The Supreme Court late Wednesday declined to block a controversial Texas law that bans abortions after six weeks into pregnancy.
The high court voted 5-4 against abortion providers in the state who had filed an emergency application for relief against the law that went into effect Wednesday. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three liberal judges in dissent.
The majority in its unsigned opinion said applicant Whole Woman’s Health raised “serious questions” about the law’s constitutionality but its application “presents complex and novel antecedent procedural questions” they did not not answer.
“In reaching this conclusion, we stress that we do not purport to resolve definitively any jurisdictional or substantive claim in the applicants’ lawsuit,” the majority wrote. “In particular, this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’ law, and in no way limits other procedurally proper challenges to the Texas law, including in Texas state courts.”
The majority said because of how the law is written, it is unknown if it will ever be enforced.
Roberts, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, wrote in his dissent that the law before them is “not only unusual but unprecedented.”
The Republican-led law, SB8, which was passed by Texas lawmakers and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in May, outlaws abortions when a heartbeat is detectable, which is about six weeks into a pregnancy and often before one knows they are pregnant. It will deny the procedure to at least 85% of patients who seek it in the state.
The ban is enforced by members of the public who are able to sue anyone who provides or is involved in aiding and performing abortions after a heartbeat in the fetus is detected.
Roberts said the reasoning for putting enforcement of the law upon the public is to “insulate the state from responsibility for implementing and enforcing the regulatory regime.”
He said he would have granted the injunction prior to the law going into effect so courts could have considered whether a state can shift responsibility for enforcing its laws to the public.
“We are at this point asked to resolve these novel questions — at least preliminarily — in the first instance, in the course of two days, without the benefit of consideration by the District Court or Court of Appeals,” he wrote, adding that they are expected to rule on the issue without briefings and oral arguments.
Breyer, in another written dissent, said the law delegates private individuals the power to prevent women from having an abortion during the first stage of pregnancy, despite women having the constitutional right to do so.
“This court’s order is stunning” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in another dissent. “Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”
Sotomayor said the state didn’t attempt tp argue that the law was constitutional as there is no way it could.
“Taken together, the act is a breathtaking act of defiance — of the Constitution, of this court’s precedents and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas,” she wrote, adding that the majority’s decision tells the nation that the state’s “gambit” to evade federal judicial scrutiny worked.
“The court should not be so content to ignore its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and the rule of law,” she concluded.
Whole Woman’s Health said it was “shocked and heartbroken” by the Supreme Court’s decision.
“We are devastated by today’s ruling,” Amy Hagstrom Miller, chief operating officer of Whole Woman’s Health, said in a statement. “Our patients are scared and confused and desperately trying to figure out what they can do to get an abortion. We don’t know what will happen next.”
The company’s staff and providers are also scared, she said, adding that they will comply with the ban but its four Texas clinics will remain open.
“But let me ask you, is this how you want someone you know and love to experience abortion?” she asked. “Texans deserve better.”
Nancy Northup, the chief operating officer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said Texas has made “a mockery” of the rule of law and will force patients who have the means to do so to leave the state to obtain the medical procedure.
“This should send chills down the spine of everyone in this country who cares about the constitution,” she said in a statement. “We will keep fighting this ban until abortion access is restored.”
According to the Guttmacher Institute, the ban increases the distance one in the state will have to travel to receive an abortion from 12 miles to 248.
Texas is one of 12 states that have passed so-called heartbeat bills, but the others have been blocked by courts from going into effect.
After the law went into effect on Wednesday and prior to the Supreme Court announcing its decision, the Pro-Life Action League, which seeks to prohibit abortions in the nation, cheered Texas for its novel law and encouraged others to pass their own versions of it.
“The state of Texas is implementing a creative new policy that recognizes the child in the womb as a member of the human family and protect her from the violence of abortion,” the group’s executive director Eric Scheidler said in a statement. “We encourage the other 49 states to catch up with Texas and continue this historic expansion of human rights.”
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And the Liberals are screaming bloody murder—no pun intended.
Where do Libs come up with their view of Life and upon what basis do they determine the value of it? Unborn lives are explained away in clinical language such as “biological mass” or “not yet human”—whatever salves the conscience. They are expendable for any reason—or no reason at all.
Look at the 180 when a George Floyd or a Trayvon Martin gets taken out. “oh, but they’re human”, they will tell you. Yeah, but they were one of the expendable ones before they got there.
Abortion is murder…
#6 of the 10 Commandments of GOD – “Thou Shalt Not Kill”
Jeremiah 22:3
This is what the LORD says: Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood
Joel 3:21
Shall I leave their innocent blood unavenged?
No, I will not. ”
With the libtards on the court, i am SHOCKED IT went this way.
John Roberts, who wants to be a star in the high society of the Washington DC Cesspool. John Roberts and the New World Order Bushes are a disgrace to America!
Just how do all these left wing liberals get the idea that abortion is a constitutional right? That term of course is not indicated anywhere in our constitution, bill of rights, or any other federal papers. The only thing that has made it constitutional is that a group of judges said it was. Now another group of judges is looking at that and just might decide something different. It wouldn’t be anything unheard of since it has happened before.We can hear the libs crying in their beer because a court went against their line of thinking.
TO THEM< any sick thing they can think off, is a "RIGHT".. BUT what is literally written in BLOOD is not.
Sotomayor seems to forget that it was the Court that pulled and stretched the words of the Fourteenth Amendment to include PRIVACY between patient and doctor to justify the ruling in Roe v. Wade. What has happened since can in no way be construed as PRIVATE, it’s been a public circus with celebrities even touting it, mostly in bad taste.
SHe doesn’t forget. SHE JUST DOESN’T care..
The only thing that appears twice in the Constitution is “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
The central question of abortion is “when does an unborn child become a person, entitled to the protections of the Constitution?”
Even when slavery was legal, based upon the same proposition as Roe v. Wade — it is legal and moral for one person to be the property of another — it was illegal to murder a slave. Not so an unborn child.
Roe v. Wade interprets the 13th amendment as “It’s OK to consider a child the mother’s property, so long as she doesn’t force it to work without pay before it’s born.”
Actually, if anyone ever read the SCOTUS decision in 1973, the court did say abortion was only permitted in the first trimester of pregnancy. It’s the dumcrats who added to the decision and now say it’s legal to abort anytime up to 30 days AFTER the child is born. What I’ll never understand is that the founder of Planned Parenthood was buddy buddy with the KKK and even stated abortion was the best way to exterminate the black race. More minorities get abortions than whites. And the white trash dummycrats are NO friend to minorities. So why does the majority of American Blacks vote for the dummycrats?
Honestly its seeming like the blacks, are acting like wives in a Battered spouse household.. THEY ARE TOO scared to leave, and too weak, to stand up for themselves..