By: By Emily Brindley and Nolan D. McCaskill
“It’s highly illegal in Texas,” said Joe Pojman, founder and executive director of Texas Alliance for Life. “It is the same offense as performing an illegal abortion in Texas.”
Legal experts have said the law isn’t so black-and-white, particularly because a number of other states have enacted shield laws that protect health care providers from other states’ abortion bans.
By: Louis Knuffke
Joe Pojman, director of the pro-life Texas Alliance for Life, criticized the Find Out PAC for attempting to “legislate from the bench” to push its abortion agenda after defeats in the legislature.
Referring to the abortion lobby group, Pojman told the American-Statesman in a recent interview, “They lost in the Legislature, so now they’re trying to get the court to legislate from the bench, and I think they’re misrepresenting that issue to voters. This PAC is lobbying the wrong body.”
Texas Alliance for Life and Texas Right to Life have both endorsed the Republican slate of state Supreme Court justices.
By: Rachel Quackenbush
“What they’re promoting is far from freedom,” Texas Alliance for Life stated.“[I]t’s the most radical push for abortion on demand that we’ve ever seen at the expense of unborn babies’ lives.”
According to the pro-life organization, the DNC was marked by claims that pro-life laws are harming women by denying life-saving care, with a particular emphasis on the case of Amanda Zurawski.
Zurawski’s story, shared by the DNC, recounts how, at 18 weeks pregnant, her water broke. Zurawski was told that her life was at risk, but that the baby was still alive. She was instructed to wait for an abortion until the baby either died or she showed signs of severe infection. Her doctor’s delay in treatment caused Zurawski to develop sepsis, putting her life in great danger.
According to Texas Alliance for Life, Zurawki’s story has been “misrepresented” for over a year, and it is widely and incorrectly believed that Amanda Zurawski’s life was risked because of restrictions on abortion.
However, Texas Alliance for Life clarified that Texas law permits immediate abortions to protect a woman’s life, and that the delay in Zurawski’s case was a result of medical mismanagement rather than legal restrictions.
By: Bayliss Wagner Minnah Arshad
The groups that advocated for the bans, however, maintain that medical exceptions to the ban protect women’s lives and health while preserving the fetuses they carry. Texas Alliance for Life in monthly news releases has highlighted that between 1 in 10 “medical-necessity” abortions have been recorded in Texas each month since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
By: Eleanor Klibanoff
“We can see that there are doctors in Texas who clearly understand that the law allows them to intervene [perform an abortion] to save a woman’s life,” said Amy O’Donnell with Texas Alliance for Life. “Not a single woman has lost their life, and no doctor has faced any kind of prosecution, lost their medical license or faced any penalties.”
By: FAITH BUGENHAGEN
“This is not the end of the conversation. There are other avenues for us to seek a reversal of those lax guidelines,” O’Donnell said. “We — the pro-life community — can petition to the executive branch. We can seek other ways to go about what the physicians and organizations, in this case, were trying to achieve.”
O’Donnell and other pro-life advocates take issue with what they refer to as an increased risk of complications linked to medical abortions compared to those associated with surgical abortions.