Democrats are seizing on the Texas case in their push for abortion rights

The case of a Texas woman who requested a court-approved abortion but ultimately left the state for the procedure is reigniting the political arguments that have roiled elections for more than two years, prompting Democrats on the offensive and illustrates the continued lack of a united Republicans. policy response or a clear strategy on how to talk about the issue.

Texas woman Kate Cox, a mother of two in the Dallas area, has emerged as the living embodiment of what Democrats say remains one of their strongest arguments ahead of the 2024 election: that the Republicans will ban all abortion. Ms Cox was more than 20 weeks pregnant with a fetus with a fatal genetic defect known as trisomy 18, and lawyers and doctors argued that carrying the pregnancy to term jeopardized her health and her future fertility.

Her lawsuit was one of the first attempts by an individual woman to challenge enforcement of the abortion ban implemented by Republican states after Roe v. Wade was overturned a year and a half ago. Hours before the Texas Supreme Court ruled against granting Ms. Cox a medical exemption from the state’s abortion ban, she had decided to travel to undergo the procedure in a state where it remained legal.

From top officials in President Biden’s campaign to candidates in battleground states, Democrats seized on Ms. Cox’s plight as a cautionary tale for voters next year, highlighting her situation as they have with the heartbreaking, deeply personal stories of other women and girls since Roe. was overthrown.

Rep. Colin Allred, the Texas Democrat who is running to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz, characterized the statement as emblematic of the kind of abortion ban Republicans would enact across the country.

“This is not an unintended consequence of these extreme policies – this is exactly what people like Ted Cruz wanted and a fairly predictable outcome of their policies,” Mr. Allred said. “Unfortunately, Kate’s story won’t be the last we hear like this.”

The Biden campaign delivered an even simpler message on the matter: blame Trump. Campaign aides linked the case directly to Trump’s legacy as president, pointing out that he appointed three Supreme Court justices who cast tie-breaking votes in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling that overturned Roe in 2022.

“This is happening here in the United States of America, and it’s happening because of Donald Trump,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez said on a call with reporters. “As the chaos and brutality created by Trump’s work to overturn Roe v. Wade continues to worsen across the country, stories like Kate Cox’s in Texas have become all too common.”

The party’s swift embrace of Ms. into a new referendum on abortion rights.

Their attacks were largely met with silence by Republicans.

During a town hall meeting hosted by CNN in Des Moines on Tuesday evening, Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who was running as the Republican presidential nominee, avoided giving a direct answer to the question of whether women in Ms. Cox’s position should be forced to cast their vote to propagate. babies to term. Mr. DeSantis noted that a six-week abortion ban he signed in Florida this year included exceptions for a fatal fetal abnormality or to save the woman’s life.

“These things get a lot of press attention, I understand that. But that is a very small percentage that falls under these exceptions,” he added. “There are many other situations where we have an opportunity to realize really good human potential, and we have been working to protect as many lives as possible in Florida.”

Republican strategists working for the party’s Senate campaign committee and other candidates have urged their politicians to express support for “reasonable limits” on late-term abortions, with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother , as part of an effort to provide a more popular answer to this issue. Although the majority of Americans support the right to abortion, they also support restrictions later in pregnancy, especially as women enter the second trimester.

But as Ms. Cox’s situation shows, the messy medical reality of pregnancy can challenge these poll-tested positions. Ms. Cox was denied exactly the kind of medical exemption that many Republicans now support. In Congress, Republicans have been trying for about a decade to pass a federal ban on abortion after 20 weeks — a mark that Ms. Cox exceeded during her pregnancy.

“It used to be a good idea politically to talk about later abortion,” says Mary Ziegler, a law professor and historian of abortion at the University of California, Davis. “The claims simply don’t land in the same way when abortion bans are actually enforced and when it is the patients themselves who are speaking.”

Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and a Republican presidential candidate, deflected when asked whether she would support rulings similar to those of the Texas Supreme Court blocking individual women’s decisions on the issue. Ms. Haley has positioned herself as someone seeking “consensus” on the issue, arguing that she is both “unapologetically pro-life” and that decisions about whether to undergo the procedure are deeply personal.

“You have to show compassion and humanize the situation,” Ms. Haley said, after speaking at a packed town hall meeting at a ski resort in Manchester, N.H. “We don’t want women to sit there and have to deal with a rare situation and we shouldn’t be delivering a baby in those kinds of circumstances any more than we want women to have an abortion at 37, 38, 39 weeks.”

Such a response is unlikely to satisfy the social conservative flank of the party base. Tensions between anti-abortion activists and establishment Republicans, who are more willing to compromise on the issue for political gain, flared as the party discussed Ms. Cox’s case.

“The prolife movement has gone from compassion for the child to cruelty to the mother (and child),” wrote Ann Colter, the conservative commentator, on the social media platform X. “Trisomy 18 is not a condition compatible with life . ”

Rick Santorum, the socially conservative Republican former senator from Pennsylvania, fired back with a photo of his daughter Bella. “Meet my incompatible life daughter,” he wrote. “Every child deserves a chance at life, not brutally dismembered because he is not perfect.”

Ardent anti-abortion advocates like Mr. Santorum argue that just as the law would not allow the killing of a terminally ill adult, it should also ban the abortion of a fetus with a fatal diagnosis — like Ms. Cox’s.

“There are two patients involved, and targeting one of them for brutal abortion will never be the compassionate response,” said Katie Daniel, state policy director for SBA Pro-Life America, an anti-abortion political organization. “Texas law protects mothers who need lifesaving care in a medical emergency, which a doctor can provide without intentionally taking a patient’s life and without court intervention.”

The argument that abortion is akin to murder, a fundamental belief of the anti-abortion movement, is harder to make when it is no longer hypothetical. As conservative states have begun imposing bans that all but completely ban abortion, pregnant women have emerged as some of Democrats’ strongest messengers.

In Ohio, the story of a girl who was raped at age 9 and had to travel to Indiana at age 10 to terminate her pregnancy became a national controversy after Republicans publicly questioned the veracity of the story. And in Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, spent nearly $2 million on sensational ads for his re-election campaign featuring Hadley Duvall, a young woman who said she was raped by her stepfather as a girl.

Eric Hyers, Mr. Beshear’s campaign manager, said these ads had the greatest impact among older men living in more rural and conservative parts of the state.

“A lot of people out there never had to think about this in the terms Hadley described,” Mr Hyers said. “This is the roadmap for how Democrats should talk about this in tough states like Kentucky and specifically how extreme these laws and bans are.”

Across the country, activists have pushed for ballot measures that would enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions. Many Democrats believe these referendums could help energize their voters, boosting turnout in Arizona, Florida and other crucial states. In Florida, abortion rights advocates said they were close to collecting the necessary number of signatures to bring an amendment to the state constitution to a vote.

Some Democrats say such measures are not enough, especially for women in conservative states like Texas, where laws had already almost completely banned abortion even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe.

“It is absolutely unacceptable that women have to ask permission to receive life-saving health care,” said Ashley All, who helped campaign for an abortion rights ballot measure in Kansas and is pushing Democrats to pass legislation that would include abortion rights in federal law. codifies, to implement. “The fact that we are not making any effort at the national level to solve that problem is frustrating.”

Nicholas Nehamas And Jasmine Ulloa reporting contributed.