The family of a Texas woman who died from a pregnancy-related complications is suing state Attorney General Ken Paxton and the hospital where she was treated, claiming the state’s ban on most abortions killed her.
Page H2From§Eachthe noon edition — 17 September 2026
Federal judge delays ruling on abortion pill until after midterms as two lawsuits land over already-banned care.
As it ran on the front
Sheena Hamlin named her daughter Ellie. At around 21 weeks, doctors found Ellie's lungs so underdeveloped she would suffocate almost as soon as the cord was cut. Oklahoma law gave Hamlin and her husband nothing to do about that inside the state — the statute doesn't carve out lungs that won't work, only miscarriage, stillbirth, and death shortly after birth, and even those exceptions mean nothing if you can't act on them at home. So the family did what the law left them: they flew to Illinois before Thanksgiving 2024, paid nearly $4,000 out of pocket, and came home to bury a plan instead of a healthy delivery date. This week Hamlin filed suit in Oklahoma state court over it.
In Texas, a different family filed a different suit against a different set of names — Attorney General Ken Paxton and the hospital that treated a pregnant woman before she died — arguing the state's abortion ban is what killed her. The two cases don't share a courthouse or a docket number. They share a law professor's flowchart: what a state decides counts as an emergency, and who finds out too late that it didn't.…
…(cont) A week earlier, in Texas's tight race for governor, a Democrat named Gina Hinojosa ran a campaign ad about giving birth despite her own child's fatal genetic anomaly. The ad never says Texas law no longer lets a woman in her position choose otherwise. It didn't have to. The viewer already knows a court filing when they see one, even dressed up as a thirty-second spot.
The drug that would let any of these women make the call in a doctor's office instead of a courtroom is still sitting with Judge Reed O'Connor in the Northern District of Texas. On August 31, the Justice Department asked him to pause the lawsuit seeking to revoke mifepristone's FDA approval. He granted it — the case now runs past the midterms, and O'Connor left the door open for the Trump administration to restrict the drug once he rules.
None of this started this year. In 2012 the Oklahoma Supreme Court struck down a personhood amendment unanimously, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review it, and the fight moved to exactly where it sits now: state by state, family by family, filing by filing, with the mifepristone case that could resolve all of it still open on Judge O'Connor's docket.
“The pill case didn't get decided, it got paused until after the votes are in — the judge's own timeline, not mine. Both families in this story did exactly what the law told them to do, and both ended up either $4,000 poorer or suing the state that made them choose. That's not two separate court systems working by coincidence; that's one law landing the same way in two different zip codes.”
“Look, delaying a lawsuit isn't sitting on it, it's due process — the Justice Department asked for the pause, the judge granted it, that's just how dockets work, nothing to do with timing. And these state laws have medical emergency exceptions built in, so if a woman's suing over a denied abortion that's a hospital compliance problem, not a law problem — wait, did I just say the law's fine but nobody can actually follow it? Forget I said that.”
The receipts
When Sheena Hamlin found out she was pregnant with a daughter she named Ellie, she was "very excited," until her doctors discovered at around 21 weeks that the baby "might survive birth, but that her lungs were so severely underdeveloped that she would suffocate almost as soon as the umbilical cord was cut." "The alternative would be to…
· Democrat’s ad about tragic pregnancy injects abortion into tight governor’s race from the morgue, 10 Sep 2026
· Court Lets US Abortion Pill Access Continue—Until Trump FDA Finishes Review Condemned as 'Sham' from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
· Federal judge delays a mifepristone lawsuit until after midterms from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
· The U.S. Supreme Court declines to take on the review of an abortion-related appeal. The case, which is a proposed measure to amend the Oklahoma state constitution that was unanimously struck down by from the morgue, 29 Oct 2012
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.