a Better Bubble™
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In the five and a half years since the Chicago Police Department agreed to extensive oversight from a federal judge, there have been bursts of activity to address the brutality and civil rights violations that led to the agreement.
Court hearings: more than a hundred. Meetings: hundreds. Money: hundreds of millions in Chicago taxpayer dollars allocated to making the court-ordered reforms, known as a consent decree, a reality.
But the record of actual accomplishment is meager.
Chicago police haven’t crafted a system for officers to work with residents to address threats to public safety.
They haven’t completed a mandatory study of where officers are assigned throughout the city and whether changes would help thwart crime.
And they have failed to move forward with a plan to alert police brass about which officers have been accused of misconduct more than once and might need counseling, retraining or discipline.
In fact, all told, police have fully complied with just 9% of the agreement’s requirements. And while excessive force complaints from citizens have dropped, complaints about all forms of misconduct have risen.
Sheila Bedi, an attorney who represented the coalition of police reform groups that sued the city years ago, called the faltering reform effort a “tragedy.”
“It has been a waste of time and money,” said Bedi, a Northwestern University law professor. “It has been nothing more than an exercise in pushing paper.”
A review by WTTW News and ProPublica of the efforts in Chicago since 2019 shows Bedi’s bleak view is supported by a range of assessments produced for the court and is also widely held among advocates, academics and officials following the process.
The goal is to emerge from the consent decree by 2027 with a police force finally ready to move beyond a long history of civil rights violations targeting Black and Latino Chicagoans. But the city is now on a path to devote substantial resources and large amounts of money to the reform effort for years beyond that. It’s a trajectory that echoes what happened in Oakland, where the police department continues to be marred by scandal and remains under federal court oversight more than 20 years into its consent decree.
No one in a position of power or oversight has pushed forcefully or effectively to make the process move faster, WTTW News and ProPublica found. Six permanent and interim superintendents have led CPD since 2019 and the city has had three mayors, all of whom vowed to implement the consent decree but failed to make good on those promises with money and other resources.
In addition, the Chicago City Council has repeatedly failed to exercise its authority to oversee CPD’s operations and demand quicker change. The council has approved $667 million to go toward implementing the decree since 2020, but at least a quarter of the city’s annual allotment goes unspent each year, a WTTW News analysis found.
At the same time, inside the federal courtroom, the court-appointed monitoring team has never demanded sanctions for the city’s slow pace. Similarly, judges overseeing the decree have not expressed concerns about the lack of significant advances.
No major city exemplifies the stubborn problems of police misconduct more than Chicago, where a series of civil cases and wrongful convictions have led to expensive court settlements that regularly cost the city more than $80 million a year. Distrust in the community now makes attacking the city’s crime rate even harder.
Now many of the city’s reform advocates have lost faith in the process and are increasingly concerned that the opportunity for lasting reform is slipping away. Surveys of Chicagoans completed as part of the consent decree show a clear drop in confidence that there will be lasting and positive change.
The process has its defenders, including current Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, whose predecessor sued the city to force it to agree to federal court oversight. Raoul still believes the consent decree is the best way of “making these necessary reforms a reality.”
But he also appears to be losing patience. Raoul warned last week that he would seek sanctions against the city if Mayor Brandon Johnson did not reverse the planned cuts. “I must remind you that the consent decree is not optional,” Raoul wrote to the mayor. “The City of Chicago must deliver on its consent decree obligations.”
Johnson rarely speaks publicly about the need to reform the police department, instead focusing on efforts to improve officer morale and reduce crime. He declined to be interviewed for this story but has told reporters he is committed to ensuring CPD “engages in constitutional policing.”
Porscha Banks’ brother Dexter Reed was shot and killed by Chicago police during a traffic stop. She’s frustrated by the city’s lack of progress toward meaningful police reformPorscha Banks, whose brother Dexter Reed was shot and killed in a barrage of police gunfire during a March 21 traffic stop, is among those who are frustrated by Chicago’s lack of progress toward meaningful reform. Four officers fired 96 shots at Reed in 41 seconds, hitting him 13 times, shortly after he shot and wounded an officer, according to a preliminary investigation.
The Civilian Office of Police Accountability has not completed its inquiry into the shooting and has not ruled whether the officers’ actions were justified. But reform advocates immediately seized on the incident as an example of how police tactics can lead to dangerous situations for both civilians and officers.
