The NYT reports:The justices may still rule on the request, which is just an early step in what is expected to be an extended legal battle over the law.... The law makes no exceptions for pregnancies resulting from incest or rape....
[T]he Texas law was drafted to make it difficult to challenge in court. Usually, a lawsuit seeking to block a law because it is unconstitutional would name state officials as defendants. But the Texas law bars state officials from enforcing it and instead deputizes private individuals to sue anyone who performs the procedure or “aids and abets” it.
The patient may not be sued, but doctors, staff members at clinics, counselors, people who help pay for the procedure, even an Uber driver taking a patient to an abortion clinic are all potential defendants.
Plaintiffs, who need not have any connection to the matter or show any injury from it, are entitled to $10,000 and their legal fees recovered if they win. Prevailing defendants are not entitled to legal fees.
The immediate question for the justices is not whether the Texas law is constitutional. It is, rather, whether it may be challenged in federal court. The law’s defenders say that, given the way the law is structured, only Texas courts can rule on the matter and only in the context of suits against abortion providers for violating the law....
“Applicants do not have standing to sue a state judge or court clerk because a private party might file a lawsuit in his court,” Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas, a Republican, wrote in a brief filed Tuesday.
Mr. Paxton argued that the abortion providers could challenge the constitutionality of the law only by violating it, being sued in state court and raising their objections as defenses.
“Contrary to applicants’ hyperbolic assertions,” he wrote, “they have not shown that they will be personally harmed by a bill that may never be enforced against them by anyone.”
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59 comments:
Good. There are many birth control options available. USE THEM. 6 weeks is enough time.
Within the context of the state of our judicial system it is exciting to see conservatives fighting back against liberal lawfare. One for the good guys I suppose. Perhaps a model to copy against future lawfare.
I reckon lefties will disagree.
The law makes no exceptions for pregnancies resulting from incest or rape
1: The law gives you six weeks to get an abortion. Were you raped? Did you have your next period? No? Then get an EPT, and if it's positive, decide whether or not you want an abortion.
What this prevents is a woman deciding at 12 weeks that she wants an abotion after all, and so making up a "rape!" accusation to get around the law.
If you didn't know within six weeks of the sex that it was a rape, it's because it wasn't a rape
2: I note that there's no orders on this. If the pro-aboriton lefties on the Court had wanted to dissent from not granting a Stay, there would have been an order not granting the Stay (as there was in the MPP case)
Often the best way to figure out what's going on is to see what did not happen (the curious case of the dog that did not bark in the night). The "best" (for the pro-abortion crowd) way to look at this is that, while the lefties know they'd lose if they forced a vote right now, they think they might win if the wait and see what happens.
'If you didn't know within six weeks of the sex that it was a rape, it's because it wasn't a rape'
What if it was rape-rape?
Since sophistry was used by the US Supreme Court to make abortion legal, sophistry will be used by other entities to make it illegal again.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/09/texas-abortion-ban-goes-into-effect-after-justices-fail-to-act/
"By failing to respond to a plea for them to intervene, the justices allowed a Texas law that bans nearly all abortions to go into effect early Wednesday morning. The abortion providers challenging the law say that it will bar at least 85% of abortions in the state"
"The law bans abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy – a time when many people do not yet know they are pregnant"
Yeah, this is why I no longer trust any analysis from ScotusBlog. "The abortion providers challenging the law say"? Who cares what they say? What are the actual numbers?
If you don't know, the STFU about it. Or quote both sides. Don't just regurgitate the claims of activists.
How do you not know you're pregnant 6 weeks in? You've missed at least one period. Did you have unprotected sex and then miss a period? Do you want to get an abortion if you're pregnant? Have you checked to see if you're pregnant? no?
Why not?
Welcome to Texas, where you're expected to have some agency, and not live your life with your head up your backside
So, abortion 'jurisprudence' along with standing and justiciability doctrines are at the intersection, meeting their reductio ad absurdum moment. Which way to turn, when there is no GPS to tell you? In an odd way, it's both amusing and engaging, as the warring sides in this particular ideological war try to one-up and out-smart each other. Well, on reflection, I suppose that would take a certain and uncommon sense of humor.
