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

A woman in Texas died of a treatable condition because a law stood between her and the physician. Now her family sues the attorney general. I read this and my first question is not whether the lawsuit will win - it is what the law was protecting, and whose.

The stated value is life. Trace it. The men who wrote this statute did not consult physiologists; they consulted a moral tradition in which the suffering woman is an instrument, her body a battlefield on which someone else’s purity is defended. The unborn is invoked - but note that the same legislators cut the food programs, the clinics, the care that would have kept the born child alive. From whose standpoint does this appear to be a culture of life? From the standpoint of men who will never be pregnant, never hemorrhage, never stand in a hospital corridor while an infection advances and a lawyer reviews the chart. Their virtue costs them nothing. That is the tell. A value that requires no sacrifice from the one who holds it, only from the one it is imposed upon, is not a value. It is an appetite wearing the costume of conscience.

And there is ressentiment here, precisely diagnosed: the weak - those who feel powerless before modernity, before women’s autonomy - have performed the ancient maneuver. They have named their weakness righteousness and their cruelty protection. The woman who dies becomes, in their vocabulary, a tragic but necessary sacrifice. Necessary for whom?

The lawsuit is interesting because it turns the weapon around: it forces the state to answer for the corpse its law produced. Good. Let the genealogy be litigated. Let the men explain, under oath, what “life” meant when it required a death.

A morality that kills the living to honor the hypothetical has failed its own test. The hammer should be applied here - not to the doctors, who trembled rightly, but to the drafters, who never tremble at all.