Senior Republican lawmakers say Texas should clarify abortion ban

SAUSTIN – The Austin American-Statesman reports several months after more than 110 Texas OB-GYNs said the state’s abortion ban must change, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Sunday said the law should be amended to protect doctors and pregnant patients at risk of death. “I do think that we need to clarify any language so that doctors are not in fear of being penalized if they think the life of the mother is at risk,” Patrick said on WFAA’s “Inside Texas Politics” after he was asked whether he expected “any significant abortion legislation, either to clarify current statute or to strengthen it.” Patrick, who runs the Senate and has established significant influence over what bills are passed, is the first major Republican official in Texas to say he supports clarifying the state’s near-total abortion ban this legislative session. Soon after Patrick’s remarks, two senior Republican lawmakers in the House and the Senate confirmed that some within the Legislature have already begun brainstorming on a potential tweak to the ban.

State Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, who penned one of the state’s two recent abortion bans, confirmed to the American-Statesman on Monday that he agreed with Patrick and said “we’ve been working on language.” Seven-term Republican state Rep. Jeff Leach, of Plano, also indicated there is support in the House for such a change. “The Lt. Gov is (100%) right about this,” Leach wrote in a post on X quoting a Texas Tribune story about Patrick’s remarks. “Plans and work are already underway to try to get it done this #txlege session.” Texas currently prohibits abortion except when a pregnant person risks death without one, with no exceptions for rape, incest or fatal fetal anomalies. For several years, OB-GYNs and patient advocates have said the ban’s life-of-the-mother exception is too vague and too narrow to allow doctors to take preventive action before a patient reaches the point of no return. They have also argued that the threat of severe penalties for physicians — up to 99 years in prison, fines of at least $100,000 and loss of medical license — further increases doctors’ hesitancy to act, increasing the risk that a patient would not be cared for. The letter signed by 111 OB-GYNs in November reiterated this case and also said the deaths of two Texas women who were denied abortion care during miscarriages— Josseli Barnaca and Nevaeh Crain— were evidence that “the law does not allow Texas women to get the lifesaving care they need.”