High court to hold key hearing on Texas abortion law

WASHINGTON — In only a handful of cases has the Supreme Court moved as quickly as it is in the fight over the Texas law that bans most abortions. They include some of the most famous disputes of the last 50 years.

The cases being argued Monday could signal how the justices will rule in an even bigger abortion dispute that will be heard a month later and asks them to overrule the two landmark cases that guarantee a woman’s right to an abortion, Roe vs. Wade and Planned Parenthood vs. Casey.

But abortion is not directly at issue in the Texas cases. Rather, the court will decide whether abortion providers or the federal government can sue in federal court over the Texas law.

The high court has so far allowed the Texas law, which effectively bans abortion at around six weeks of pregnancy, to be in effect even as it appears to conflict with the Roe and Casey decisions. Those cases remain the law of the land until the Supreme Court says otherwise.

The Texas law bans abortion once cardiac activity is detected in the fetus, usually around six weeks and before some women even know they are pregnant.

Federal courts have had no trouble blocking similar laws enacted elsewhere as inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s rulings on abortion that essentially don’t let states prohibit abortion before a fetus can survive outside the womb, usually around 24 weeks.

The difference in Texas is the way the law is enforced. Rather than let state officials enforce it, as typically happens, Texas puts the power in the hands of private citizens, who can sue anyone who performs or abets an abortion. The pregnant woman herself cannot be sued.

Texas legislators have said that they designed the law this way precisely to make it hard to challenge in federal court.

Abortion providers first sued to block the law before it took effect, but they were rebuffed by a federal appeals court and ultimately the Supreme

Court. The Justice Department then stepped in with a new lawsuit.

The Supreme Court is now weighing, at this early stage of the court fight, whether abortion providers or the federal government may sue in federal court to block a law that the administration argues has “made abortion effectively unavailable in Texas after roughly six weeks of pregnancy.”