Abortion rights groups challenge new Texas restrictions

[ad_1]

AUSTIN – Abortion rights groups Wednesday urged a state district judge to declare Texas’s new six-week abortion ban unconstitutional, arguing that handing it over to private individuals posed a number of legal issues.

The plaintiffs are also calling on the court to prevent Texas Right to Life from suing them under the new law, known as Senate Law 8, to date no private law enforcement action.

“Our customers’ interests are being affected, they must change their behavior because SB8 is unconstitutionally exposing them to financial ruin,” said Elizabeth Myers, a Dallas attorney who represents social workers, organizations that help people gain access to abortion, and others .

The day-long hearing marks the latest legal battle over the state’s restrictive abortion law, which allows individuals to sue anyone who “favors or promotes” an abortion after evidence of cardiac activity in the fetus. Successful litigants can receive a minimum of $ 10,000 plus their attorney fees.

Texas Right to Life attorneys and its legislative director, John Seago, claim their clients are the wrong people to sue and have done nothing wrong. Even if the court issues an injunction against the anti-abortion group, attorney Heather Hacker said there are millions of others who could still sue.

“They will not change their behavior if this court can grant relief,” she said.

Still, lawyers for the abortion providers said a positive decision to repeal the law and prevent lawsuits from Texas Right to Life – one of the biggest proponents of the new law – would make sense.

The 14 lawsuits against Texas Right to Life by Planned Parenthood, abortion funding organizations, social workers, doctors and lawyers, were combined into one case.

David Peeples, a retired judge who presided over the case, appeared receptive to concerns that the law’s novel enforcement system could apply well beyond abortion.

“The potential of a number of procedural weapons that could be used in other contexts,” said Peeples, “that must be on people’s minds.”

Peeples said he would make a decision sooner rather than later. An appeal will almost certainly be made.

The US Supreme Court is considering a legal challenge, but it is not clear when the judges will act. Since it went into effect Sept. 1, the law has cut abortions in Texas in half, a study found.

Outside the Austin courthouse, abortion rights advocates said Wednesday that the only people who can get an abortion now will have to leave the state and spend hundreds of dollars on it.

“If you allow a country to deprive you of one of your rights, it can deprive you of all of your rights,” said Marsha Jones, executive director of the Afiya Center, the plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Wednesday’s hearing mainly focused on the novel enforcement mechanism in the first real debate on the virtues of the law.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys argued that the law violated people’s right to privacy by litigating their abortion decisions without their consent. Another problem they pointed out is that the law allows anyone to sue without showing that they have been harmed.

Foreign attorneys have filed the first lawsuit under the new law against a San Antonio doctor who admitted in a comment in the Washington Post that he allegedly performed an abortion on a woman who was more than six weeks pregnant.

“For a private lawsuit, as the defendants keep saying, you need an injury,” Myers said. “No damage is required here. Anyone can just file a lawsuit, prove an abortion occurred and get $ 10,000 or more and fees. “

Texas Right to Life attorneys generally rejected these arguments, but spent much of the hearing saying that their clients should not be the ones to be sued.

Seago, Hacker said, is “just a man who happens to be for life” and has to defend a state law because “the plaintiffs sued him and not someone else responsible”.

If he loses, “plaintiffs will ask Mr. Seago to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees because the state passed a law that plaintiffs believe is unconstitutional,” she said. “It’s just unfair.”

[ad_2]
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2021/11/10/anybody-can-just-file-a-lawsuit-abortion-rights-groups-challenge-new-texas-restrictions/