Texas fetal remains burial trial gets underway

[Draggingtree]

Texas Tribune

Texas fetal remains burial trial gets underway

The law at the center of the case is Senate Bill 8, passed in 2017, which requires the burial or cremation of fetal remains.

BY MARISSA EVANS JULY 16, 2018 12 AM

State and reproductive rights attorneys are going head to head again in federal court on Monday to argue whether Texas should require health providers to cremate or bury fetal remains.

“It’s a tough case for everybody,” U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra said Friday during a pretrial hearing. In January he granted an injunction blocking a state fetal remains burial rule, but he said last week that the previous decision is no indication of how he would rule in the trial.

“It’s a very emotional case, and so I would ask counsel to do the best job they can to try and tamp down some of the more zealous individuals in your respective camps so that we don’t get a lot of extraneous stuff going on,” Ezra said to attorneys for the state and the Center for Reproductive Rights, who are representing the plaintiffs.