Texas doctors do not need to perform emergency abortions, court rules

silence7@slrpnk.net to politics @lemmy.world – 289 points –
wapo.st

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that Texas hospitals and doctors are not obligated to perform abortions under a longstanding national emergency-care law, dealing a blow to the White House's strategy to ensure access to the procedure after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022.

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Ok, to get this straight: cops do not need to protect, nor serve, and doctors do not need to save your life. I suppose life guards will get to decide whether or not they will grab a drowning child. Maybe the bathing suit is distasteful? If someone is in the street, I don't have to stop unless I am fully comfortable doing so; I paid for my car and I shouldn't have to risk damaging it by running someone over.

What are regulations even for? God, the government is so useless!

Hard /s

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"Some of you may die, but that's a risk I'm willing to take."

Poor women.

But a prime example what failing to codify into law does. The pro choice lawmakers failed all these decades to actually create robust laws protecting women's reproductive choice and health. Then Roe fell and there was nothing to hold back the hordes of Christian zealots waiting in the wings. Their intent was clear as some states even had trigger laws that would enact the moment Roe fell.

You see that now there is a scurry to create several laws that should curtail the president's power, as certain limits existed based on decency, decorum and shame. Now that decency, decorum and shame no longer play a role in politics, only hard and explicit rules help.

They never did anything because roe was rock fucking solid!!! Scotus had to literally show how corrupt they were by completely ignoring the 9th and the 14th amendments. They basically completely destroyed 50 years of jurisprudence and literally lied in their Dobbs reasoning.

Stop pretending any fucking law on the books would have stopped these ghouls.

Except it wasn't law, only jurisprudence. And many law scholars warned about the exact scenario that unfolded.

They ignored literal parts of the Constitution. How is another law going to stop that?

The Roe ruling was one based on a privacy argument that held up. A law explicitly enshrining these rights might have helped.

There are thousands of pages of legal analysis out there that break down how that should work. The goal would be to explicitly state these rights I stead of allowing interpretation by judges.

But laws are interpreted by the courts so a law passed by Congress would still be subject to their interpretation. In fact, even rights outlined in Constitutional amendments are interpreted by the courts. The best option would have been a constitutional amendment that was as specific as possible. However,

A) a constitutional amendment was not needed and should not have been required. The right to abortion was already codified in law and had a large pile of case law backing it up. Should we try to pass amendments for all the unenumerated rights? Do we need a state convention every time the courts rule in a way that establishes a new right?

B) Even that would not have stopped a court that had already made up its mind decades ago. They could have ruled that the new amendment violated the old ones and was void. They could have ruled it only protected abortion in rare cases, or that states rights are more important and overrule the right to abortion.

C) a constitutional amendment was never going to pass to requirements to become law. It would require a Dem supermajority in both chambers or Dem control of 2/3rds of states which is impossible with current gerrymandering.

Fundamentally we are looking at a whole party that would break any rule, law, or norm as long as it lets them do what they want. Establishing more rules or laws just gives them more things to break. The only party at fault here is them.

every time the courts rule in a way that establishes a new right?

The courts don't routinely invent entirely new rights whole cloth. It's much, much more common to make rulings on exactly how already established rights apply in new or untested scenarios. Roe is one of those exceptions. Roe was weak legally, even if it was good from a policy standpoint.

They never did anything because roe was rock fucking solid!!!

No, it wasn't. It was always just one bad decision away from crumbling, one that was always imminent because while it might be good policy, it was a bad decision from a legal standpoint. Any decision built on implied rights drawn from the shadows cast by other legal rights is inherently going to be on shaky ground, because determining what exactly those implied rights are is like reading tea leaves.

It doesn't help that a lot of the arguments, positions and implied rights surrounding abortion seem to only apply in that context.

No, it wasn't. There are plenty of areas in medical care and our personal medical decisions that somehow didn't fall under these amendments.

It was not solid, which is why Dems kept promising for 50 years to codify it into law. They fucked around and women got screwed.

Their intent was clear as some states even had trigger laws that would enact the moment Roe fell.

And some, like mine, just never repealed the old law against it. No need to pass a trigger law when the old unenforceable abortion ban that's literally older than the state can suddenly become enforceable.

