Texas abortion law stays in place
THE United States’ top court formally refused on Wednesday to block a Texas law banning almost all abortions, less than a day after the nation’s most restrictive reproductive rights legislation took effect in the southern state.
The law, known as the “Texas Heartbeat Act,” bans abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which usually takes place at six weeks — before many women even know they are pregnant. It makes no exceptions for rape or incest. The only exemption is if there is a danger to the woman’s health.
While similar laws have passed in a dozen Republicanled conservative states, all had been stymied in the courts.
The American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights and other groups filed an emergency request with the Supreme Court on Monday asking it to stop the Texas law from taking effect.
But the court late on Wednesday formally refused to block the legislation.
The court, which was sharply divided with four of its nine justices opposing the decision, did not rule on the constitutionality of the law, but cited “complex and novel procedural issues.”
Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the court’s order “stunning,” saying her colleagues had “opted to bury their head in the sand” over a “flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights.”
President Joe Biden vowed to defend abortion rights after the law took effect.
“This extreme Texas law blatantly violates the constitutional right established under Roe vs Wade and upheld as precedent for nearly half a century,” Biden said in a reference to the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case that legally enshrined a woman’s right to an abortion.
Vanessa Rodriguez, senior manager of a contact center of Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas, said patients were “scared, confused, angry.”
“Texas politicians are taking away their right to make the decision about terminating a pregnancy,” Rodriguez said.
The ACLU said the impact of the bill will be “immediate and devastating.”
“Access to almost all abortion has just been cut off for millions of people,” the powerful civil rights association said.
According to the ACLU, “approximately 85 to 90 percent” of the women who obtain an abortion in Texas are at least six weeks into pregnancy.
Anti-abortion activists, however, were jubilant: “This is an historic moment in the fight to protect women and children from abortion,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion nonprofit Susan B Anthony List.
The other states that have sought to enact restrictions on abortion in the early stages of pregnancy have been barred from doing so by rulings that cited protections granted in Roe vs Wade.
That decision guaranteed the right to an abortion in the US so long as the fetus is not viable outside the womb, which is usually the case until the 22nd to 24th week of pregnancy.