Fort Worth, TX — Today the Second Court of Appeals will consider an appeal of a lower court’s decision regarding the medical interventions provided by the doctors and nurses at Cook Children’s Medical Center to a terminally ill baby, Tinslee Lewis. The court was asked to order the interventions to be provided indefinitely against the advice of the medical team and to declare a provision of Texas law that resolves disputes between the family and doctors to be unconstitutional. However, the lower court did neither.

Compelling testimony in the lower court revealed that the interventions prolonging Tinslee Lewis’ death are causing her continual pain and suffering and require her to be sedated and paralyzed.

Texas Alliance for Life and several other pro-life, disability rights, and health care organizations filed an amicus curiae (friend-of-the-court) brief defending the law, and representatives of Texas Alliance for Life will be present in the courtroom.

That brief is here.

“We believe the dispute resolution process in Texas law is both good public policy and is constitutional,” said Joe Pojman, Ph.D., Texas Alliance for Life’s executive director. “The Texas law is among the best in the nation. It balances patients’ rights to make end of life decisions with the rights of physicians to not indefinitely order painful, medically inappropriate interventions to terminally ill patients that only prolong their deaths with no proportional benefit.”

First passed unanimously by the Legislature and signed into law by then-Governor George W. Bush in 1999, the Texas Advance Directives Act has been amended three times, all of which were supported by Texas Alliance for Life: 2003, 2015, and 2017. “We believe the proper place to improve the dispute resolution process is in the Legislature with input from stakeholders and the public. We don’t think the court should short circuit the legislative process through judicial activism,” added Pojman.

While the plaintiffs’ attorneys claim that the Texas law fails to guarantee “due process” protection from the State, we point out that just the opposite is true.

First, the dispute resolution process in Texas law, Sec. 166.046 of the Health & Safety Code, compares very well with other states’ dispute resolutions laws. Twenty-two states provide safe harbor for physicians as does Texas, but Texas provides more due process to protect patients’ end of life decision-making autonomy.

A list of the 22 states is provided here.

Second, a doctor treating a patient according to his or her best medical and ethical judgement is not the State or a state actor. “A doctor following the dispute resolution process in Texas law is no more a state actor than a taxi driver following the laws of the road,” said Pojman.

The case is on expedited appeal, but it is not known when a decision will be handed down.

By: Amy O'Donnell

Texas Alliance for Life is opposed to this budget amendment. “There are more than 20 wonderful agencies in the greater Austin area that help a woman who has a crisis pregnancy with alternatives to abortion, including adoption,” said Joe Pojman, Ph.D., Executive Director for Texas Alliance for Life. “We would have preferred the council spend the money to help low-income women utilize these life-affirming agencies.” A link to those resources is available here: PregnancyCentralTexas.com.

By: Joe Pojman

In a recent article on their website, Empower Texans claims that Texas Alliance for Life opposed a bill to ban the most common method of second trimester abortion, Senate Bill 415, claiming that we “sided with pro-abortion groups in opposing the legislation.”

That claim is false.

Indeed, there are quite a few incorrect statements about Texas Alliance for Life in the article, and the article’s conclusion is entirely wrong. This is not the first time that Empower Texans has grossly misrepresented Texas Alliance for Life’s positions.

By: Joe Pojman

Just over a year ago the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) began to release a series of undercover videos chronicling Planned Parenthood’s alarming practice of selling body parts of aborted victims– livers, kidneys, eyeballs, brains, and more – for research. Not only are members of the public shocked by what we saw, so are pro-life state political leaders. They have begun to respond, and this article gives a summary of what has been done and what we can expect.