But those kinds of games are inevitable once the constitution becomes a social-justice code untethered to text (or anything else), in a context where the warring sides have no intention of giving in or trying to find a live-and-let-live compromise -- which could only come from a legislative solution (and definitely not this kind of legislation). Failing that -- and after 40+ years of the same battles, it's pretty clearly a failure -- we're left with these kinds of absurd but challenging cases.
Taking the game seriously for a (brief) moment, it's very difficult to find anything in the constitution addressing abortion (or gender rights or marriage rights or ...) with clarity or specificity. And the constitutional generalities of 'equal protection' and 'due process' don't help -- they arose in a different era, concerned different problems and were never understood to address abortion or the rest of the 'gender' items on today's social justice agenda. Today's mess that passes for abortion 'jurisprudence' is just the result of substituting grand meta-theories loosely anchored to those generalities for something that a court could actually enforce without having to make it all up in the process. And those meta-theories suffer from two major problems -- they are a dime-a-dozen in academia, so pick your favorite flavor] and no doubt just by happy coincidence, what you pick always end up enshrining the values of whoever is doing the choosing (or inventing) the particular meta-theory at hand.
A lot of things to discuss here, but time is limited.
1. I do not like that an Uber driver can be named in a suit. I would wish they kept it to people who have a much clearer culpability.
2. I do not like that defendants cannot recoup fees if they prevail but plaintiffs can.
3. The point of an abortion ban is to protect what is considered an innocent human life. That life is no less human and no less innocent due to the circumstances of its conception. Rabe and incest exceptions are not rational. now, it is cruel to expect the woman to carry a baby to term due to those circumstances, but this is pretty much the only crime where the remedy is to punish one innocent party for the benefit of another. Make the punishment for the perpetrator more severe and give a lot more support for the victims to deal with the results of the crime.
3. All the money spent fighting the Abortion issue could be put to use caring for the women and children with unplanned pregnancies and demonstrate a more humane way of dealing with such an important social issue.
I have read that a fetal heartbeat can sometimes be detected as early as 3 1/2 weeks. The woman might not even have missed her period.
LIFE, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Notice the FIRST word???
I thought "conservatives" claimed to be advocates of personal liberty. More evidence here of their actual hunger for the restriction of personal liberty to engage in behavior they don't like.
" [T]he Texas law was drafted to make it difficult to challenge in court."
What is it I keep hearing about the push to mandate vaccinations... "If it saves even one life", or something along those lines?
Last night I saw a CNN segment on this topic. Obviously all the guests were flummoxed that SCOTUS hadn’t acted to issue a stay.
But one of the guests was Jeffrey Toobin. Seriously. WTF. How does that guy still have a job on air?
I couldn’t listen to anything he said. A. Because he was incoherent. And B. Because all I could do was laugh when he was talking…
Were you raped? Did you have your next period? No? Then get an EPT, and if it's positive, decide whether or not you want an abortion.
Stop. There's no need for rape victims to have an abortion. Emergency birth control is far better. Avoid the whole subject of abortion. Take emergency birth control. Or you can swallow two birth control pills, which is about the same thing as emergency birth control.
It's horrific how pro-choice people want to use rape victims to enact their agenda. Stop politicizing rape. Every rape victim should go to a hospital and get cleaned up. Talk to a doctor. Take emergency birth control. Talk to the police. Pro-lifers should be advocates for emergency birth control and rape victims. There is no need to kill a baby or to commit an atrocity on top of another atrocity.
Sorry, but I don't get the whole "except for rape or incest" thing. If the fetus is a human life worth protecting, the circumstances (as tragic as they may be) of it's conception are besides the point. Life is life, you either protect it or you don't.
And the constitutional generalities of 'equal protection' and 'due process' don't help
Equal protection is a very specific promise, that no human being will be put into a class of sub-humans. I believe it's inspired by the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Apply the same rule to other people that you apply to yourself.
What it does not allow -- what it strictly forbids -- is the callous and completely dishonest discussion of "person" in Supreme Court jurisprudence. Corporations are persons and babies are non-persons. What that says to me is that the people in power care more about money than they do about human beings.
