, on Tuesday, just before 4:30 p.m. the Texas Senate passed the so-called “life of the mother” act to “clarify” medical emergencies that constitute exemptions under the laws.
“This bill is an acknowledgement of how desperately fragile our personal rights and liberties are. Under the current order, Texans are no longer allowed to make the most fundamental of personal choices without governmental interference,” Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, who voted for the bill, said just before the Senate vote. “If your pregnancy falls outside of this politically determined exception, you are on your own trying to get to a territory that still provides you your right to determine whether, when, and with whom you have children. And anyone who helps you on your way is vulnerable to civil and even criminal prosecution for helping you.”
Eckhardt and other Democrats seemed to reluctantly support the bill — imperfect was a common descriptor — saying it could save lives. Yet, the rare bipartisan effort isn’t exactly instilling confidence in women who are scared to get pregnant or who have gone through harrowing, near-death experiences trying to have babies in Texas.
“These politicians insist they know better than you what is right for your family, they would criminalize you for making the right decision for your family,” said Lauren Miller, a mother who had to flee the state for abortion care, during a March Senate hearing. “That is not freedom, that is not independence, that is anti-Texan.”
Still, there may be some hope. The aim of the bill is “purely a medical exception and a cleanup,” said state Rep. Ann Johnson of Houston, a co-author of the bill, during testimony for the committee on public health in early April.
“We are talking about physicians in our emergency rooms that see women bleeding who can’t perform regular medical modern technologies because they are afraid that folks politically think they’re trying to do something wrong. They’re just trying to perform healthcare,” Johnson said. “All this bill does is say that when you see that physical manifestation of an indication that a major bodily function is at risk, you don’t need to make her get at death’s door before you practice your job, because not doing that is making these people leave the state of Texas, and it is hurting us all.”
The bill could change as it goes through the House, where it’s pending in committee, though it is expected to head to the governor’s desk. As it stands, it will:
- Clarify that a doctor can perform an abortion if there are “threats to the mother’s life and threats to her major bodily functions”
- Clarify that a doctor “using reasonable medical judgment” can intervene more quickly and give “timely medical care to a pregnant woman in a defined medical emergency”
- “Protect” women undergoing treatment for cancer and other diseases when the treatment may jeopardize the unborn child
- Redefines ectopic pregnancies in a more medically accurate way
- Would allow mothers to choose medical treatment (for things like cancer) to save their lives, even if it means their pregnancy will be terminated
- Force the state to create courses for both attorneys and doctors to take to understand how lawmakers want to control the parameters of what abortions are legal and which are not
While the bill has received pushback from abortion advocates, there’s also a sentiment that doctors will take what they can get to help lower rates of women dying.
“An inconvenient fact for many is if the woman is pregnant, if she gets an abortion, her risk of death goes down dramatically with that pregnancy. That is a fact,” Dr. Charles Brown, a member of the Texas A&M College of Medicine, said at a Texas Impact gathering in February of 2024. Texas Impact is an interfaith group that works together on issues that impact the most vulnerable people in our communities, according to their website. Brown explained that basic medicine facts support the need for abortions. “Early abortion is a very safe procedure, nothing’s 100% but those are the best statistics we have that have been shown to every country on Earth, every society, everyone who honestly looked at the data.”
Brown said that when Texas’ abortion bans took effect, he approached several attorneys for help in clarifying what they meant for doctors like him. He said they “could not give me any advice because these were criminal laws, not the typical civil laws that apply to the practice of medicine.”
Brown has practiced medicine in Texas for over 40 years and is a maternal fetal medicine doctor who has received specialized training to handle high-risk pregnancies. He believes that the “clarification” bill “ensures that physicians and the members of their team can act quickly when the life of the mother is at risk without the threat of losing our medical license or getting thrown in jail,” Brown said during testimony of the House version.
While it won’t legalize abortion in Texas, Brown said this piece of legislation is “a necessary step in protecting the health and well being of women in Texas.”
But lawmakers and abortion advocates are clear that with abortion bans still in place, people will continue dying.
“It’s not all I want in this bill. This does not deal with rape and says doesn’t deal with fatal fetal abnormality or many other things that we could debate,” Johnson, a co-author of the bill, said.
Not all women will be covered by the “clarification” bill
“It was finally our time. We had done all the hard work, and we were finally here,” Taylor Edwards told The Barbed Wire. After several rounds of failed IVF, she and her husband had finally got the news their IVF was successful on Thanksgiving of 2022. Then in February of 2023, on the day of her wedding anniversary, Edwards and her husband went in for a routine anatomy scan of their growing baby girl.
“I knew they were looking at the stuff with the baby, but I didn’t really understand that people get the worst news of their lives at the anatomy scan,” Edwards remembered. Because of their IVF journey, they had to visit a new doctors office that specializes in maternal fetal medicine and noticed something was off.
“The ultrasound tech, she was really weird, and I didn’t really put it together. I was just trying to crack jokes with her, be (a) person, and she was just being really quiet.” After the ultrasound tech left the room, a doctor came in and introduced himself, then asked Edwards to get back on the exam table.
“He said she saw something in the spine. So he goes to her spine, and he starts at the bottom, and he’s going up and then he gets to the back of base of her skull, and it hadn’t closed, and her brain was actually coming out of the back, and he didn’t even mince words. He said, ‘This baby is not going to survive.’”
The couple’s world came crashing down.
“I started screaming. I kept fighting with him. I was like, ‘What do you mean? Can she have surgery? Can we do something? I will go anywhere.’ And he was like, ‘She’s not going to survive.’”
Edwards and her husband were told they could wait for their baby girl to die — either in utero (which would require weekly monitoring appointments and labor induction) or after birth, when she would suffocate.
