Texas bill clarifying when doctors can perform life-saving abortions wins early House vote

Yahoo22-05-2025

(The Texas Tribune) — The House voted 129-6 on Wednesday to preliminarily approve a bill to clarify Texas' near-total abortion ban, after it passed the Senate unanimously last month. Despite wide bipartisan support for the bill, some conservative lawmakers raised concerns about whether this would create a loophole allowing doctors to 'rubber stamp' otherwise prohibited abortions.
Bill sponsor Rep. Charlie Geren, a Republican from Fort Worth, stressed that this was not a 'choice bill,' but rather an attempt to ensure the existing limits of the law are 'clear, consistent, fair and understandable.'
'We do not want women to die from medical emergencies during their pregnancy,' Geren said. 'We don't want women's lives to be destroyed because their bodies have been seriously impaired.'
Texas banned all abortions three years ago, with a narrow exception that allows doctors to terminate a pregnancy only to save a pregnant patient's life. Immediately, doctors and legal experts warned that this exception was too narrow and vaguely written, and the penalties too severe, to ensure that women could get life-saving care.
That has proven true in many cases. Dozens of women have come forward with stories of medically necessary abortions delayed or denied, and at least three women have died as a result of these laws. Faced with these stories, Republican lawmakers have conceded that the language of the law might need some clearing up.
Senate Bill 31, also called the Life of the Mother Act, does not expand the exceptions or restore abortion access. It instead aims to clarify when a doctor can terminate a pregnancy under the existing exceptions by aligning language among the state's abortion laws, codifying court rulings and requiring education for doctors and lawyers on the nuances of the law.
The bill was tightly negotiated among lobbyists for doctors and hospitals, anti-abortion groups and Republican lawmakers, including Sen. Bryan Hughes of Mineola, who authored the bill, and Geren.
'These groups don't always see eye to eye,' Geren said. 'But in this case, they worked together to ensure pregnant women with pregnancy complications get appropriate and timely care.'
In the Senate, Republicans threw their support behind the bill, while Democrats pushed back on its narrowness, noting that Texas law still does not allow abortions in cases of rape, incest or lethal fetal anomalies.
'The folks who are working on this fix are, from my perspective, the folks who have created the problem,' said Houston Sen. Molly Cook. 'Over the past four years, we've watched women suffer and die, and this bill is the confirmation that we all agree that something is broken in Texas.'
In the House, however, the bill faced headwinds from the right, as conservative Republicans rallied to the idea that this bill would allow doctors to resume elective abortions. Rep. Brent Money, a Greenville Republican, said he believed the laws were clear as written but there had been 'malicious interpretations' by pro-abortion doctors.
'People that want to promote abortion have tried to make it murky what our current law is,' Money said. 'And so my question is to you, is this law written to ensure that malicious actors won't be able to find loopholes to allow abortions that would not be allowed under our current law?'
Geren touted his own perfect record of voting for every anti-abortion measure that's come before the House in his long career, and assured Money and his fellow conservatives that this was not an end-run around the laws.
'We are in no way promoting abortion on this,' Geren said, adding later that if a doctor were to abuse this clarification, they could face 99 years in prison and 'they would deserve it.'
Many anti-abortion Republican women rallied to Geren's side, including Rep. Shelby Slawson, a Stephenville Republican who carried the bill in 2021 that led to Texas banning nearly all abortions. She framed this bill as just codifying the Legislature's original intent to protect the live's of pregnant women. They took the mic to offer up examples of times doctors should be allowed to terminate a pregnancy – in cases of cancer diagnoses, kidney failure, premature membrane rupture, ectopic pregnancies.
But still, some Republicans were not appeased. Rep. Briscoe Cain, a Deer Park lawyer who has been involved in some of the state's most contentious abortion litigation, asked Geren if 'more or less babies will die' as a result of this bill. Geren conceded that by affirming that doctors can perform abortions to save a woman's life, it was possible more babies would die, although he noted that many women were traveling out-of-state to get the same medical care they were denied in Texas.
Rep. Brian Harrison, a Midlothian Republican, said he was 'alarmed' to hear Geren's comments, and said it was the 'height of irresponsibility to tinker with these pro-life protections that have already saved countless lives.'
Some doctors groups, including the Texas chapter of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, have criticized the bill for not going far enough to protect doctors and the patients they treat. Others say these changes will be sufficient to free doctors to perform medically necessary abortions without fear of lengthy prison sentences and massive fines.
'At the end of the day, our hope is that political differences can be set aside, because at the heart of this is a pregnant mother whose health and safety are on the line,' Texas Hospital Association president John Hawkins said in a statement. 'Hospitals and doctors need to be able to act on the medical facts and merits in front of them, without fear of prosecution. We sincerely believe this will have an immediate and positive impact, helping us provide life-saving care to our patients.'
Despite the back-and-forth between Republican factions over the bill, it passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, with just six Republicans, including Harrison, voting no. Ten Republicans, including Cain and Money, declined to vote on the measure.
The House also preliminarily approved Senate Bill 33 on Wednesday, which prohibits a city or county from using taxpayer dollars to pay for abortion-related expenses. The bill is aimed at Austin and San Antonio, where city officials have allocated budget dollars to support abortion funds that help pay for people to travel to abortion clinics out-of-state. Despite efforts from Democrats to kill the bill on procedural grounds, it passed 89-57.
Disclosure: Texas Hospital Association has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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President Lee picks South Korea's first civilian defense chief in 64 years