“Unless something changes, it is going to keep happening,” Banks said. “They are failing Black people. They are failing all of us.”
How Police Helped Stall the ProcessAt its core, the consent decree is designed to fix the shattered relationship between police and Chicago communities.
The goal is to increase communication and familiarity by having officers patrol the same geographic area of the city and report to the same supervisor on a consistent basis, instead of moving throughout the city to chase crime. As a first step, the consent decree required CPD to complete a study to determine whether officers are efficiently deployed to stop crime and respond to calls for help.
But it took more than five years to authorize the study. And now, more than five months after the Chicago City Council ordered it, the police department acknowledges it has yet to start in earnest.
“It is deeply embarrassing,” said Alderperson Matt Martin, who represents the North Side’s 47th Ward and authored the measure requiring the staffing study. He said that police leaders simply ignored the May 21 deadline set by aldermen. The contract to perform the study was not finalized until Oct. 24, according to records obtained by WTTW News.
Matt Martin, a Chicago alderperson, wrote a measure requiring the police department to complete a staffing study, but it has yet to get underway.It’s not the first time Chicago has missed an opportunity to align the department with community needs.
In 2019, former Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck took over as the city’s interim police superintendent for Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Beck’s first order of business was to reassign more than 1,100 detectives and gang intelligence and narcotics officers from citywide teams to work in Chicago’s 22 police districts.
The goal was to tie each of those officers directly to one of Chicago’s 77 community areas, a necessary change to make community policing a reality, said Beck, who led the LAPD through its own reform push that was widely hailed as lightning fast and successful.
But Beck was only an interim chief and led the CPD for less than six months before Lightfoot replaced him with former Dallas Police Chief David Brown. Brown quickly reversed those changes and reestablished teams of specialized officers that moved throughout the city to address crime hot spots.
Beck declined to comment for this article; Brown did not respond to requests for interviews.
Brown’s successor, Larry Snelling, who has been at the helm of CPD for more than a year, has not attempted to reorganize the department. While acknowledging that the reform effort is far from complete, Snelling often emphasizes that the department is making progress on most goals laid out in the consent decree.
CPD now has written policies addressing just under half the items included in the consent decree. It also has trained a majority of its officers on the new policies involving a little over a third of the items. To be in full compliance, CPD must prove to the monitoring team that officers are following the new policies over a sustained period of time. The most significant victory for the city has been providing officers with annual training on the department’s policies for use of force, the latest report from the monitoring team found.
But CPD has yet to reach full compliance on any part of the consent decree that involves community policing, unbiased policing or crisis intervention, records show.
Community trust is at the heart of another consent-decree misstep by the department, which for decades has failed to hold its officers accountable for misconduct, according to the federal probe that led to the decree. An early-warning system that would identify problematic officers and get them off the street was drawn up near the beginning of the consent-decree process but has yet to be implemented.
Police reform advocates say that Snelling is more committed to reform than his predecessor, but he rarely talks publicly about the consent decree. Snelling declined to be interviewed for this story.
As a candidate for mayor, Johnson promised to succeed where his predecessors failed and quickly implement the consent decree. But his main policing focus since taking office has been on reducing the number of people killed and shot in Chicago following a surge that coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. Homicide rates have dropped in the last two years.
Johnson’s latest budget proposal, which closed a projected budget gap of $982 million, slashes the number of employees assigned to implementing the decree by 13%.
Questioned by WTTW News at a press conference, Johnson acknowledged Chicago’s long history of police violence against Black Chicagoans.
“Unfortunately, we’ve had a trail of destruction over the course of decades where there has been an erosion of the relationship between community and policing,” Johnson said. “What I can say is that it has gotten considerably better from where we started.”
Despite such assertions, critics of the reform push contend the mayor is ultimately responsible for the lack of progress during his time in office.
“I expected to see much more of the mayor and his administration step up and be present and be at the table,” said Craig Futterman, a professor of law at the University of Chicago who represented one of the coalition of groups that sued the city to force it to agree to judicial oversight.
“It’s been left to the police department, and that’s again like the fox guarding the henhouse.”
Efforts to assign each officer to a specific part of town where they could get to know the people were reversed when a new police superintendent was appointed. Delays Come Without Consequences in CourtWhat frustrates observers like Futterman is not just that police have dragged their feet; it’s that the formal mechanism for oversight hasn’t led to meaningful progress.
