The Road To Gilead, Con't

Texas's state Supreme Court is allowing the state's law banning abortion from a century ago to go into effect immediately, ending legal abortions in the state.

Texas can enforce its abortion ban from 1925, the state Supreme Court ruled late Friday evening, a decision that exposes abortion providers to lawsuits and financial penalties if they continue to perform the procedure.

The court overruled a district judge in Houston, who on Tuesday had temporarily blocked the state’s old abortion law from going into effect. That law made performing an abortion, by any method, punishable by two to 10 years in prison.

Friday’s decision does not permit prosecutors to bring criminal cases against abortion providers, but it exposes anyone who assists in the procurement of an abortion to fines and lawsuits.

The federal Supreme Court on June 24 overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that asserted that access to abortion is protected under the constitution. The Texas Legislature last year passed a “trigger law” that would automatically ban abortion from the moment of fertilization 30 days after a judgment from the Supreme Court, which typically comes about a month after the initial opinion.

Abortion rights groups filed a lawsuit Monday in hopes of extending the period the procedure remains legal in Texas. They argued the 1925 ban was effectively repealed when the Supreme Court rendered its decision in Roe v. Wade, and thus cannot be enforced now.

“These laws are confusing, unnecessary, and cruel,” Marc Hearron, Senior Counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is not part of the lawsuit, said in a statement. “Texas’s trigger ban is not scheduled to take effect for another two months, if not longer. This law from nearly one hundred years ago is banning essential health care prematurely, despite clearly being long repealed.”

Since the Legislature never repealed its pre-Roe statute banning abortion, however, some conservative lawmakers and legal scholars argued abortion again became illegal in Texas the moment the Supreme Court announced its ruling.

 

And again, the next step is to criminalize crossing state lines for an abortion, and then finally criminalizing failure to give live birth.

Hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last week, a man with a wiry, squared-off beard and a metal cross around his neck celebrated with his team at a Brazilian steakhouse. He pulled out his phone to livestream to his followers.

“We have delivered a huge blow to the enemy and to this industry,” the man, Jeff Durbin, said. But, he explained, “our work has just really begun.”

“Even the states that have trigger laws,” which ban abortion at conception without exceptions for rape or incest, did not go far enough, Mr. Durbin, a pastor in the greater Phoenix area, said. “They do not believe that the woman should ever be punished.”

Resistance to “the question of whether or not people who murder their children in the wombs are guilty,” he said, “is going to have to be something we have to overcome, because women are still going to be killing their children in the womb.”

Even as those in the anti-abortion movement celebrate their nation-changing Supreme Court victory, there are divisions over where to go next. The most extreme, like Mr. Durbin, want to pursue what they call “abortion abolition,” a move to criminalize abortion from conception as homicide, and hold women who have the procedure responsible — a position that in some states could make those women eligible for the death penalty. That position is at odds with the anti-abortion mainstream, which opposes criminalizing women and focuses on prosecuting providers.

Many people who oppose abortion believe that life begins at conception and that abortion is murder. Abolitionists follow that thinking to what they believe is the logical, and uncompromising, conclusion: From the moment of conception, abolitionists want to give the fetus equal protection as a person under the 14th Amendment.

States like Texas are going to start sending women who miscarry to death row very soon.