President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden walk out of the South Portico toward Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on November 28, 2023, in Washington, D.C. On Wednesday, the Bidens invited Kate Cox, the Texas woman who was denied an emergency abortion by the state's Supreme Court, to attend the State of the Union. File Photo by Samuel Corum/UPI |
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Jan. 24 (UPI) -- President Joe Biden has invited Kate Cox, the Texas woman who was denied an emergency abortion by the state's Supreme Court, to join first lady Jill Biden as her guest at the State of the Union.
"On Sunday, the president and first lady spoke to Kate Cox, who was forced to go to court to seek permission for the care she needed for a non-viable pregnancy that threatened her life," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters during Wednesday's White House briefing.
"They thanked her for her courage in sharing her story and speaking out about the impact of the extreme abortion ban in Texas," Jean-Pierre added. "The first lady invited Kate to join her as a guest at the State of the Union, and Kate accepted."
The president is scheduled to deliver his State of the Union address on March 7, two days after Super Tuesday. It will be Biden's his last address to a joint session of Congress before the 2024 presidential election.
Cox, a 31-year-old Dallas mother of two, filed a lawsuit last month over the restrictive abortion bans in Texas. She was 20 weeks pregnant at the time and had just learned that her developing fetus had trisomy 18, a severe chromosomal defect with an extremely low survival rate.
Cox and her lawyers argued that her fertility was at risk if she continued the pregnancy.
"I do not want to put my body through the risks of continuing this pregnancy," Cox said in her lawsuit last month. "I do not want to continue until my baby dies in my belly or I have to deliver a stillborn baby or one where life will be measured in hours or days, full of medical tubes and machinery."
Last month, Cox left Texas to get an emergency abortion just hours before the Texas Supreme Court ruled against her.
The ruling reversed a lower court's decision that would have allowed Cox to get an abortion under Texas' "medical emergency" exception. But the state Supreme Court said a fatal fetal anomaly did not qualify as a life-threatening condition for the mother.
Texas laws ban all abortions unless, "in the exercise of a reasonable medical judgment," a doctor diagnoses "a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function."
On Wednesday, the White House called Cox's story "incredibly powerful and devastating."
"It speaks to the moment that we are in now when we talk about women having the right to make these deeply personal decisions about their health care that was taken away by the Supreme Court," Jean-Pierre said, as she announced Cox would attend the State of the Union.
"It is important for Americans to hear the harrowing stories that we're hearing from women of their experiences across the country."
