If court overturns Roe, state will ban abortions

Texas is set to impose a blanket ban on abortions under a socalled trigger law that takes effect if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade — as the court is poised to do, according to a draft opinion published Monday evening by Politico.

The Texas law, passed by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott last spring, would prohibit abortions within 30 days of a court decision granting states authority to outlaw the procedure. The ban would apply to abortions beginning with conception, extending beyond the six-week threshold established by Texas’ more widely known abortion law, Senate Bill 8.

As with the six-week ban, Texas’ trigger law makes no exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, nor does it exempt cases of severe fetal abnormality, including those in which the fetus is not expected to survive after birth. It carries narrow exceptions for those placed at risk of death or “substantial impairment of a major bodily function” unless their pregnancy is aborted.

It remains uncertain whether the draft majority opinion, penned by Justice Samuel Alito in February, will remain intact when the court renders its final decision, expected within the next couple months. In the document, Alito calls the landmark 1973 decision, which legalized abortion nationwide, “egregiously wrong from the start.”

The draft opinion would overturn a lower court decision that blocked Mississippi’s law banning most abortions starting at 15 weeks of pregnancy. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments for the case in December and was widely expected to issue a ruling later this spring or over the summer.

Politico, citing “a person familiar with the court’s deliberations,” reported that four other conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — had sided with Alito in a conference between judges following December oral arguments.