"Certain assumptions must be made and constitutionally accepted to find that there is a basis of rationality to the exclusion of the above-mentioned classes of women from the statute’s protection. One is that human-life begins with fertilization of egg by sperm. Another is that this “life” is equivalent to the life of the woman, and the life-saving exception to the abortion law is a rational balancing of interests by the state, analogous to the laws of self-defense. It is remarkable that the existence of a one-day-old fetus is to be equaled with the life of a grown woman. The woman is—beyond doubt—a human being, one upon whom other human beings (husband, children, etc.) depend in a variety of ways essential to the sanctity of the family, and whose impaired health may be critically disruptive to that family; or one who may not have consented to sexual intercourse made felonious by the state, yet who is forced to bear the consequences of that same felonious act. This equivalency of interest between a microscopic embryo and the woman who bears it must be assumed in the Texas law, however, since that statute draws no lines, such as viability, as the time to invoke the state’s protection."
January 1, 1970