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  The Texas laws are “a patchwork,” said Jamila Perritt, an ob-gyn and the C.E.O. of Physicians for Reproductive Health, “and deliberately confusing.” And that confusion sometimes poses, for doctors, a profound ethical test. As another Houston doctor put it to me, “Imagine a bullet is flying in your direction and you have a choice of either saving your family from being hit or saving a patient that you just met. As doctors, we’ve sacrificed a lot to be at that bedside when women need us the most, but you ask us to let our family take the bullet for somebody that we don’t know? Most people would draw the line.”