Five Texas women and two Texas-based doctors Tuesday filed a lawsuit challenging the state’s abortion ban for failing to provide adequate medical exceptions. In the complaint, the plaintiffs’ alleged, “As a direct result of Texas’s abortion bans, Texas is in the midst of a health care crisis.” The landmark lawsuit follows the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn a federal right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

The plaintiffs ask the District Court of Travis County, Texas to: (1) issue a judgment defining the scope of the exception to Texas’ abortion ban, (2) declare the law in violation of the Texas Constitution and (3) restrain enforcement of any and all provisions the court declares void.

Texas’s abortion ban, Senate Bill 8, effectively imposed a statewide ban on abortion after approximately six weeks. The law contains exceptions for “emergent medical condition(s),” otherwise known as EMCs. An EMC provides pregnant people with an ability to seek medical care for “life-threatening” complications arising from pregnancy. However, as the complaint alleged, “inconsistencies in the language of these provisions, the use of non-medical terminology, and sloppy legislative drafting have resulted in understandable confusion throughout the medical profession regarding the scope of the exception.”

Opponents of the law argue that the confusion has led some physicians to believe that people must be on “death’s door” to qualify for exceptions to the ban. Supporters of the law, like Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, dismiss these characterizations as over-reactions.

Previously in July 2022, Paxton sued the federal government and won over another abortion dispute with the federal government. Following the June 2022 Dobbs decision, the Biden administration issued guidance to states which required emergency rooms to perform abortions–if deemed medically necessary–on patients that enter the emergency room on the advice of a licensed physician. Upon winning the lawsuit, Paxton announced in a press release, “We’re not going to allow left-wing bureaucrats in Washington to transform our hospitals and emergency rooms into walk-in abortion clinics.”