For instance, the monitoring team — which is made up of lawyers and public safety specialists — has the power to recommend to the judge that the city and CPD be punished for failing to meet the terms of the consent decree. While it has repeatedly highlighted the slow pace of reforms in its reports, the monitoring team has never demanded sanctions, despite pleas from the coalition of reform groups.
Barry Friedman, a professor at New York University who studies police reform and has advised CPD on implementing community policing policies, said he is baffled by this.
He cited the monitors’ unique position of power and the money going to their efforts. Chicago taxpayers have paid the monitoring team more than $20.4 million from the beginning of the decree through March 31, 2024, records show.
“For that amount of money, you should have a consent decree that is working,” Friedman said. “Five years in, one is entitled to ask what the city is getting out of the consent decree.”
Members of the consent decree monitoring team and the judge overseeing the case declined to be interviewed. The spokesperson for the judge and the team said they’re prohibited from doing so under the decree.
For its part, the Chicago City Council has not called out the CPD for its failures. The council had vowed to hold hearings about the progress of police reform every three months, but the last hearing took place in February. Alderperson Brian Hopkins, chair of the Public Safety Committee, and Alderperson Chris Taliaferro, chair of the Police and Fire Committee, did not respond to a request for comment about why no hearings have taken place for nine months.
Another factor in the slow pace is the structure of the oversight itself. To amend the agreement, all relevant parties must get involved — the state attorney general, the coalition of reform groups and City Hall. They have to exhaust efforts to negotiate a solution before asking the judge to resolve any stalemate.
Chicago police swarmed into Anjanette Young’s home in a raid on the wrong address. She often finds peace by visiting the lakefront.The delays and compromises have led to unsatisfying results, as exemplified by the aftermath of the widely criticized raid on the home of Anjanette Young. In 2019, a group of male officers handcuffed Young, a social worker, inside her home while she was naked; they had raided the wrong address.
When Young and advocates for reform sought restrictions on raids, they ran into opposition from Lightfoot. They then asked that the consent decree be expanded to impose reforms.
That launched unfruitful negotiations between CPD’s leaders, city lawyers, attorneys for the coalition and the attorney general’s office that stretched for two years. U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer resolved the dispute by rejecting almost all of the demands made by reform groups. She didn’t add any significant restrictions on police raids and didn’t bar no-knock warrants. Young was bitterly disappointed.
Porscha Banks’ quest for reforms in the aftermath of her brother’s killing has been similarly frustrating. Dexter Reed, whose car had tinted windows that made it almost impossible to see inside, was pulled over for a safety belt violation, according to the preliminary investigation.
For groups that had been sounding the alarm for years that CPD was aggressively using traffic stops to target Black and Latino drivers, Reed’s death was heartbreaking evidence that such tactics inevitably lead to volatile encounters. Banks has demanded officials ban traffic stops like the one that led to her brother's death.
CPD leaders and the monitoring team agreed just two months after Reed’s death to expand the consent decree to include traffic stops, but reform advocates and politicians pushed back. The consent decree is not capable of delivering the kind of urgent change the city needs, they told Pallmeyer; instead, the city’s new police oversight board should set the rules for traffic stops.
The request was a rejection of the consent decree process.
“I’m frustrated that despite what I have to believe is everyone’s best effort, it has not been good enough,” said Alderperson Daniel La Spata, whose ward is on the Northwest Side.
Pallmeyer has not ruled on that request yet.
Banks does not particularly care how reform is achieved. She just wants to see signs of hope.
“They just need to stop talking about it and fucking doing it,” Banks said.
Chicago Alderman Daniel La Spata is frustrated by the lack of progress toward police reform. An Opportunity May Be Slipping AwayInside a room at Corliss High School on Chicago’s Far South Side, a few dozen residents assembled for a community meeting with police in a district that has long struggled with pervasive crime. These were people who care about their neighborhoods, the future of Chicago and the trajectory of policing here. And in interviews, many of them expressed skepticism.
Tony Little, who volunteers as a community liaison with CPD, said police today are more responsive to residents’ concerns than in the past, but there’s still room for improvement. “If they could just make sure officers, especially young officers, are aware of the community and get to know the neighborhood, that would build trust,” he said.
