U.S. Supreme Court lets stand a decision barring emergency abortions

[ltlee1]

"WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a decision barring
emergency abortions that violate the law in Texas, which has one of the
country’s strictest abortion bans.

Without detailing their reasoning, the justices kept in place a lower
court order that said hospitals cannot be required to provide pregnancy
terminations that would violate Texas law.
..
Texas asked the justices to leave the order in place, saying the state
Supreme Court ruling meant Texas law, unlike Idaho’s, does have an
exception for the health of a pregnant patient and there’s no conflict
between federal and state law.

Doctors have said the law remains dangerously vague after a medical
board refused to specify exactly which conditions qualify for the
exception.

There has been a spike in complaints that pregnant women in medical
distress have been turned away from emergency rooms in Texas and
elsewhere as hospitals grapple with whether standard care could violate
strict laws against abortion."

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/10/07/US-Supreme-Court-emergency-abortion-ban-Texas/

[ltlee1]

The abortion rollback is based on a non-scientific emotional argument
fortified by an arcane legal framework.

"But there is a legal framework—it’s just an arcane one. It’s called
coverture.

Under coverture, when a woman married, she ceased to have an independent
legal identity and was instead “covered” by the legal identity of her
husband. The eighteenth-century legal scholar William Blackstone
described the concept in 1765: “By marriage, the husband and wife are
one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the
woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and
consolidated into that of the husband ... and her condition during her
marriage is called her coverture.” If this still feels a little
abstract, here is a contemporary description from several political and
historical scholars to put it in perspective: “Like children, servants,
and slaves, a woman’s identity was inseparable from that of a male
property owner. She could not sue, be sued, buy or sell property, or
engage in the public sphere.… [A] woman’s body was not her own.”

Sound familiar?

The legal maneuver performed by coverture—the subsuming of a woman’s
identity into a nearby and supposedly superior interest—precisely
describes what happens in legislation that is advanced on the basis of
the state’s interest in protecting potential life. In other words: When
the state recognizes the legal interest of the fetus but not that of the
pregnant person, it is subsuming the identity of the pregnant person
into that of her fetus. From a legal standpoint, when a person becomes
pregnant, she simply stops existing. The only thing that exists is her
fetus.

We can see this conspicuous absence all over the current panoply of
abortion restrictions. This is particularly the case in the definitions
embedded in the legislation, which often feature elaborate wordings that
foreground the legal identity of the fetus and de-emphasize that of the
pregnant person. For instance, the provision of the Georgia Code that
defines classes of persons currently defines “unborn human child” to
mean “a member of the species Homo sapiens at any stage of development
who is carried in the womb”—but never references the person whose body
contains that womb. "
https://newrepublic.com/article/185911/abortion-coverture-arcane-legal-theory