The Hill

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The Hill

President Lee picks South Korea's first civilian defense chief in 64 years

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korean President Lee Jae Myung nominated a five-term liberal lawmaker as defense minister Monday, breaking with a tradition of appointing retired military generals. The announcement came as several prominent former defense officials, including ex-Defense Minister Kim Yong Hyun, face high-profile criminal trials over their roles in carrying out martial law last year under then-President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was indicted on rebellion charges and removed from office. Ahn Gyu-back, a lawmaker from Lee's Democratic Party, has served on the National Assembly's defense committee and chaired a legislative panel that investigated the circumstances surrounding Yoon's martial law decree. Yoon's authoritarian move involved deploying hundreds of heavily armed troops to the National Assembly and election commission offices in what prosecutors described as an illegal attempt to shut down the legislature and arrest political opponents and election officials. That sparked calls to strengthen civilian control over the military, and Lee promised during his election campaign to appoint a defense minister with a civilian background. Since a 1961 coup that brought military dictator Park Chung-hee to power, all of South Korea's defense ministers have come from the military — a trend that continued even after the country's democratization in the late 1980s. While Ahn will face a legislative hearing, the process is likely to be a formality, since the Democrats hold a comfortable majority in the National Assembly and legislative consent isn't required for Lee to appoint him. Among Cabinet appointments, Lee only needs legislative consent for prime minister, Seoul's nominal No. 2 job. 'As the first civilian Minister of National Defense in 64 years, he will be responsible for leading and overseeing the transformation of the military after its mobilization in martial law,' Kang Hoon-sik, Lee's chief of staff, said in a briefing. Ahn was among 11 ministers nominated by Lee on Monday, with longtime diplomat Cho Hyun selected as foreign minister and five-term lawmaker Chung Dong-young returning for another stint as unification minister — a position he held from 2004 to 2005 as Seoul's point man for relations with North Korea.

Hamilton Spectator

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Hamilton Spectator

President Lee picks South Korea's first civilian defense chief in 64 years

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Crash dummies used in car safety tests are still modeled after men despite higher risks for women