If you don't know what a "person" is, resign your office, you embarrassment to humanity. A person is a live human being.
Once you acknowledge these babies are people -- and our Constitution requires this acknowledgment -- then you start trying to figure out how equality works. For instance, we have rules in place in regard to when people die. Do we apply those rules to the abortion controversy? No, because they are a sub-human class, like slaves.
We fought a Civil War to put those words in the Constitution. Yes, equal protection jurisprudence is a joke. But that certainly does not mean that the provision itself has no meaning or can't be read.
Just for clarity: "A heartbeat can be detected using a transvaginal ultrasound at about six to seven weeks of pregnancy, but may not be detectable until 12 weeks' gestation when a Doppler fetal monitor is used."
Exactly, have some agency. Wear a mask, bitch. Get the jab. If you don't, then your insurance is revoked and you are baned from all hospitals.
I don't like this law. I supported the 20 weeks time frame that was previous law. In the past, talk show host Dan Patrick talked about requiring Doctors show the infants development in the womb to the pregnant mother, so that she understood the condition prior to the abortion. But it seems Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick moved that goal post.
As for a political tactic; well there are a lot of laws passed that test various questions on freedoms. California was considering requiring evidence of medical history as a condition to buy groceries at a store. California has already passed a law banning efficient engines. Texas might as well test the other side of the spectrum. Maybe then people will come to respect the simplicity of the Bill of Rights, rather than calling it systemically racist.
What are the politics of women who get abortions? I am guessing this skews 9 to 1 Democrat, at least at the time an abortion is obtained. So, even if Roe is overturned (I doubt it happens), every blue state will keep abortion fully legal right up to the point of birth, and every purple state will keep it legal as first defined by Roe itself.
Deputizing the citizenry, what could possibly go wrong?
An analysis I've always wanted to see is if the budgets of pro-abortion organizations were used to send woman to states where abortion is legal (in a world in which the states are allowed their own abortion laws), is there enough money to provide an abortion for everyone who wants one?
Using the same doctrine that made abortion and gay marriage required throughout the nation, the supreme court could literally declare anything legal. The court may say, for example, that bestiality or incest must be made legal throughout the land. What principle would stop them from doing so?
This is why our fights over court nominations are so hideous - we know that we are appointing our lawgivers. Get the right set of judges and you can get the law you want. The mere legislators in Texas will learn soon enough that their efforts are worth little - temporary, and easily brushed aside.
"after the Supreme Court successfully chose not to act on a request to block it..."
Fixed it for them
Robert Cook
I thought "conservatives" claimed to be advocates of personal liberty.
Any intelligent person would clearly understand that personal liberty does not include the right to terminate a human life. For people who consider the unborn both alive and human, then they would no more think it justified to kill them as it would be justified for me to kill you. There is no logical inconsistency here. Try thinking a little harder.
Who would have standing to sue under this law?
Plaintiffs, who need not have any connection to the matter or show any injury from it,
Ah, it was right there. Still, how does this pass muster with what were until recently universal standing rules?
If / when conservatives perfect the craft of lawfare to the same extent as have proggies, the proggies are going to rue the day they started it!
Whaddaya know-- lawfare turns out to be every bit as ugly when we do it as it is when they do it.
Robert Cook said...
I thought "conservatives" claimed to be advocates of personal liberty.
"Personal liberty" != "Killing those who are inconvenient to you"
Just like "personal liberty" != "right to own slaves".
You Democrats really do get high on dehumanizing the Other, don't you.
AlbertAnonymous said...
Last night I saw a CNN segment on this topic. Obviously all the guests were flummoxed that SCOTUS hadn’t acted to issue a stay.
But one of the guests was Jeffrey Toobin.
Well, who would CNN more want on a show about abortion, than a guy who got in trouble for pressuring the daughter of a co-worker to get an abortion after he impregnated her?
After all, who has more "skin in the game" than him?
Chris Lopes said...
Sorry, but I don't get the whole "except for rape or incest" thing.
Babies born from incest are far more likely to be genetically defective. And the sex making them is illegal.
As for rape, the issue is one of consent.
