Los Angeles, US, Dec 11 (EFE).- Texas’ top court on Monday struck down a lower court’s ruling allowing a 21-week pregnant woman from Dallas to terminate her pregnancy for medical reasons.

The Texas Supreme Court’s ruling comes just hours after Kate Cox’s lawyers announced that she had left the state to receive the care she needed.

Cox’s attorneys from the Center for Reproductive Rights said that the 31-year-old had received “offers to help her access abortion elsewhere, from Kansas to Colorado to Canada.”

They argued that she and her husband desperately wanted to have the baby, but her doctors warned her that it was not viable and posed a risk to her health and fertility.

On Thursday, a judge classified Cox’s case within the exceptions allowed by the strict abortion ban in Texas, a predominantly conservative state.

But TexasAttorneyGeneral Republican Ken Paxton filed a petition in the Texas Supreme Court, which on Friday night temporarily suspended the judge’s ruling and struck it down on Monday evening.

Nancy Northup, president and CEO at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement that Cox’s health “is on the line” and that the woman, who has two children, has been in and out of the emergency room and “couldn’t wait any longer.”

“This is why judges and politicians should not be making healthcare decisions for pregnant people—they are not doctors,” she added.

Texas has passed the most restrictive abortion laws in the United States even before the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, which constitutionally protected terminations of pregnancies in the country, was reversed in June 2022.

The Texas “Heartbeat Act” came into effect in September 2021, prohibiting abortion once a ‘fetal heartbeat’ is detected, which happens after six weeks of conception, when many women do not even know they are pregnant. EFE

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