Five women and two doctors filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas saying the state’s new snitching law that encourages people to bring frivolous lawsuits against women seeking an abortion and the medical providers who perform them endangers patients’ lives, NPR reports.
“[The women] have been denied necessary and potentially life-saving obstetrical care because medical professionals throughout the state fear liability under Texas’s abortion bans,” the plaintiffs assert, outlining that doctors are being intimidated against providing a legal, life-saving medical procedure because they fear getting a slew of lawsuits from uninterested parties who are encouraged by potentially getting $10,000 each in a civil suit promoted by the law, which doesn’t punish anyone who files frivolous lawsuits under the law.
The lawsuit points out that the law, known as SB 8, does not clarify under what circumstances abortion is necessary and therefore, protected under the law. But conservatives in Texas didn’t enter a provision of the law shielding abortion providers who perform life-saving abortions, allowing a provider to get sued out of business for saving a woman’s life because conservatives are shitty, spiteful politicians.
One of the women sought an abortion at 19 weeks of gestation after her water broke prematurely, effectively ensuring the fetus would die; she had to fly to Colorado to get an abortion to avoid a life-threatening infection. Another woman, in a high-risk pregnancy with twins, was told by doctors that aborting the weaker twin would greatly increase the chance the other twin would live. Neither could find a doctor in Texas who would perform the life-saving procedures.