Texas Republicans drove Kate Cox out of her own state. What her abortion story means for America

It's impossible for any man, without the experience of pregnancy, to fully comprehend the unbearable trauma that Kate Cox just endured. At the same time, every one of us can appreciate the service she performed for America. Her suffering has viscerally exposed the harm to women and their families that has come from the Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org’n, the June 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. 

May we remember it next fall when we elect a president who will appoint the next Supreme Court justices. They will be people who either understand that harm or who sacrifice it on the altar of their religious beliefs and ideology.

Cox is the Texas woman who last week asked a trial court for permission to terminate her unviable pregnancy. She initially won, only to have the permission rescinded Friday by the state Supreme Court’s stay of the lower court ruling. Texas’s MAGA Attorney General Ken Paxton couldn’t wait to bring the court an emergency petition to force Cox to continue her doomed pregnancy. 

Testing showed a fatal genetic abnormality in her fetus, a mutation that would kill it in utero or shortly after birth. Ms. Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two, sought simply to accelerate the inevitable, avoid any threat to her health from continuing a pointless pregnancy and potentially dangerous labor, grieve and try again in the future.

Under Texas law enacted after Dobbs, however, that was not to be. Once the Texas Supreme Court issued its stay last Friday, Ms. Cox saw the handwriting on the wall. On Monday, hours before the Texas court announced its final decision permanently stopped her right to have an abortion, Ms. Cox left the state to seek medical care before her condition worsened.

Texas bans abortions after six weeks. There’s an exception for threats to the mother’s life, but not to non-terminal risks to physical or mental health from carrying a fetus that has no serious prospect for surviving. 

The state tied a mother’s hopes for compassionate relief to a stake and burned them in the public square. The cruelty is shocking. Yet Cox, knowing what could be coming, stood until she saw that she might be forced – literally – to deliver. 

It took undaunted courage for a woman in her straits to stick around at all, file a lawsuit and risk the emotional torture she faced last week from Texas officials and the laws enacted by them.   

The conflict between Cox and Texas embodies the larger battle for the soul of America. 

On one side of the battle lines is the state, which claims the right to subject its pregnant women to agony of the kind that Ms. Cox just experienced. Ultimately, she had the means to escape to another state, but millions of poor Texas women do not.

On the other side stands Cox, representing those willing to face personal peril to insist, to the point of intolerable pain, on the rights to health and bodily safety that the state should safeguard. Texas has now said it will not. 

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Citizens can change this in the answer we give in our votes 10 months from now. Our answer will decide not only who represents us, but also the larger question posed by Cox’s case and by political philosophers over the centuries: Can humans sustain societies in ways that benefit all, not just those with money and power who believe that the government can take away fundamental rights that existed for 50 years. 

Donald Trump and his MAGA enablers are making plans if he is elected to benefit only themselves by installing the Ken Paxton’s of the country as our governing class and to destroy the constitution’s checks and balances on their power. If Trump returns to the White House, we are all Kate Cox. 

In the meantime, however, she has illuminated the choice before us. Her torment by the state may sear into the public consciousness the understanding that freedom from oppressive government control is truly on the ballot in 2024. 

We have already seen the redoubtable power of abortion rights in virtually every election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Voters have affirmed the right in seven initiative measures on the ballots of states red and blue over two election cycles. The issue has carried decisive weight in competitive candidate elections like Justice Janet Protasciewcz’s 11-point victory in Wisconsin, a state known for tight elections.

As for the coming presidential contest, the many of us who care about freedom can work to ensure the future of a republic in which the law protects individual rights. The need for a government and law of compassion can be understood by anyone, including those not built to carry a baby.