During a town-hall event in Iowa this week, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis about Kate Cox’s tragic story out of Texas. The Republican presidential hopeful didn’t have much to say about the specific case involving the Dallas-area mother and her dangerous pregnancy, but the governor did talk about the six-week abortion ban he imposed on his constituents.
“What I can tell you is in Florida, the Florida legislature passed a heartbeat bill that contained exceptions for things like rape, incest, life of the mother, fatal fetal defect, and victim of human trafficking,” DeSantis said.
The idea, of course, is to appear reasonable and compassionate. Sure, Republicans across multiple states were imposing unpopular abortion bans. And sure, the bans drastically reduce Americans’ freedoms. But don’t worry, GOP officials like DeSantis like to argue, the bans are filled with exemptions.
Women, the argument goes, can still terminate unwanted or dangerous pregnancies, just so long as they meet one of the standards Republicans consider legitimate.
But this is one of the key reasons the story out of Texas is so important: The abortion ban in the Lone Star State allows for abortions if there’s a risk of “substantial” harm to pregnant women.
Cox faced a risk of “substantial” harm. Texas Republicans tried to use governmental power to force her to go through with her dangerous and doomed pregnancy anyway. The exemption provision in the state’s abortion ban proved meaningless.
TPM’s Kate Riga had an excellent piece on this. If the exemption for a “life-threatening physical condition” and the “risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function” doesn’t apply to Cox — who, per her lawyers, has been in and out of four emergency rooms in the past month and may lose her ability to give birth in the future — who does it apply to? And how can anyone feel confident that a pregnant patient in even more imminent danger than Cox would get an abortion, given how justifiably skittish doctors are in the state?
The Texas case “reveals just how ineffective the ‘health and life’ exceptions to abortion bans are in practice,” Wake Forest law professor Meghan Boone told Vox. “If doctors cannot reasonably interpret these exceptions, they will understandably refrain from providing care — even when they believe it would be the correct treatment for their patient.” Aziza Ahmed, a Boston University law professor, also told Vox that the state’s primary goal is “to ensure that the medical exceptions are read narrowly,” a result the professor argued will “further hamper the already extremely limited ability of pregnant people to access care when they need it.” When Republicans like DeSantis, among others, point to so-called exemptions to the party’s many abortion bans, as part of a political effort to appear benevolent, keep these latest developments in mind — because as The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg explained in her latest column, the Texas case shows that “abortion ban exemptions are a sham.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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