But when Cox got a court order allowing her doctor to terminate her non-viable pregnancy, Paxton channeled the full power of the state to stop her, threatening hospitals, appealing to the state’s highest court and ultimately getting the order blocked.

“Kate Cox called their bluff,” said Elizabeth Sepper, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Ken Paxton came in, in a very personal way, and put the state of Texas in embodied form between her and an abortion.”...

Before the overturn of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Texas law would have allowed Cox to have an abortion at her doctor’s office or hospital. But now, her doctors told her they could not perform the procedure, and there was likely no one in Texas who would.....

The high court rejected the lower court’s temporary restraining order, saying Cox did not qualify for an abortion under the medical exception to the law. The justices said Karsan, Cox’s OB/GYN, did not assert that, in her reasonable medical judgment, Cox is facing a life-threatening physical condition, as the law requires.

“No one disputes that Ms. Cox’s pregnancy has been extremely complicated. Any parents would be devastated to learn of their unborn child’s trisomy 18 diagnosis,” the justices wrote. “Some difficulties in pregnancy, however, even serious ones, do not pose the heightened risks to the mother the exception encompasses.”