The second option her doctor recommended was to leave the state to seek an abortion.
“He said that families typically regret carrying on with the pregnancy. It is more dramatic for everybody involved. And so I’m trying to process literally all this and and we’re like, OK, I guess we’re going to leave the state,” Edwards said. “They wrote it on a little piece of paper, a name of a clinic in New Mexico. Didn’t give me any other information.”
Edwards said her decision on how to peacefully and respectfully end her pregnancy was taken from her due to Texas’ abortion laws.
“I didn’t have a choice in what kind of procedure I was going to have, because you’re very limited, because Texas has laws where you can’t use your insurance for abortions, and so you have to go to a clinic. I couldn’t go to a hospital setting because I couldn’t afford a hospital without insurance for that kind of procedure, and nobody can, so we had to go to a clinic.”
Edwards and her husband ran into complications with scheduling in New Mexico, she had to carry her dying daughter for two more weeks after the ultrasound, then had to flee to Colorado to find the care she needed.
“I didn’t get to mourn what was going on, my pregnancy and my daughter,” Edwards said. “I was trying to navigate laws. I was trying to understand if it was legal. I was truly, deeply afraid I would be arrested when we landed back in Austin. And I think that that fear is intentional.”
Edwards’ situation wouldn’t be covered under the so-called “save the mother” act. Abortions in the case of fatal fetal diagnosis will still be considered “elective,” and Texans who receive the news that their babies will die will be faced with the same agonizing decision — if they can even afford to go out of state for care.
“I had a fatal fetal anomaly, yes, but I had an elective abortion. Both of those things can be true, and I don’t think that lawmakers that’s getting through to their head,” Edwards said. “It is Texas. I’m not delusional. I don’t think that tomorrow they’re going to be like, ‘Okay, let’s just open up abortions for any reason.’ But I think that, if you are going to be making these distinctions and legislating things that have real-life effects on real people, you need to be very clear about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.”
“I think that they are trying to play the good guys, and they’re not,” Edwards said.
Mothers like Lauren Miller and Kaitlyn Kash would also be excluded from abortion care. Both of their wanted pregnancies faced complications and fatal fetal anomalies. Miller, who was pregnant with twins, found out that one of her pregnancies was unviable. She said her doctor told her, “I can’t help you anymore. This baby isn’t going to make it to birth. You need to leave the state.”After fleeing to Colorado to get the care she needed, Miller said, “If I had not been able to get an abortion for Thomas, then Henry, my healthy son, would be in that urn with him.”
Kash had two health crises during two different pregnancies. In 2023, she was denied a D&C, a minor procedure called suction dilation and curettage, to remove tissue from the uterus that hasn’t been expelled naturally and presents risk of infection. Doctors say due to the state’s abortion bans, they couldn’t give her that standard of care after her placenta would not deliver. She waited for nearly two hours before the procedure was performed and says she almost bled out, then spent the night in the ICU. Doctors told her that future pregnancies could be life-threatening. In that case, the “clarification” bill could potentially help her. But it wouldn’t have in 2021, when her fetus was diagnosed with a fatal anomaly at 13 weeks. Kash’s life was not at stake, but she says her unborn child was suffering, and she had to flee the state for an abortion.
“I had already been waiting a week, my baby’s bones were going to start breaking in utero, and I was literally up against a clock of trying to end their suffering,” Kash told The Barbed Wire. “I was afraid to move because I didn’t want to break their bones, and I had to get on an airplane, and the doctor asked me how I wanted to remember, and I was so upset and panicked that I just said, ‘I just would like to get this over with,’ and it is the biggest regret that I have in my life.”
Texas lawmakers, she said, “took away my dignity as a mother to say goodbye to my child,” and you treated me like a criminal.
Kash and Miller are both on a mission to keep pushing for more than just “clarification” laws, although Miller admits she was initially excited about having more clarity.
“Exceptions to abortion bans are a lie. They will always be a lie, and giving any sort of support to it has become a flaw. When I initially heard about this bill, I was very excited. I was thinking, okay, we’re going to get a little clarity. Maybe, we don’t have to get dead enough. Maybe there will be something,” Miller said. “But it’s clear that anti abortion groups have gotten their hands on this so much that it no longer resembles what may have been in good faith.”
Another concern among abortion advocates is the possible revival of a 1925 law that could set the stage to prosecute abortion patients, anyone who helps patients access abortion care. There are also no exceptions for rape, incest or teen pregnancy. In 2023, six kids under 11 years old had to flee Texas to get abortions, according to Texas Health and Human Services data. There were 105 minors total who had to leave.
During the final reading of the bill, Sen. Roland Gutierrez questioned why the bill had no exceptions for children who were raped. Republican Sen. Bryan Hughes said “we wouldn’t punish the little unborn baby because of the horrible act of the rapist, let’s punish the rapist.” (If that sounds disingenuous, it may be because F.B.I data from 2019 shows that Texas solves fewer rape cases than the national average, and Republicans at the national level have made cuts to sexual violence prevention programs, meaning delays for rape crisis centers in Texas.)
Lawmakers say their focus is to try to get what they can get in the midst of the people running the state politically. They say the bill “doesn’t provide greater relief to Texas Women, it just provides greater clarity and relief from liability for the physicians” to act in a “politically defined medical emergency.”
The next step is for House members to vote on their version of the bill and send it to the governor’s desk to become law in September.
“As a state, we’ve already decided that we don’t trust women to make that decision about their babies, but right now, we’re not trusting medical professionals to do that either,” Johnson said. “This is health care, and this is about saving women’s lives free from an abortion debate, because you’ve already won that.”