Texas doctors say state’s new 6-week abortion bill criminalizes their profession

The Texas Medical Association said the state’s new fetal heartbeat abortion bill criminalizes doctors and encourages vigilantism.

In a meeting with the Star-Telegram’s editorial board, TMA President Linda Villarreal stressed that her organization maintains its policy of not weighing in on the morality of abortion. But she said that the provision that allows people to sue anyone who helps a woman get an abortion interferes with the doctor-patient relationship.

The law, which went into effect Wednesday, effectively bans most abortions. A fetal heartbeat is typically detected around six weeks, often before pregnancy is known. The law allows citizens to sue a person who performs an abortion or aids in the performance of an abortion. An abortion patient could not be sued under the law.

“I cannot comment on abortions, but that is a medical condition that needs to be left with the physician and his or her patient,” Villarreal said.

TMA Executive Vice President and CEO Michael J. Darrouzet said the organization strongly opposes aspects of the bill that imposes penalties on physicians for conducting otherwise legal medical care.

“That is a line that hasn’t been crossed in Texas before, and we will be standing against that,” Darrouzet said. He acknowledged that partisan divisions over abortion that have existed since the Supreme Court legalized the practice in 1973, but said the the legislation that went into effect Wednesday governmental interference between doctors and their patients.

“We feel that it’s a slippery slope whenever the moral issue of the day could be added to a criminal list, and we just feel that that’s not the right place for the Legislature to take this,” Darrouzet said.

He explained the issue of abortion is just as divisive within the ranks of the TMA as it is in the general public, which is why the organization doesn’t take a stance on its morality.

“The idea that you could have a public cause of action by a stranger somebody that has no connection to a case, does not know either party in the case, but could file a lawsuit against the physician seems to be unconstitutional on its face and we don’t understand why the courts haven’t seen that,” Darrouzet said.