Texas abortion law: Judge temporarily blocks enforcement after White House legal challenge

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Protesters take part in the Women's March and Rally for Abortion Justice at the State Capitol in Austin, Texas, on October 2
AFP via Getty Images
Matt Watts7 October 2021

A federal judge in the US has temporarily blocked the controversial new law in Texas that bans most abortions in the state.

The order by US District Judge Robert Pitman calls for the state to suspend the abortion law, the most restrictive in the US, while its legality is being challenged.

He was responding to a lawsuit brought by the Biden administration, which has said the restrictions were enacted in defiance of the US constitution.

The order is the first legal blow to the Texas law, brought in by Republican lawmakers in the state in September and known as Senate Bill 8, which until now had withstood a wave of early challenges.

The White House called the judge’s ruling “an important step” to restoring Texas women’s constitutional rights.

In the weeks since the restrictions took effect, Texas abortion providers say the impact has been “exactly what we feared”.

Planned Parenthood, a nonprofit organization that provides reproductive health care in the United States, says the number of patients from Texas at its clinics in the state decreased by nearly 80% in the two weeks afterwards.

Some providers have said Texas clinics are now in danger of closing while neighbouring states struggle to keep up with a surge of patients who sometimes must drive hundreds of miles for an abortion,

Other women, they say, are being forced to carry pregnancies to term.

Thousands of protesters came out in response to a new bill outlawing abortions on Wednesday
Thousands of protesters came out in response to a new bill outlawing abortions on Wednesday
Getty Images

In a 113-page opinion, Judge Pitman took Texas to task over the law, saying Republican politicians had “contrived an unprecedented and transparent statutory scheme” to deny patients their constitutional right to an abortion.

“From the moment SB 8 went into effect, women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution,” Judge Pitman wrote.

“That other courts may find a way to avoid this conclusion is theirs to decide; this Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right.”

But even with the law on hold, abortion services in Texas may not instantly resume because doctors still fear that they could be sued without a more permanent legal decision.

Texas officials are likely to seek a swift reversal from the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which previously allowed the restrictions to take effect.

Other states, mostly in the South, have passed similar laws that ban abortion within the early weeks of pregnancy, all of which judges have blocked. But Texas’s version has so far outmanoeuvred the courts because it leaves enforcement to private citizens to file suits, not prosecutors, which critics say amounts to a bounty.

“This is not some kind of vigilante scheme,” said Will Thompson, defending the law for the Texas Attorney General’s Office. “This is a scheme that uses the normal, lawful process of justice in Texas.”

The Texas law is just one that has set up the biggest test of abortion rights in the US in decades, and it is part of a broader push by Republicans nationwide to impose new restrictions on abortion.

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