The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, has threatened to prosecute any doctor who provides an abortion to Kate Cox, a woman with a non-viable pregnancy, advising hospitals to ignore a court order issued on Thursday allowing her to get the procedure.
Paxton also wrote that the hospital where Cox obtains an abortion “may be liable for negligent credentialing the physician” who performs the procedure.
On Thursday, the Travis county judge, Maya Guerra Gamble, issued a temporary restraining order to permit Cox’s doctor to perform the abortion.
Late Thursday night, the state appealed the judge’s ruling, in a motion asking the Texas supreme court to immediately block Gamble’s order.
In Paxton’s letter to the hospitals involved in Cox’s case, the attorney general wrote that Gamble was “not medically qualified to make this determination”.
The abortion rights movement generally enjoyed broad electoral victories in the aftermath of the US supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade.
Paxton, a particularly active champion of abortion restrictions, was re-elected to a third term as Texas’s top prosecutor in November 2022. »