"My body, my choice!" Yes, that's right. You chose to have sex, now you get to deal with the consequences of it. If you didn't want the consequences, you shouldn't have had sex. (We tell this to any man who gets a woman pregnant, and is then stuck with 18+ years of child support payments for a kid he never wanted)
She didn't choose to be raped, so she is entitled to chose whether or not she wants to become a mother
I know someone who recently had a miscarriage, a “missed miscarriage”. She was getting an ultrasound at 12 weeks and they discovered the baby had died at around 6-7 weeks. Her body continued to think she was pregnant, all the bloodwork said she was having a normal pregnancy. So it’s not clear how they can detect heart beats before 12 weeks.
Now I see this:
PM said...
Just for clarity: "A heartbeat can be detected using a transvaginal ultrasound at about six to seven weeks of pregnancy, but may not be detectable until 12 weeks' gestation when a Doppler fetal monitor is used."
and I’m wondering what the procedure will be to detect the heart beat.
It’s funny to hear so many conservatives screaming “my body my choice!” when it comes to getting a Covid Vaccine, they don’t want government telling them what to do with their health! lol, LOL
My favorite Partridge Family song by far.
I can hear your heartbeat
Watch Shirley Jones, she looks like she's riding a Sybian Machine.
On the point of “six weeks”: We start the count from the first day of the period, because that is more often observed than the day of ovulation or implantation. This method means that implantation might not take place for another 3.5 weeks *after* the day marked as day one of week one of the pregnancy. When we say a woman is 6 weeks pregnant, she is actually only 2.5 weeks post implantation.
I’m not saying you can’t object to abortion from conception or heartbeat. That’s a different discussion. What you shouldn’t say is that women should always well know they are pregnant before the “sixth week” of pregnancy.
I thought "conservatives" claimed to be advocates of personal liberty.
Nope, those are libertarians. Do try to keep up.
Got pregnant breastfeeding, you OVULATE before your period. My last period was two years prior. Stress also postpones ovulation, many late periods are due to delayed ovulation. No idea.
Thank God, my husband is as prolife as I am.
Can't imagine women being coerced/pressured into an abortion.
Greg The Class Traitor said...
She didn't choose to be raped, so she is entitled to chose whether or not she wants to become a mother.
Entitled, huh? If a prohibition on abortion is based on the desire to protect the life of an innocent child, I think the woman's desire not to become a mother is a subordinate concern. There are lots of things we don't choose, but that doesn't "entitle" us to go around killing innocent people.
Mary said...
It’s funny to hear so many conservatives screaming “my body my choice!” when it comes to getting a Covid Vaccine, they don’t want government telling them what to do with their health! lol, LOL
Are you really that stupid, Mary?
We're shouting "my body, my choice", to point out to hypocritical scumbag leftists that they're violating their own "principles" when they issue vaccine mandates.
Or is the problem here that you can't ever imagine that your words should be allowed to be used against you?
Um, Michelle, I'm only a man here, but I'm pretty sure that periods happen every four to five weeks.
Have you had unprotected sex since your last period?
Has it been over 5 weeks since your last period?
If you're pregnant, do you want to have an abortion?
If "yes" to all of the above, get an EPT. Make the guy you had sex with pay for it. (Note: Don't have unprotected sex with guys who you don't think you could get them to pay for your EPT)
If you can't handle the above, then you shouldn't be having sex at all. And we've got a far bigger problem here than your inability to get an abortion
Robert Cook said...
I thought "conservatives" claimed to be advocates of personal liberty. More evidence here of their actual hunger for the restriction of personal liberty to engage in behavior they don't like.
How about affording personal liberty to a 7 week fetus? Mother gets 6 weeks of personal liberty.
I keep thinking that efforts such as this will be rendered moot by the so-called "Plan C" abortion pills that are available by mail and claimed to be safe and effective in inducing abortions in women who are up to 11 weeks pregnant.
I can imagine this law, however, resulting in the online pharmacies refusing to ship to Texas.
"The law makes no exceptions for pregnancies resulting from incest or rape."
It allows abortions for rape or incest for up to six weeks so no exceptions are required. If a pregnant woman does not know whether she was a victim of rape or incest at the end of six weeks, she's not going to know at the end of nine months either.
