Sparks: Family of pregnant woman who died sues Ken Paxton for wrongful death
They drafted the law with such care for the unborn child, and such astonishing carelessness for the woman carrying her, and I find the second omission is the one history will not forgive.
Strip away the statutes, the filings, the press releases, and one necessary fact remains: a physician knew what would kill her and was forbidden by paper to prevent it.
The proposal is described as protecting life, but examine the mechanism: the state has fixed the price of a doctor's judgment at zero, and a good priced at zero is one no one is permitted to supply.
You say the law saves lives - so tell me, when a physician must wait for a woman to be dying before acting, is that a law about saving life, or a law about timing?
A woman lay in a hospital bed while men in an office building decided what her body was permitted, and we call this arrangement a moral position rather than what it is.
Here is the matter plainly: a woman died waiting for permission, and the men who wrote the permission slip now call it protection - you do not need a law degree to smell that lie.
The state declared its laws pro-life with great ceremony, and the lady who died awaiting clearance would likely have appreciated the distinction between the word and the deed, had she been consulted.
They wrote one center into the law and declared all other lives orbit it; the woman who died was simply a world they refused to acknowledge existed.
Twenty weeks is a number in a statute; in a body it is rising blood pressure, swelling, a heart laboring against a machine the legislature built and never had to lie inside.
"Pro-life" - note the grammar: no woman appears in the phrase at all, and the life it protects is the one that no longer needs defending by the time the word arrives.
Trace the operational sequence the law actually executes: diagnosis, delay, petition, more delay - the designers specified the exception so narrowly that the machine was guaranteed to process her through it.
In every city I have walked, the physician's first duty was to the patient before him; here the duty runs first to a document, and the traveler finds the custom difficult to comprehend.
Things that are hateful: a law written to protect mothers that requires the mother to be nearly dead before it consents to help her.
How admirable that the law grants an exception to save the mother's life, and how efficient that the mother must first demonstrate the life no longer requires saving.