AUSTIN (LifeSiteNews) — The Texas Supreme Court unanimously rejected a challenge to the state’s pro-life laws by abortion activists seeking to widen exceptions for so-called “medical emergencies” and fetal disabilities. 

Texas currently has a near-total abortion ban dating back to 1925 and a trigger law signed in 2021, as well as a heartbeat-based abortion ban that was allowed to take effect by the state and U.S. Supreme Courts thanks to its unique enforcement mechanism (citizen lawsuits rather than government prosecution), several months before the nation’s highest court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

Under these laws, abortions may only be committed for a “life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that, as certified by a physician, places the woman in danger of death or a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless an abortion is performed.” This prompted a lawsuit from the national pro-abortion group Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), which sought to have the judiciary “clarify Texas’s abortion bans by creating a binding interpretation of the laws’ ‘medical emergency’ exception.”

CRR argued in its lawsuit that “Texas’s abortion bans can and should be read to ensure that physicians have wide discretion” to commit abortions for so-called “emergent medical conditions” and that abortions should be allowed for fetal disabilities that would purportedly render children “unlikely” to “sustain life after birth.”

READ: Mother shares beautiful life of 10-year-old with Trisomy 18: ‘We just love our little girl’

However, on Friday, the all-Republican court rejected CRR’s arguments, upholding Texas’ abortion bans and the state’s “reasonable medical judgment” standard for abortions sought for “health” reasons, which the CRR sought to replace with the more subjective “good faith medical judgement” standard.

The justices wrote that “the Center’s ask is for a court to substitute a different standard for the one that is expressly written in the statute. This is a call for amending the law, not for interpreting it.”

The court found that, as written, Texas law permits a physician to commit an abortion “to avert death or substantial bodily impairment of a pregnant woman diagnosed with a life-threatening physical condition,” based on “reasonable medical judgment,” while specifying that a physician “may not disregard” that requirement to commit an abortion for “any pregnancy risk.”

While some emergency situations in pregnancy can necessitate treatments indirectly resulting in a child’s death, direct abortion is always gravely immoral and never needed nor ethically justified to save a mother’s life.

The court further ruled that, “As painful as such circumstances are, that the law does not authorize abortions for diagnosed fetal conditions absent a life-threatening complication to the mother does not render it unconstitutional.”

READ: The post-Roe baby boom in Texas proves that pro-life laws save lives

Every state in the union with abortion prohibitions currently in effect also permits doctors to administer life-saving, non-abortive treatment to pregnant women even if it comes at the expense of a baby’s life. The vast majority of abortions have never been sought for “medical” reasons, but for social, career, or financial considerations. But that has not stopped abortion activists from attempting to make “health” exceptions so broad and subjective as to allow nearly any abortion and to use so-called “hard cases” to stoke fear about the effects of pro-life laws.

The Texas Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) reported in January 2023 that just two months after Roe’s reversal, there were zero elective legal abortions and only three legal abortions committed due to reputed physical threats to a mother’s life – down from 67 elective abortions the month before, and 5,706 in August 2021.

As detailed by LifeSiteNews in June 2023, Texas births rose 4.7% in 2022. By December 2023, Texas HHS found that 34 abortions had been reported all year.

This past March, the Texas Medical Board gave a broad definition for what constitutes a “medical emergency” in cases in which abortion would be allowed under state law, rejecting demands from abortion activists for language that could be used to create legal loopholes.