In almost all of the rest of the Western world (Canada excepted) elective abortions are prohibited after the first trimester. Europeans in general consider American abortion laws to be barbaric, but abortion is not a religion over there like it is here.
Greg, you’re missing the factual point. The medical standard is to count a pregnancy from the start of the woman’s last period. This means that even a woman with a “regular” period cycle, which is not that common, could be one week “late,” which wouldn’t be so strange even if she’d weren’t having sex, and if she noticed she was one week late, she would be classified as six weeks pregnant or more at that one week period. How pregnant is she really? The clock starts ticking from our current way of calculating when she starts to bleed. Two to three weeks later she ovulates. Let’s say she conceived two days later. In the usual course of things, implantation takes place five to six days later. To many people, that is when pregnancy actually begins - weeks after we count her as pregnant and clearly at least two weeks before she could possibly be pregnant because she hasn’t ovulated for that cycle on the first day of her period.
Well the probable wailing and gnashing of teeth by Rachel Maddow aside, I have to ask, "At this point what difference does it make?"
A legislature--in this case the Texas legislature--sets an arbitrary cutoff point for elective abortions. So long as everybody knows what the cutoff point is--fetal heart beat, first trimester, second trimester--and I heard that in Obama's Illinois view the first or second day after delivery, what difference does the cutoff point make? As long as everybody--and particularly every pregnant woman (gee what about pregnant progressive men?) knows what "X date" is, then the woman can decide to have an abortion--or not--before X. After X date passes, no more abortions.
There are a lot of situations (frequently codified in law) where the important thing is not necessarily the substance of the rule--but the fact that the rule exists, people know about the rule, and people can shape their behavior to conform to the rule. It doesn't have to be perfect--but it does have to be certain.
Blogger Chuck said...
"Now, I’m a Republican..."
/eyeroll
"...I am interested in what moderate Republicans and swing voters throughout Texas will do with their votes in response to the Republicans who passed the bill."
I suggest you consider that the vast majority of Republicans don't think it's ok to take another person's life out of convenience. And also that any honest person who has rationally considered teh great penumbra realizes that a constitutional right to abortion is a reach. And finally, that many if not most Texas Republicans have realized that their political opponents act as if they believe that ends justify means, and therefore the Rs are ready to take Obama's advice to punch back twice as hard.
Newsflash Greg. It is not uncommon for women to have irregular periods. In my “fertile” years it was actually rare that I didn’t skip months. Might be once a month, every other or even every third month. Gynecologists told me it was quite normal. I’m not weighing in on the law, just correcting your assumptions on female biology.
I'm deleting all the comments accusing people in the comments of rape. I would appreciate it if you would avoid attacking each other, especially with factual allegation, even for rhetorical effect. Things evolve from there.
Re: Greg The Class Traitor
“Are you really that stupid, Mary?
We're shouting "my body, my choice", to point out to hypocritical scumbag leftists that they're violating their own "principles" when they issue vaccine mandates.
Or is the problem here that you can't ever imagine that your words should be allowed to be used against you?”
The difference is that when a woman makes a choice to have an abortion she does not put her family, friends, co-workers health at risk. The people that are refusing to get vaccinated are putting themselves and everyone around them at risk. 99% of people dying of Covid now are unvaccinated. But, that’s their choice. Who’s being stupid?
Mary said...
Re: Greg The Class Traitor
“Are you really that stupid, Mary?
We're shouting "my body, my choice", to point out to hypocritical scumbag leftists that they're violating their own "principles" when they issue vaccine mandates.
Or is the problem here that you can't ever imagine that your words should be allowed to be used against you?”
The difference is that when a woman makes a choice to have an abortion she does not put her family, friends, co-workers health at risk.
Instead, she murders her baby.
She destroys a body that is NOT hers.
As for Covid:
1: People who are vaccinated can pass on the disease
2: If you're vaccinated, then you life is pretty much not at risk from catching Covid
3: There's been over 40 million Covid cases in the US, and even with Cuomo and the other murderous Democrat Governors infecting LTCF's with Covid, there's been 660k deaths
Which is a death rate of 1.6%. the fact majority of which is in the over 70 crowd.