His wife, Malinda, is more pessimistic. Although the consent decree requires CPD to demonstrate that residents can trust officers to protect and serve them, those are no more than empty promises, she said. “Some of the individuals, they have an attitude that this is just a job. … They don’t care about the people.”
Such comments should come as no surprise to the police department or the monitoring team.
“By most indications, many Chicagoans are not feeling many of the changes that have been made by the city and the CPD so far,” the monitoring team wrote in its most recent assessment of the city’s progress.
The most recent survey conducted by the monitoring team, in 2022, found that 43.2% of Chicagoans were “doubtful” or “very doubtful” that police reform would have a lasting and positive effect, an increase of more than 10 percentage points since 2020.
The survey identified a similar decrease in the number of Chicagoans who said the police were doing a “good” or “very good” job in their neighborhood and citywide, while the number of Chicagoans who said the police were doing a “poor” or “very poor” job in the city as a whole grew to 42.7% in 2022, compared with 30.2% in 2020.
A billboard for the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation, which provides support for families of officers killed or seriously injured on the job.“Of course there’s a lack of trust in the police,” said Roxanne Smith, a West Side resident and police reform advocate who was part of the coalition that sued the city. “We’re in a new generation and some things still haven’t changed. These things need immediate attention.”
Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg, whose office was the first, and so far only, city department to fully comply with its obligations under the consent decree, said the reform effort is at a tipping point, much like a bicycle ridden too slowly.
“The risk is that you tip over for a lack of forward momentum,” Witzburg said.
Anjanette Young is now among those in Chicago who feel the tipping point is past.
“The consent decree is not the answer,” Young said. “It is just oversight on paper. We need a plan B. We need to do something else.”
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Jared Rutecki of WTTW News contributed data reporting.
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Weeks after ProPublica reported on the deaths of two pregnant women whose miscarriages went untreated in Texas, state lawmakers have filed bills that would create new exceptions to the state’s strict abortion laws, broadening doctors’ ability to intervene when their patients face health risks.
The legislation comes after the lawmaker who wrote one of Texas’ recent abortion bans wrote an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle defending the current exceptions as “plenty clear.”
But more than 100 Texas OB-GYNs disagree with his position. In a public letter, written in response to ProPublica’s reporting, they urged changes. “As OB-GYNs in Texas, we know firsthand how much these laws restrict our ability to provide our patients with quality, evidence-based care,” they said.
Texas’ abortion ban threatens up to 99 years in prison, $100,000 in fines and loss of medical license for doctors who provide abortions. The state’s health and safety code currently includes exceptions if a pregnant woman “has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced.” A separate exception exists that provides doctors with some legal protections if they perform an abortion for an ectopic pregnancy or in cases when a patient’s water breaks.
The bills, filed in the state House and Senate last week, create new health exceptions. They would allow doctors to induce or perform abortions necessary to preserve the mental or physical health of a patient, including preserving the patient’s fertility. Doctors could also provide abortions in cases where the fetus had an anomaly that would make it unable to survive outside the womb or able to survive only with “extraordinary medical interventions.”
State Rep. Donna Howard, who filed the bill in the Texas House, said ProPublica’s recent reporting adds to evidence that the current legislation is a threat to the safety of pregnant women in Texas and increases the urgency to make changes. “This is my reaction,” she said. “It’s one of extreme sadness and disbelief that we are at a point where we are allowing women to die because we haven’t been able to clarify the law,” she said.
Investigations by ProPublica have found that at least four women, including two in Texas, died after they could not access timely reproductive care in states that ban abortion. There are almost certainly others.
In Houston, Josseli Barnica died in September 2021, just days after the state’s six-week abortion ban went into effect. Barnica, 28, was miscarrying at 17 weeks, but doctors did not offer her the medical standard of care — to speed up labor or empty her uterus — for 40 hours, until after the fetal heartbeat had stopped. Her husband said she was told it would be a “crime” to intervene. This left her seriously exposed to infection, experts told ProPublica. Three days later, she died from an infection, leaving behind a young daughter.
Her death was “preventable,” according to more than a dozen medical experts who reviewed a summary of her hospital and autopsy records at ProPublica’s request; they called her case “horrific,” “astounding” and “egregious.”
The doctors involved in Barnica’s care at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest did not respond to multiple requests for comment on her case. In a statement, HCA Healthcare said, “Our responsibility is to be in compliance with applicable state and federal laws and regulations,” and that physicians exercise their independent judgment. The company did not respond to detailed questions about its policy.
