In a counter to pro-abortion activists’ claims that women would not be able to get legal medically necessary abortions in Texas, data released by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission notes that nearly 100 legal abortions have been performed in Texas to save the life of the mother since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, much political hay has been made of the Lone Star State’s abortion ban through distortions and misrepresentations of data by the mainstream media.
There has been, however, the issue of under what circumstances such a procedure can be legally performed. Physicians in Texas lobbied the Texas Medical Board (TMB) for guidance on how to navigate the state’s ban against elective abortions.
“Texas women are often not receiving quality care due to physician fear and misunderstanding of the laws,” Dr. Ingrid Skop, a member of the Texas Health Department’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee, claimed before the Texas Medical Board in May, according to Fox 4 KDFW.
TMB subsequently issued such guidance, but it seems that doctors were figuring things out long before that, as the Texas Health and Human Services Commission’s data seems to show.
Here’s some of what The Center Square reported on the commission’s figures:
There have been zero elective abortions in Texas since August 2022, when Texas’ new Human Life Protection Act took effect, according to 20 months of data published by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.
The data also shows abortions are being performed in medical emergencies, refuting claims to the contrary.
The law went into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its final judgement in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning the landmark abortion ruling of Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. This triggered the Human Life Protection Act, which allowed Texas statutes prohibiting abortion predating Roe to go into effect that were still on the books and never changed by the state legislature. Texas laws banning abortion, including the new Heartbeat Act, were in full effect by Aug. 25, 2022.
After years of legal challenges, the Texas Supreme Court ruled again last month that the Human Life Protection Act and other laws banning most abortions in Texas are legal.
The data shows that from January 2022 to June 2022, there were 17,112 elective abortions performed in Texas and 14 medical-necessity (life/health) exceptions. After Dobbs, in July 2022, there were 67 elective abortions performed in Texas and none after that.
Since Dobbs, 97 abortions have been performed for medical-necessity exceptions.