The Texas Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday in the lawsuit challenging the state’s near-total abortion ban. Patients have been refused care despite serious complications and forced to carry nonviable pregnancies to term, often at great personal risk. This is Molly Duane, a senior attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which brought the case on behalf of 22 patients and doctors.

Molly Duane: “The last two years are an aberration from a centurieslong practice in Texas that allowed physicians broad discretion to provide abortion when necessary to preserve their patients’ lives. The abortion bans as they exist today subject physicians like my clients to the most extreme penalties imaginable: life in prison and loss of their medical license. And while there is technically a medical exception to the bans, no one knows what it means, and the state won’t tell us.”