(LifeSiteNews) — A Texas woman cannot sue the officials who arrested her for a self-induced abortion in 2022 because their discharge of official duties was protected by qualified immunity, a federal judge has ruled.

Reuters reports that Lizelle Gonzalez (then Herrera) had been arrested in 2022 and charged with having “intentionally and knowingly caused the death of an individual by self-induced abortion,” according to law enforcement, but the charges were quickly dropped due to an exemption for abortions in the state’s murder statute at the time.

The case occurred just weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, empowering states to directly ban abortion as murder.

Two years later, Gonzalez filed a lawsuit against Starr County, District ​Attorney Gocha Ramirez, Assistant District Attorney Alexandria Barrera and Sheriff Rene Fuentes, claiming the brief attempt at prosecution had violated her constitutional rights.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton dismissed the claims against the individual defendants, ruling that they were protected by qualified immunity in the official pursuit of their duties, that they had not violated any established law, and that they had not conspired to railroad her. However, her claims against the county itself remain pending.

“Drawing all inferences in favor of Gonzalez, the Court struggles to see how this constitutes malice,” Tipton wrote. “If anything, it suggests that DA Ramirez sought to avoid a premature arrest. DA Ramirez’s instruction—to wait until the Sheriff’s Office completed its investigation to obtain a ‘clear picture of what had happened’ before ‘decid[ing] whether to present it to a grand jury or not,’ (id. At 58)—shows a commitment to a full and fair vetting of the facts. There is no other evidence of DA Ramirez’s malice. As such, there is no genuine dispute of a material fact as to whether DA Ramirez deprived Gonzalez of her right to be free from malicious prosecution.”

“In short, Gonzalez bears the burden to show that qualified immunity does not apply, and she has not,” he added. “Standing alone, the cases cited by Gonzalez simply do not work in her favor. And taken together, a collection of non-binding, factually distinct, and inconclusive authority cannot be aggregated to create clearly established law.”

Such cases test the legal distinction between abortions and murders that are universally recognized as such by the law, and the thornier question about how the law should treat mothers who seek to abort.

Historically, abortion bans in the United States have focused on penalizing the doctors who commit abortions and exempted the women who seek them, due to the practical need to get women to testify against those with the technical skills to actually commit the act. In the modern era, most pro-life activists also say that abortion-minded women are secondary victims of the abortion industry, whom the pro-life movement seeks to persuade and heal rather than punish.

Pro-abortion activists have long used the specter of punishing women against pro-lifers in two contradictory ways, primarily by spreading fears of sending vulnerable, desperate women to jail (despite the fact that the vast majority of pro-life bills have always expressly reserved punishment for abortionists), but sometimes trying instead to paint pro-lifers’ refusal to treat women like murderers as proof of hypocrisy or insincerity.

In recent years, with the fall of Roe taking direct abortion bans out of the purely hypothetical realm, a vocal subset of abortion opponents (some rejecting the “pro-life” label in favor of “abolitionist”) have argued that the mainstream movement’s reluctance to simply treat abortions the same as any other murder, with all that entails, has held back the cause of ending abortion. More mainstream pro-lifers argue that such a drastic shift would backfire in light of the cause’s precarious position in opinion polls.