Maria Weston Kuhn had one lingering question about the car crash that forced her to have emergency surgery during a vacation in Ireland: Why did she and her mother sustain serious injuries while her father and brother, who sat in the front, emerge unscathed? 'It was a head-on crash and they were closest to the point of contact," said Kuhn, now 25, who missed a semester of college to recover from the 2019 collision that caused her seat belt to slide off her hips and rupture her intestines by pinning them against her spine. "That was an early clue that something else was going on.' When Kuhn returned home to Maine, she found an article her grandma had clipped from Consumer Reports and left on her bed. Women are 73% more likely to be injured in a frontal crash, she learned, yet the dummy used in vehicle tests by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration dates back to the 1970s and is still modeled almost entirely off the body of a man. Kuhn, who is starting law school at New York University this fall, took action and founded the nonprofit Drive US Forward. Its aim was to raise public awareness and eventually encourage members of Congress to sign onto a bill that would require NHTSA to incorporate a more advanced female dummy into its testing. The agency has the final word on whether cars get pulled from the market, and the kind of dummy used in its safety tests could impact which ones receive coveted five-star ratings. 'It seems like we have an easy solution here where we can have crash test dummies that reflect an average woman as well as a man,' Sen. Deb Fischer, a Nebraska Republican who has introduced the legislation the past two sessions, told The Associated Press. Senators from both parties have signed onto Fischer's 'She Drives Act,' and the transportation secretaries from the past two presidential administrations have expressed support for updating the rules. But for various reasons, the push for new safety requirements has been moving at a sluggish pace. That's particularly true in the U.S., where much of the research is happening and where around 40,000 people are killed each year in car crashes. The crash test dummy currently used in NHTSA five-star testing is called the Hybrid III, which was developed in 1978 and modeled after a 5-foot-9, 171-pound man (the average size in the 1970s but about 29 pounds lighter than today's average). What's known as the female dummy is essentially a much smaller version of the male model with a rubber jacket to represent breasts. It's routinely tested in the passenger seat or the back seat but seldom in the driver's seat, even though the majority of licensed drivers are women. 'What they didn't do is design a crash test dummy that has all the sensors in the areas where a woman would be injured differently than a man,' said Christopher O'Connor, president and CEO of the Farmington Hills, Michigan-based Humanetics Group, which has spent more than a decade developing and refining one. A female dummy from Humanetics equipped with all of the available sensors costs around $1 million, about twice the cost of the Hybrid used now. But, O'Connor says, the more expensive dummy far more accurately reflects the anatomical differences between the sexes — including in the shape of the neck, collarbone, pelvis, and legs, which one NHTSA study found account for about 80% more injuries by women in a car crash compared to men. Such physical dummies will always be needed for vehicle safety tests, and to verify the accuracy of virtual tests, O'Connor said. Europe incorporated the more advanced male dummy developed by Humanetics' engineers, the THOR 50M (based on a 50th percentile man), into its testing procedures soon after Kuhn's 2019 crash in Ireland. Several other countries, including China and Japan, have adopted it as well. But that model and the female version the company uses for comparison, the THOR 5F (based on a 5th percentile woman), have been met with skepticism from some American automakers who argue the more sophisticated devices may exaggerate injury risks and undercut the value of some safety features such as seat belts and airbags. Bridget Walchesky, 19, had to be flown to a hospital, where she required eight surgeries over a month, after a 2022 crash near her home in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, that killed her friend, who was driving. While acknowledging the seat belt likely saved her life, Walchesky said some of the injuries — including her broken collarbone — were the result of it pinning her too tightly, which she views as something better safety testing focused on women could improve. 'Seat belts aren't really built for bodies on females,' Walchesky said. 'Some of my injuries, the way the force hit me, they were probably worsened.' The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an industry trade group, said in a statement to the AP that the better way to ensure safety — which it called its top priority — is through upgrades to the existing Hybrid dummy rather than mandating a new one. 'This can happen on a faster timeline and lead to quicker safety improvements than requiring NHTSA to adopt unproven crash test dummy technology,' the alliance said. Humanetics' THOR dummies received high marks in the vehicle safety agency's early tests. Using cadavers from actual crashes to compare the results, NHTSA found they outperformed the existing Hybrid in predicting almost all injuries — including to the head, neck, shoulders, abdomen and legs. A separate review by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research arm funded by auto insurers, was far more critical of the dummy's ability to predict chest injuries in a frontal crash. Despite the vast expansion in the number of sensors, the insurance institute's testing found, the male THOR dummy was less accurate than the current Hybrid dummies, which also had limitations. 'More isn't necessarily better,' said Jessica Jermakian, senior vice president for vehicle research at IIHS. 'You also have to be confident that the data is telling you the right things about how a real person would fare in that crash." NHTSA's budget plan commits to developing the female THOR 5F version with the ultimate goal of incorporating it into the testing. But there could be a long wait considering the THOR's male version adopted by other countries is still awaiting final approval in the U.S. A 2023 report by the Government Accountability Office, which conducts research for Congress, cited numerous 'missed milestones' in NHTSA's development of various crash dummy enhancements — including in the THOR models. Kuhn acknowledges being frustrated by the slow process of trying to change the regulations. She says she understands why there's reluctance from auto companies if they fear being forced to make widespread design changes with more consideration for women's safety. 'Fortunately, they have very skilled engineers and they'll figure it out,' she said.

Texas bill clarifying when doctors can perform life-saving abortions wins early House vote

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President Lee picks South Korea's first civilian defense chief in 64 years

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Crash dummies used in car safety tests are still modeled after men despite higher risks for women

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