Ban reinstated, Texas clinics cancel abortions
Appointments were booked during brief reprieve from the harsh restriction.
AUSTIN, Texas — Texas abortion clinics on Saturday canceled appointments they had booked during a 48-hour reprieve from the most restrictive abortion law in the U.S., which was back in effect as weary providers again turn their sights to the Supreme Court.
The Biden administration, which sued Texas over the law known as Senate Bill 8, has yet to say whether it will go that route after a federal appeals court reinstated it late Friday. The law bans abortions once cardiac activity can be detected, usually around six weeks, which is before some women know they are pregnant. It makes no exceptions in cases of rape or incest.
The White House had no immediate comment Saturday.
But for now, the law is in the hands of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which allowed the restrictions to resume pending further arguments. In the meantime, Texas abortion providers and patients are right back where they’ve been for most of the last six weeks.
Out-of-state clinics, already inundated with Texas patients seeking abortions, were again the closest option for many women. Providers say other women are being forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, or waiting in hopes that courts will strike down the law that took effect on Sept. 1.
There are also new questions — including whether antiabortion advocates will try punishing Texas physicians who performed abortions during the brief period that the law was paused from late Wednesday to late Friday. Texas leaves enforcement solely in the hands of private citizens, who can collect $10,000 or more in damages if they successfully sue abortion providers and others who violate the restrictions.
Texas Right to Life, the state’s largest antiabortion group, created a tip line to receive reports of violators. About a dozen calls came in after U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman suspended the law, said John Seago, the group’s legislative director.
Although some Texas clinics acknowledged they had briefly resumed abortions on patients who were beyond six weeks, Seago said his group had no lawsuits in the works.
“I don’t have any credible evidence at the moment of litigation that we would we would bring forward,” Seago said Saturday.
About two dozen abortion clinics were operating in Texas before the law took effect. At least six clinics resumed performing abortions for clients who were past their sixth week of pregnancy during the reprieve, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights.
At Whole Woman’s Health, which has four abortion clinics in Texas, President and Chief Executive Amy Hagstrom Miller said she did not know how many abortions her locations performed for patients beyond six weeks but put it at “quite a few.” She said her clinics were again complying with the law and acknowledged the risks her physicians and staff had taken. “Of course we are all worried,” she said. “But we also feel a deep commitment to providing abortion care when it is legal to do so.”
Pitman, the judge who’d halted the Texas law in a blistering 113-page opinion, was appointed by President Obama. He called the law an “offensive deprivation” of the constitutional right to an abortion, but his ruling was swiftly set aside in a onepage order by the 5th Circuit.
That same appeals court previously allowed the Texas restrictions to take effect in September in a ruling in a separate lawsuit brought by abortion providers. This time, the court gave the Justice Department until 5 p.m. Tuesday to respond.
Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, urged the Supreme Court to “step in and stop this madness.” Last month, the Supreme Court allowed the law to move forward in a 5-4 decision, although it did so without ruling on the law’s constitutionality.
A 1992 decision by the Supreme Court prevented states from banning abortion before viability, the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb, or around 24 weeks of pregnancy. But Texas’ version has outmaneuvered courts due to its novel enforcement mechanism that leaves it to private citizens to take action against violators rather than prosecutors, which critics say amounts to a bounty.
The Biden administration could bring the case back to the Supreme Court and ask it to quickly restore Pitman’s order, although it is unclear whether it will do so.
“I’m not very optimistic about what could happen at the Supreme Court,” Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said about the Justice Department’s chances.
“But there’s not much downside either, right?” he said. “The question is: What’s changed since the last time they saw it? There is this full opinion, this full hearing before the judge and the record. So that may be enough.”