Two of them at least have the potential to be positive. That’s good, right?
Texas court clears path for Planned Parenthood lawsuit challenging state abortion law
A Texas appeals court has allowed three Texas Planned Parenthood affiliates to move forward with a lawsuit challenging the state’s “heartbeat” abortion law, rejecting an effort by Texas Right to Life to shut the case down.
The Third Court of Appeals on Friday said Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers have the right to sue over the Texas Heartbeat Act, the 2021 law that bans abortions after cardiac activity is detected and is enforced not by the state, but by private citizens through civil lawsuits.
Judges said the providers face a credible and ongoing threat of enforcement that has already chilled their work, even as they comply with the law. The court found the groups “established an imminent threat of injury traceable to the threatened conduct of Texas Right to Life,” pointing to its efforts to encourage private citizens to file lawsuits and submit tips about suspected violations.
“Stating ‘we won’t sue you as long as you obey the law’ is still a threat of litigation,” the Friday court filing read. Planned Parenthood didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Texas Right to Life could appeal to the Texas Supreme Court. The group didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
The lawsuit was filed shortly before the law took effect in September 2021. At the time, a judge granted a restraining order blocking Texas Right to Life from suing the clinics under the new statute. Providers argued the law’s private enforcement system exposed them and their supporters to unlimited lawsuits and effectively shut down reproductive care through fear of legal retaliation.
See here for some background. I’d forgotten this was a thing, it was so long ago and as noted there are so many other issues to deal with following the Dobbs debacle. SCOTx may yet block the suit, and even if they eventually rule that it can go forward, that 2021 ruling will surely stay blocked as the case is fully litigated. You’ve seen how long it has taken to get to this point. It’s not crazy to think that if Dems have trifecta control again in 2029 they will actually pass a new national law overturning Dobbs and affirming a right to abortion, which would render all of this moot. Which is a great outcome, to be sure, just one that took an awfully long time to happen. And if the national law doesn’t happen then and this lawsuit eventually succeeds, there will still be other state laws in place to ban abortion. It’s just that the bounty hunter part of it will have been knocked down. Which would still be something.
Speaking of which…
Texas Supreme Court hears arguments in case tied to state’s bounty hunter abortion law
The Texas Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in Sadie Weldon v. The Lilith Fund, a case that pertains to Senate Bill 8, the 2021 law that banned abortions after around six weeks.
The landscape of abortion law has changed since SB 8 — also called the Texas Heartbeat Act — passed, with Texas enacting more comprehensive abortion bans after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. But SB 8’s novel “bounty hunter” provision, which allows private citizens to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion after cardiac activity is detected in a fetus, has continued to drive legal questions.
The Texas Supreme court’s decision in Sadie Weldon v. The Lilith Fund would not decide the constitutionality of SB 8, though challenges to the law still persist. It could, however, impact whether a challenge to the law has a path forward.
The case has wound through the courts since 2022, when Weldon, a private Texas citizen, sought to depose Neesha Davé, the deputy director of the Lilith Fund, a nonprofit that provides support to people seeking abortions. In a sworn affidavit for a separate legal proceeding, Davé acknowledged that the Lilith Fund had helped at least one Texas woman pursue an abortion, a potential violation of SB 8. Weldon filed a Rule 202 petition to try to glean more information about the potential violation without officially filing a lawsuit.
“We wanted to find out exactly who was involved, the extent of the violation and what else we could investigate,” said Jonathan Mitchell, Weldon’s attorney, in arguments presented Wednesday. Mitchell, who was a key figure in the drafting of SB 8, has represented a number of clients filing Rule 202 petitions pertaining to suspected abortion law violations.
However, the Lilith Fund countersued Weldon, asking a judge to both declare SB 8 unconstitutional and prevent Weldon from suing the organization under the statute. Weldon asked the courts to dismiss that countersuit, invoking the Texas Citizens Participation Act — a law intended to prevent retaliatory suits aimed at silencing “matters of public concern.” A Jack County court and the Second Court of Appeals ruled that the TCPA does not apply to declaratory judgment claims of this nature.
Now, the Texas Supreme Court must decide whether to uphold those rulings. If the high court rules against Weldon, it could result in the case being sent back to a lower court to decide the merits of the Lilith Fund’s request for SB 8 to be declared unconstitutional.
The Jack County district judge also denied Weldon’s 202 petition, and Weldon chose not to pursue the petition further — meaning it’s only the Lilith Fund’s countersuit and Weldon’s motion to dismiss it that remain active.
See here and here for some background, and here for a copy of the Second Court of Appeals’ ruling, which is technical and wonky but largely boils down to saying no, the Lilith Fund did not file this action “based on or in response to Weldon’s exercise of the rights of free speech, to petition, or of association”. Again, if the good guys win here then there will be another lawsuit back in the pipeline to overturn SB8, the vigilante bounty hunter law. Which, it occurs to me, if it succeeds might weaken or even kill the underpinnings of multiple other bounty hunter-style laws that the Lege has passed since then. That’s far from a guarantee, in the still seemingly unlikely event of success in the lawsuit itself, as the ruling would have to be at least somewhat broad for that to happen. But it’s in play, and that would be a good thing in so many ways. Tune in again in a few years and we’ll see where it’s at. Slate and The Center Square have more.
I hate to end on a buzz kill, but here we are: Louisiana Seeks to Extradite California Abortion Provider. Take some calming breaths before you read on.
In September, Abortion, Every Day broke the news that Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill had signed an arrest warrant for California abortion provider Dr. Remy Coeytaux, accusing him of illegally mailing abortion pills into the state. Today, the Republican AG ramped up her efforts—making a splashy social media announcement that she’s signed an extradition request for Coeytaux.
“This is not healthcare; it’s drug dealing,” she said. Coeytaux is charged with violating a Louisiana statute banning “criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs,” and faces up to 50 years of hard labor.
Coeytaux is the second abortion provider Louisiana has targeted with criminal charges and extradition. In January 2025, a grand jury indicted New York provider Dr. Maggie Carpenter on felony abortion charges, with Murrill signing an extradition order a few weeks later:
At the time, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said “there’s no way in hell” she would extradite Carpenter. We’re awaiting comment from California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office on Louisiana’s extradition request; but like New York, California has shield laws that protect abortion providers from out-of-state prosecution and extradition.
Last year, attorney Alejandra Caraballo, co-author of the 2023 CUNY law review article Extradition in Post-Roe America, told me that abortion-related extradition requests take us into uncharted territory—and could wind up at the Supreme Court:
“We haven’t really seen this kind of disparity in state laws around human rights since the Civil War, where, what constitutes a human right in one state, constitutes a capital crime in another. The federal Constitution is not set up to manage that. The last time we had this kind of disparity led to the full breakdown of calamity of the states, to the Civil War.”
There’s been a race among conservative attorneys general to get shield laws in front of SCOTUS, so this is exactly what Murrill wants. That’s why she isn’t just targeting providers: in a video posted on X today, Murrill promised that her office would “pursue actions against those states that are shielding those doctors and are illegally trying to nullify our laws.”
The timing of all of this couldn’t be better for Murrill, who’s set to testify before the Senate on Wednesday about the supposed danger of abortion pills and telehealth access.
See here and here for some background, and remember that Texas is also a player in this game, though so far only on the civil side. We could do better in the rhetoric department in pushing back against deranged sociopaths like Liz Murrill, but that’s a conversation for another day. That 2029 Dem trifecta I talked about above? It would help a lot here, too.