EDIT: Surprised no one commented on the "literally older than the state" part. I'm in WV, our old abortion ban was carried over when we more or less imported Virginia's criminal code wholesale when we broke off from Virginia to stay with the Union in the Civil War.

This ruling is literally this court overriding a law. It's the first sentence if the summary. "A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that Texas hospitals and doctors are not obligated to perform abortions under a longstanding national emergency-care law,"

Can you, and everyone else, please stop with this ridiculous argument? It honestly might be one of the stupidest things said about abortion, and that's saying something.

First, Republicans weren't passing this, so you need Democratic control of the House, 60 votes in the Senate, and the presidency. So you're down to about 70 days in the past 40 years when this could have happened.

Second, where does Congress get the authority to regulate abortion? Interstate Commerce? How are you circumventing the 10th amendment?

Lastly, why wouldn't SCOTUS strike down this law when they overturned Roe? So they are willing to strike 50 years of judicial precedent, but not an act of Congress?

Your argument doesn't make sense and you're blaming the wrong people.

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The 5th Circuit: when you need a less legitimate court than SCOTUS.

Yeah, the 5th circuit is pretty widely known to be full of crazies. This ruling isn’t a surprise, and it’s exactly what Texas’ leadership wanted when they pushed to take it to federal court.

The Hippocrite’s Oath:

First- allow harm.

*hypocrite

Thanks. Always have a problem with that one. Gonna leave it for continuity.

I appreciate that. I've been trying to do the same thing with my comments as well (with a few exceptions). I think it's the right way to go about things, so digital-high-five

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Is there such a thing as murder by inaction? As in you could have prevented a death by taking action, and you didn't? Sounds like this might be it.

Yes, very much. Like murder by homeless sweeps destroying life saving medications. But out society accepts that much more than something like a classical murder.

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I still do not understand how lawmakers are allowed to practice medicine without a doctorate.

Having just read it, I am extremely disappointed to know that the Hippocratic oath doesn't mention anything about failing to provide care when it's necessary.

Be kind to these people when they come to seek asylum in your state. People can change and learn from their mistakes (in the case that they voted these reps in, they might not even regret it but honey and vinegar right?)

46% of Texans voted for Biden. Before the election, there were (wishful) talks of Texas becoming purple. It's much more blue than Florida, for example. But, the gerrymandering is pretty egregious.

Here's one district that contains black neighborhoods in both San Antonio and Austin, which are about 100 miles apart.

Just another example of why we need district lines to be assigned by an explicit mathematical process rather than politicians deciding what will best let them retain power.

Least split line is an example of an attempt at that (basically if you have an even number of districts to split into, draw the shortest line across the region that splits the population into an even number of people on each side and put half the districts on each side. If odd, then do almost the same, except instead of an even split, one side gets the extra "share" of people and the extra district to split into. Repeat the process for each piece until you have one district on each side of the line.

For example, if a state has 5 seats, then draw the shortest line that puts 60% of the population on one side and 40% on the other (a 3:2 ratio). Then for the 40% side, draw the shortest line across it that splits the population in half. For the 60% side, you draw the shortest line that produces a 2:1 split, then the shortest line across the 2 side that splits the population evenly. Each district now contains 20% of the population, all drawn without regard to or consideration of political affiliations or identity groups, and all generally pretty compact. Inconvenient if you want to ensure your party's continued power or create "majority minority" districts, but then those aren't the goals (and are actually antithetical to the goal of preventing gerrymandering).

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2 of those justices were ones that Schumer fast tracked under Trump so Congress could start their recess on time.

Texas is a garbage state in a shithole of a country.

There are enough loopholes in that law to drive a truck through. They arise out of the basic fact that obviously not every hospital can be a stroke or bypass center. Lack of EMTALA care for complex psychatric cases is a fact of life already.

we have a conservative anti-abortion Catholic in office

how does this surprise anyone

What does Biden have to do with a judgement by a different branch of government?

between this bullshit and the influx of californians since the pandemic, I wonder if this will end up flipping texas blue.

Because for some fucking reason we need a pile of bodies at our feet to realize when something needs to change, if that's even enough (see: gun control).