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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – Abortion providers in Texas again on Thursday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to pass a new state law banning most abortions since early September when deeply divided judges allowed it to go into effect.
Since then, abortion providers in Texas have said their worst fears have come true. They describe women traveling hundreds of miles to have an abortion while clinics outside of the state are congested and their own clinics are quickly faced with possible closings.
This time around, the abortion providers want the court – which allowed the law known as Senate Law 8 to remain in effect in a 5-4 decision – instead of waiting for its ongoing lawsuit to be filed before the 5th U.S. Court of Appeal is filed. The conservative court of appeal will not act until December, say the abortion providers.
“Texans are now in a crisis,” the Center for Reproductive Rights told the Supreme Court. “As a result, Texans have to travel hundreds of miles to other states now during a pandemic just to exercise a clearly defined federal law.”
The Supreme Court almost always waits for the lower courts to act before doing so. By allowing Texas law to be enforced for the time being, the judges did not previously rule on the constitutionality of Senate Law 8, but refused to block enforcement while a dispute is being carried out in the courts.
Texan law is the nation’s greatest restriction on abortion law since the court’s landmark Roe v. In 1973 Wade proclaimed that women have a constitutional right to abortion. It prohibits abortions as soon as health professionals can detect cardiac activity, which usually takes about six weeks, and before some women know they are pregnant.
Enforcement is left to private individuals who can file lawsuits against abortion providers, as well as others who are helping a woman in Texas obtain an abortion. Last weekend, a San Antonio doctor became the first to publicly say he had deliberately broken the law and was quickly sued – not by anti-abortion activists but by two ex-lawyers who hoped a judge would take the side instead Clinics and the measure blocked.
The Justice Department has also stepped in and filed its own lawsuit in Texas, due to be heard by a federal judge in Austin on October 1.
The new motion from Texas abortion providers comes days after the Supreme Court announced in December arguments in Mississippi’s motion to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade, who guarantees a woman’s right to an abortion, to hear.
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