Women Enabled International (WEI), the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), and the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) filed an amicus brief on behalf of eleven disability rights organizations and scholars in the Texas Supreme Court. The amicus brief underscores that restrictions on legal access to abortion place an undue burden on individuals with disabilities, who often require specialized medical care and may face additional challenges in carrying a pregnancy to term. The brief urges the Texas Supreme Court to interpret the medical exception to the abortion ban in a manner that upholds their rights and safeguards their well-being.

WEI, DREDF, and TCRP’s amicus brief highlights that:

• Texas’ abortion bans and the current confusion regarding the applicability of the medical exceptions create a healthcare crisis that disproportionately harms people with disabilities. People with disabilities are more at risk for severe maternal morbidities and maternal mortality during their pregnancies than non-disabled people and pregnancy can worsen disability-related health outcomes.
• Texas’ abortion bans exacerbate the harms that people with disabilities already encounter, given widespread discrimination and barriers to accessing abortion care (including travel- related and financial barriers). The combined effect of the chilling effect on the provision of abortion care due to Texas’ laws and barriers to accessing care is that people with disabilities are at high risk of total denial of medically necessary abortion care within Texas.
• Restricting access to abortion care does not protect people with disabilities or advance any claimed state interest in opposing discrimination. Both the disability rights movement and the reproductive justice movement are united in the pursuit of autonomy, dignity, equality, and self- determination.
• Disabled people have the right to protect their life and health under both the Texas Constitution’s Due Course Clause and Equal Protection Clause.