Prison guard suffers stillbirth after being ordered to keep working after going into labor – with pro-life Texas AG now claiming fetus has NO rights

A Texas woman is suing the prison where she worked after, while seven months pregnant, she was unable to go to the hospital for two and a half hours while experiencing severe pain – and her baby was stillborn.

Salia Issa claims her supervisors accused her of lying about her contractions and told her to wait for a replacement to arrive before leaving her post.

Doctors told her that if she had arrived at the hospital earlier on November 15, 2021, her child could have been saved.

Issa and her husband, Fiston Rukengeza, filed a lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in 2022 seeking monetary damages to cover her medical bills, pain and suffering, and other things, including the unborn child’s funeral expenses.

Issa claims her supervisor told her, “You just want to go home.”

The attorney general’s office and the prison system have asked a judge to dismiss the case, and Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general, has argued that the unborn child had no rights.

Known for his strong pro-life stance, Paxton stated on the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, “I look forward to defending the pro-life laws of Texas and the lives of all unborn children in the future .’

Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton has argued in court cases that Issa’s unborn child had no rights

Texas immediately banned abortion when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022: Earlier this month, Paxton celebrated that the state Supreme Court temporarily blocked a decision by a lower court that declared Texas’ abortion ban illegal.

“Protecting the health of mothers and babies is of paramount importance to the people of Texas, a moral principle enshrined in law,” Paxton said on Aug. 5.

He vowed that his office would “uphold the values ​​of the people of Texas by doing everything it can to protect mothers and babies.”

But in response to Issa’s case, Paxton argues that the fetus had no rights.

“Just because different statutes define an individual as an unborn child does not mean that the Fourteenth Amendment does the same thing,” the Texas Attorney General’s Office wrote in a March footnote, referring to the constitutional right to life.

Issa and her husband, Fiston Rukengeza, filed a lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in 2022

Issa drove herself to the hospital when her bosses finally let her out of the prison where she worked (pictured), but her baby was already dead

Ross Brennan, Issa’s attorney, wrote in a lawsuit that the state’s argument “is nothing more than an attempt to say — without explicitly saying — that an unborn child at seven months’ gestation is not a person.”

Paxton’s position was first reported by The Texas Tribune.

Laura Hermer, a professor at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, described Texas’s legal attitude as “looking for their pie and eating it too.”

“This wouldn’t be the first time the state has tried to claim to support the right to life of all fetuses, yet acts very differently when it comes to protecting the health and safety of such fetuses, except in the very narrow area of banning abortions,” Hermer said.

Last week, U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Hightower recommended that the case proceed in part without commenting on fetal rights arguments.