So no, they're not putting their "family, friends, co-workers health at risk" unless those people have also chosen not to be vaccinated.
But, more importantly, if we get to talk about the external costs of your choice, and take away "your choice" whenever there's an externality forced on another, you've just lost "your choice" of abortion."
Because cutting the birth rate puts schools out of business (fewer kids to teach), and makes Social Security insolvent (need lost os workers paying in for each retiree taking out).
So, either it's "my body, my choice", and you can STFU about other people's vaccine choice, or it's not "my body, my choice", and you can stop complaining about other people telling you what you cn and can't do with "your body".
Pick one, and stop being a lying hypocrite.
Before I got involved reading about other people's attitudes towards abortion and the law my thoughts on the Texas law went along the lines of why don't women take more control of their sex lives and knowing when they are ovulating? It's not an exact science, but certainly being aware of ones own body and deciding not to have sex around the time of ovulation would go a long way to preventing unwanted pregnancies.
Would men respect that or would men freak out at the prospect of women deciding when to have sex? IDK
Rosalyn C. said...
Would men respect that or would men freak out at the prospect of women deciding when to have sex? IDK
Any guy who freaks out at "let's not have unprotected sex for these 5 days, because I don't want to get pregnant" is probably not someone you want to be having sex with
Michelle said...
Greg, you’re missing the factual point.
No, Michelle, you are
The situation comes down to this:
1: Are you having unprotected sex despite not wanting to have a kid? Why?
2: If you are engaging in that risky behavior, you need to really watch your periods,
3: If your periods are more than a month apart, you're having unprotected sex, and you don't want to have a baby, do an EPT once a month, or 4 weeks after your last period, or whatever timing works for you.
4: You can get 6 EPTs at Walmart for $31. if you can't afford $5 a month for pregnancy tests, how can you possibly afford to pay for an abortion if you screw up and get pregnant?
To wrap up:
If you want to have unprotected sex, and don't want to have a baby, then invest in some EPTs, and use them every month
If you're not going to take any responsibility for yourself and your life, don't expect my sympathy, because you're not getting any
Thank you
Howard said...
Exactly, have some agency. Wear a mask, bitch. Get the jab. If you don't, then your insurance is revoked and you are baned from all hospitals.
Exactly, have some agency. Use a condom. Get the jab. If you don't, then your insurance is revoked and you are banned from all hospitals.
So, any gay man who gets AIDS / HIV is "baned" from all hospitals?
Every woman who gets an abortion, since she didn't demand that a condom was used?
Everyone overweight?
Howard, do you ever stop to think before you post?
I don't think anyone has suggested that the law itself turns on six weeks, instead of a registered heartbeat, but for those who care: The plausibility of a woman knowing she is pregnant by six weeks appears to matter to many people, and for understandable reasons. It may or not may not move any given person to understand that "six weeks pregnant" is really around two weeks pregnant, but I do not think we degrade the conversation by having more accurate factual information. (Of course, we can understand that if one objects to abortion at conception or implantation, this fact will not be relevant.)
To hopped-up Greg, you assume things about my life and policy positions that are inaccurate but, more important, irrelevant to the factual discussion.
@ Greg No birth control method is 100% effective except for abstinence. I’m somewhat surprised that is not common knowledge, I’m pretty sure educated women know that, guys might be less motivated to know the actual facts for obvious reasons. So my question remains unanswered. I guess your answer would be the same though.
@Rosalyn, @Michelle
"The plausibility of a woman knowing she is pregnant by six weeks appears to matter to many people, and for understandable reasons."
It's < $60 a years to get enough EPTs to do one every month. With a minot amount of thought, you can take the tests such that there's no chance you're be more than 2 weeks pregnant.
If you can't afford the EPTs, you can't afford the abortion.
"It may or not may not move any given person to understand that "six weeks pregnant" is really around two weeks pregnant, "
Um, no. 6 weeks after your period is 3 - 4 weeks after your ovulation, which means 3 - 4 weeks pregnant.
Even abstinence isn't 100% successful, see: rape.
So if it's a big deal to you, get those EPTs. Consider it part of your "safe sex" routine.
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