Nevaeh Crain, 18, made three trips to emergency rooms in rural southeast Texas last year for vomiting and abdominal pain, waiting 20 hours before doctors admitted her. Doctors insisted on two ultrasounds to document “fetal demise” as Crain’s vital signs grew more alarming. By the time they rushed to operate, sepsis had spread throughout her body and her organs failed.
Experts who reviewed a summary of Crain’s medical records for ProPublica said it may have been possible to save both the teenager and her pregnancy if she had been admitted earlier for close monitoring and continuous treatment.
Doctors involved in Crain’s care did not respond to several requests for comment. The two hospitals — Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas and Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth — declined to answer questions about her treatment.
What Is A ‘Medical Emergency’?The cases highlight how abortion laws can interfere with maternal health care, even for those who want to have a child.
Much of the confusion hinges on the definition of a “medical emergency.” In many cases, women experiencing a miscarriage or a pregnancy complication may be stable. But requiring them to wait for an abortion until signs of sickness are documented or the fetal cardiac activity stops violates the professional standard of care, putting them at higher risk that a life-threatening infection or other complications could develop and be harder to control.
Attaching criminal penalties to abortion procedures has led to a chilling effect, making some physicians more hesitant to care for patients experiencing pregnancy complications in general, doctors told ProPublica.
After ProPublica’s reporting, state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the author of one of the state’s abortion bans, wrote an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle. He said the women were “wrongfully denied care,” but he blamed media outlets including ProPublica for publishing stories that made doctors “afraid to treat the women.”
“When a mother’s life or major bodily function are in jeopardy, doctors are not only allowed to act, but they are legally required to act,” he wrote. “And contrary to what ProPublica would have us believe, Texas law does not prevent them from aiding their patients and saving their lives.”
He argued that the medical emergency exceptions in Texas’ new abortion bans use the same language as abortion laws from the 1800s. “We did not want to risk confusing medical providers by changing the definition,” he said. But that language was written at a time when many more women died in pregnancy and childbirth — before medical innovations such as suction devices to empty the uterus and lower the risk of sepsis helped make maternal care vastly safer.
Hughes is a licensed attorney who lists no medical training on his Senate webpage.
ProPublica repeatedly requested an interview with Hughes to further understand his interpretation of how doctors should apply the law in specific scenarios. He did not respond to a detailed list of questions and requests to comment for this article.
There is no state office that doctors can call to make sure their decisions in miscarriage cases do not violate the law. Yet Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has made it clear he will not hesitate to prosecute doctors if the abortions they provide do not meet his interpretation of a medical emergency.
Last year, a Dallas woman asked a court for approval to end her pregnancy because her fetus was not viable and she faced health risks if she carried it to term. Paxton fought to keep her pregnant, arguing that her doctor hadn’t proved her situation was an emergency, and threatened to prosecute anyone who helped her. The courts sided with him, and the woman traveled out of state for the abortion.
Warnings From the Medical CommunityAfter reading ProPublica’s stories, 111 Texas OB-GYNs signed a letter placing blame for the deaths squarely on state abortion law that “does not allow us as medical professionals to do our jobs.”
“The law does not allow Texas women to get the lifesaving care they need and threatens physicians with life imprisonment and loss of licensure for doing what is often medically necessary for the patient’s health and future fertility,” they wrote.
Their letter adds to years of warnings from the medical community and from patients themselves: 20 women who were denied abortions for miscarriages and high-risk pregnancy complications joined a lawsuit against the state. They asked the courts to clarify the law’s exceptions, but the Texas Supreme Court refused.
Dr. Austin Dennard, a Dallas OB-GYN, is one of the women represented in the lawsuit. She has seen the consequences of the laws from both sides. As a doctor, she has to call a hospital lawyer any time she wants to provide abortion care to patients facing emergencies. She also was personally affected when she was pregnant and learned her fetus had anencephaly — a condition in which the brain and skull do not fully develop. Texas’ law would have forced her to carry to term, putting her through more health risks and making her wait longer to try again for another pregnancy, so she traveled out of state for an abortion.
She said lawmakers have failed for years to listen to the doctors who have to navigate these laws.
In response to Hughes’s op-ed, she said: “We’re the ones with their boots on the ground. We’re the ones taking care of these patients, and we’re the ones telling you it is very nebulous and confusing, and we’re all terrified,” Dennard said.
