Republicans advance bill to allow doctors to lie about foetal abnormalities and prevent abortions

Texas senate bill likely to head for final vote on senate floor this week

The bill would prevent patients from filing a so-called 'wrongful birth lawsuit' (Getty/iStock)

Texas Republicans have pushed forward another bill to restrict women's reproductive rights by allowing doctors to lie about foetal anomalies.

Senate bill 25, which is waiting for the final vote this week in the state senate, would prevent parents from suing their care provider if their baby is born with a disability, even if their doctor discovered the condition when the woman was pregnant and failed to inform her.

Advocates of the bill say it would protect children with disabilities, but critics say it is another attempt to curb abortion by limiting the number of reasons a woman might seek the procedure.

The same bill, which stops parents from filing a “wrongful birth” lawsuit, was introduced in 2015 but failed to become law.

Social media user Megan Gordon wrote that the bill was not fair for parents who wanted time to prepare and research for the case that their child was born with a disability.

"Any doctor who withholds medical information from a patient is committing malpractice," she said. "It is not up to the doctor, nor the legislature, what a parent can and cannot handle with regards to a child."

Texas considered several anti-abortion bills this week, including Senate Bill 415, which would ban a common, safe procedure used for second trimester abortions. Republicans are calling it a “dismemberment abortion ban” and it also passed the first vote.

As the Senate chamber mulled the bills, a group of Texas women entered the room wearing red robes and white caps, as portrayed in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. The novel tells the story of a world in which women have no rights and many have to live as “breeders” and wear the heavy robes.

There have been an increasing number of state bills introduced across the country to limit women’s reproductive rights, an attempt to erode Roe v Wade. The 1973 federal law guarantees a women a right to an abortion at certain stages of her pregnancy.

There have been over 200 such bills since 2010.

At his senate confirmation hearing, new Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he would support Roe v Wade even though he still believed it was the “worst colossal erroneous decision made by Congress”.

Other measures to prevent abortions across the country include unnecessarily anaesthetising women during the procedure in Utah; forcing Arizona doctors to lie to patients that a medication abortion is reversible, and showing women in Oklahoma an image of their unwanted foetus during an ultrasound.