On: Family of pregnant woman who died sues Ken Paxton for wrongful death

Eighteenth of September, and a woman is dead in Texas because the law would not let a physician act until she was dying outright. Her name was Tierra Walker. She was thirty-seven, with child, and sick in a way the physicians understood. They understood it, and their hands were tied. She died in December of last year. Her family now sues the attorney general of that state.

I have held office, and I know what it is to defer a just claim until the hour can bear it. I defended that waiting, and I would defend it again, because a proclamation issued before it can be enforced is worth less than the paper it is written on. But there is a waiting that is prudence and a waiting that is cowardice wearing prudence’s coat. The first buys power for the claim. The second spends lives to avoid the discomfort of the claim.

What was waited for here? Not the right moment. The men who wrote that statute knew the exception for the life of the mother was drawn so narrow that no doctor could find his way through it with a prosecutor at his back. They knew. A law that leaves the physician guessing whether the court will later agree he acted soon enough is a law that decides, in advance, for death. That is not an accident of drafting. It is the drafting.

The suit will wind through the courts for years. The woman will be dead for all of them. I do not know whether the law will name what was done to her as a wrong. I know the country will have to decide, sooner than it wishes, whether a government that compels a woman to carry her own death is a government fit to endure.

The question is not whether it is just. The question is what we do now.