AUSTIN, Texas (LifeSiteNews) — Dozens of Texas lawmakers this week signed onto an amicus brief to support Texas’ strong pro-life legislative protections against a challenge by a New York-based pro-abortion group.
Ninety lawmakers, representing half of the Lone Star State’s legislature, put their signatures to a brief written by Texas Alliance for Life special counsel Paul Linton.
In the brief, filed with the Supreme Court of Texas in Zurawski v. Texas, the 10 senators and 80 representatives said they “have a vital interest in the outcome of this litigation, which directly challenges their constitutional authority to establish public policy for the State of Texas and to protect the lives of unborn children in accordance with that policy.”
“The regulation of abortion is a sensitive issue which, like most such issues, should be decided by the legislature, where the voice of the people may be heard and where compromise and accommodation of divergent viewpoints are possible,” they said.
Abortion activists like the members of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the lawsuit against Texas’ pro-life laws, have “failed in the political process,” the brief states, leading them to turn “to the courts in an effort to subvert the democratic will.”
“That effort should be resisted,” the lawmakers said.
Texas law prohibits nearly all abortions except when allegedly “necessary” to save the life of the mother or to prevent “substantial impairment of major bodily function.” Pro-lifers point out that the deliberate killing of a preborn baby is morally unjustifiable and never medically necessary.
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The Center for Reproductive Rights states that its lawsuit seeks to “clarify Texas’s abortion bans by creating a binding interpretation of the laws’ ‘medical emergency’ exception.”
Amy O’Donnell, communications director for Texas Alliance for Life, said in a press release shared with LifeSiteNews that the “brief counters a very dangerous lawsuit now before the Texas Supreme Court that seeks to significantly expand the reasons to allow abortions in our state, putting the lives of thousands of unborn babies at risk every year.”
She said the Texas Supreme Court “should uphold the laws that the Legislature has passed, and protections for unborn babies should continue,” and she praised “our state legislators who have joined the brief in defense of laws that protect mothers and unborn babies from abortion.”
The Texas Supreme Court is slated to begin hearing oral arguments in the case on November 28.
Texas is one of over a dozen U.S. states that have implemented near-total abortion bans since last year.
As LifeSiteNews has extensively reported, states including Texas, Idaho, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Kentucky have enforced extensive pro-life laws to prohibit nearly all abortions following the rollback of Roe v. Wade. Other states like Florida, North Carolina, and Nebraska have implemented partial abortion restrictions based on gestational age. Meanwhile, other states like California, Oregon, New York, and New Mexico have moved in the opposite direction, and the right to life has suffered a wave of defeats with state ballot measures.