Doctors, lawyers and advocates say the state board’s new guidance still doesn’t clarify when doctors can legally perform abortions.
Texas Medical Board President Sherif Zaafran, M.D., speaks during a board meeting in the George H.W. Bush Building in Austin on March 22, 2024.to The Texas Tribune will help investigative journalism that impacts state policies and politics. It is the last week of our Spring Member Drive, and our newsroom relies on readers like you who support independent Texas news.
Stephen “Brint” Carlton, the board’s executive director, corrected her, saying that line applies to things like fetal surgeries and other interventions aimed at saving single pregnancies, not selective reductions of multiples. But then board chair Dr. Sherif Zaafran chimed in, saying that, in general, if a doctor feels a selective reduction is the standard of care and other expert physicians agree, it could potentially be allowed.
“I thought that exception applied until I heard you today,” Louise Joy, an attorney who advises Texas hospitals, said to Carlton. “But that’s the very confusion we have.” But after Steve and Amy Bresnen, Austin attorneys and health lobbyists, filed an official petition, the board conceded, issuing this first proposal in March. At Monday’s stakeholder hearing, doctors, lawyers and advocates across the political spectrum testified that the guidance did not clarify when doctors can act and, in fact, adds additional confusion.
Several speakers criticized the aspect of the guidance that tells doctors to document whether there was time to transfer a patient to another facility to avoid terminating the pregnancy. This provision“The requirement to determine when there was an adequate time to transfer the patient by any means available is so vague as to be unworkable,” testified Molly Duane, senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights.
Skopp said her fellow doctors’ fears were “irrational,” but called on the medical board to clearly reassure them that they can rely on their reasonable medical judgment to decide when to perform an abortion. The Texas Supreme Court ruled that Cox did not qualify for an abortion, even as it clarified in that ruling that a medical emergency need not be imminent to justify performing the procedure. Several groups, including the anti-abortion Texas Alliance for Life, called on the board to add this language to the guidance, which Zaafran said they would consider.
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