You already know how I feel about this.
The Texas Medical Board on Friday adopted guidance for how doctors should interpret the state’s new abortion laws, reducing paperwork requirements some saw as overly burdensome but declining to provide a list of cases in which an abortion would be legal.
The board unanimously approved the new guidelines after making revisions in response to concerns raised by doctors, lawyers and people who say they were denied medically necessary abortions. The changes included removing a controversial provision that appeared to encourage doctors to transfer patients who might need an abortion.
Board Chair Dr. Sherif Zaafran acknowledged Friday that, even with these edits, this guidance doesn’t address all the concerns the board heard during this process.
“There are certain things that we can address and there are certain things that we ultimately don’t feel that we have the authority to address,” Zaafran said.
This long-awaited guidance is just that — guidance, laying out how the Texas Medical Board will investigate allegations of illegal abortions. The medical board can take away the license of a doctor found to have performed an illegal abortion, and its findings could potentially be used by prosecutors or the attorney general’s office in determining whether to seek criminal or civil penalties.
“There is nothing that prevents a prosecutor in an individual county or an individual who wants to file a lawsuit to do so,” Zaafran said. “But my hope would be, and my strong recommendation would be, that any entities out there would defer to the actions of the medical board and its judgment when a complaint has come in as to whether something was appropriate or not.”
See here for the previous update. With all due respect to Dr. Zaafran, who along with his colleagues did what they could with this mess, but tell that to Ken Paxton. If you cannot meaningfully restrain Ken Paxton, then no doctor has any incentive to act any differently today than they did before.
As I said, you already know how I feel so I’m just going to add a couple of notes from elsewhere. First, from the Things That Will Not Happen department:
More than 20 Texas women turned to the courts for additional clarity on when their doctors could act in medical emergencies in Zurawski v. Texas. The State Supreme Court ruled against those women in late May, saying a lower court’s injunction in the case “departed from the law as written without constitutional justification.”
In the case of Kate Cox, a North Texas woman who petitioned the court for the right to get an abortion for her medically complicated pregnancy, the state’s highest court similarly did not side with the patient. Instead, the court said the Texas Medical Board had the authority to issue guidance on how physicians should operate under the bans.
“I think the Supreme Court, for lack of a better term, created the hot potato. They didn’t want to do this, so they threw it to the state medical board and the state medical board really doesn’t have the authority to change the law, ” said Dr. Todd Ivey, a Houston OB-GYN. “I think what this says to me, as a practicing physician, is now the onus is on the legislature and the legislature really needs to step up and address this.”
Narrator: The Legislature will not do anything to address this. There may be some room for a microscopic change around the edges, but nothing that will have an impact. This will be true for as long as the Legislature remains as it is.
And to reiterate my earlier point:
One of the medical board members who is not a health care professional, LuAnn Morgan, said she was concerned that the rules don’t go far enough to ensure patients receive the care they need.
In response, Zaafran noted that physicians also can face discipline for declining to act in emergency scenarios. Reports of hospital officials making decisions not to treat a patient, against a doctor’s judgment, is inappropriate, he added.
“What we’re saying here, very specifically, is that there is no right for anyone other than a physician to make that judgment,” Zaafran said. “To do so by anyone else would be practicing medicine without a license.”
Another board member, Dr. Manuel Quiñones Jr., a San Antonio family medicine physician, acknowledged that the board cannot “completely cover every single possible scenario under every single circumstance.” But the rules reflect the board’s attempt to protect a doctor’s decision-making, he said.
“Somebody has to … step beyond the line and try to save life or maintain quality of life,” he said. “Somebody has to make that decision, and that’s what we’re trying to protect.”
And again, the person making that decision will be Ken Paxton. We both know what needs to be done about it. Spectrum News and KXAN have more.