State Sen. Carol Alvarado, who filed the Senate version of the bill, said she worked with physicians who represent major medical organizations to draft the exceptions.
“This bill is not about politics — it’s about ensuring that doctors can provide life-saving care without hesitation or fear of prosecution,” Alvarado said. “This bill is about restoring trust in our health care system and ensuring that no one has to endure the heartbreak of wondering whether more timely medical care could have saved their loved one.”
Molly Duane, a lawyer with the Center for Reproductive Rights who represents women who are suing the state, said the bill, if passed, could help save some lives, but cautioned that without removing the threat of criminal penalties, some doctors might still deny care.
“Exceptions don’t work in reality, no matter how clear they are,” Duane said. “We’ve seen hospitals turn away Texans facing life-threatening ectopic pregnancies, even though providing an abortion in these cases is legal under state law. As long as doctors face the threat of jail time and loss of license, they will be terrified to provide care.”
Where the Medical Board StandsIn his op-ed, Hughes said that the Texas Medical Board has issued guidance that an emergency doesn’t need to be “imminent” to keep physicians “from doing what is medically necessary” under the law.
But Dennard, echoing many doctors who spoke to ProPublica, said the board was “incredibly unhelpful.” The guidance instructed doctors on ways they could document why the abortion was necessary and still left open the question of how lawyers and courts might interpret “medically necessary.”
“None of them want to face the reality of the situation, which is that the laws that were put in place are directly harming pregnant people, and it is their fault,” she said.
The board, whose members are appointed by the governor, issued the guidance earlier this year after declining for more than two years to respond to questions about how the law should be interpreted, even as patients facing health risks publicly shared their stories of being denied abortion care and journalists asked the board to respond. The board issued guidance only after the Texas Supreme Court directed it to do so.
The president of the board, Dr. Sherif Zaafran, said in an interview that it would have been “inappropriate” to weigh in without that direction.
“Somebody could easily sue the medical board and say, ‘You shouldn’t have done this,’ and then we’d be in limbo also, and that could have actually dragged things out even longer.”
In the meantime, women’s lives were left in the balance.
Last year, lawmakers created a new exception for two conditions that the original law had not addressed: ectopic pregnancies and previable premature rupture of membranes, when a patient’s water breaks too early, causing a miscarriage.
But the exception is small comfort, some doctors say. It’s written in a way that only allows doctors to make an “affirmative defense” for a legal penalty. An affirmative defense, if found credible by a judge or jury, means the defendant wouldn’t be liable for the alleged acts even if he or she committed them.
“Nobody wants to be that poster child,” said Dr. Robert Carpenter, a Houston OB-GYN who signed the letter.
The Houston Chronicle also published 10 letters to the editor in response to Hughes’ editorial, eight of them arguing against his claim that the Texas abortion ban is clear.
Among them was Trevor M. Bibler, an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine’s Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy.
“If doctors weren’t threatened with jail time and accused of murder just for upholding a basic standard of care, then these tragedies wouldn’t happen,” he wrote. “The possibility that the cause of these tragedies are the doctors who read the writings of the left-wing media rather than the law is absurd, disingenuous and not at all convincing. His law, not the media, is the cause.”
Howard said she’s hopeful the Texas Legislature will listen to the medical community and the public and create health and other exceptions in the abortion laws. She also pointed out that President-elect Donald Trump has said that he supports exceptions in cases of rape and incest, which Texas’ ban does not include. She filed a separate bill to propose such exceptions.
“It’s really just unbelievable, from a state that considers itself to be pro-life, that these obstacles will be put in place that are the antithesis of pro-life,” Howard said.
As other states assess whether to ban or protect abortion rights, Texas is providing an example of what to expect.
In Wisconsin, state Supreme Court Justice Jill Karofsky recently pressed an attorney for the state to explain whether an abortion ban on the books from 1849 would stop doctors from providing abortion care to patients who were experiencing miscarriages if the court allowed it to go into effect.
Describing Barnica’s case, she asked for clarification: “She suffered an infection that killed her because medical providers were unwilling or unable to give her the health care that she needed,” she said. “That’s a scenario that could easily — and perhaps has easily — play out here in Wisconsin under your interpretation of [the law], couldn’t it?”
“I’m not sure, Justice Karofsky,” the attorney responded. “I’m not a doctor.”
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