A federal judge has temporarily stopped Texas officials from enforcing a ban on the most common second-trimester abortion procedure, just one day before the ban was set to go into effect.
Judge Lee Yeakel of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas granted a temporary restraining order Thursday, delaying enforcement of the ban until Sept. 14. It was originally set to go into effect Sept. 1.
Senate Bill 8, which passed during the 2017 regular legislative session, banned dilation and evacuation abortions — where doctors use surgical instruments to grasp and remove pieces of fetal tissue — unless the fetus is deceased.
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“The provisions of SB 8 that we’re challenging criminalize a safe and common method of abortion,” said Molly Duane, staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Politicians in Texas are trying to punish doctors who are using their best medical judgment.”
In court Tuesday, [Darren McCarty, an attorney for the state] questioned the timing of the lawsuit’s filing, and argued it was a strategy to force the court to “rubber stamp” emergency relief days before the ban was slated to go into effect. Yeakel, agreeing, said he could see no reason why the suit couldn’t have been filed as soon as the governor signed the bill into law, and said its timing was a “real imposition” and put “maximum pressure” on the court to act at the last minute.
Yeakel also asked repeatedly what evidence legislators had considered before passing the law, and how Texas’ provision differs from similar bans that have been contested in other states. Laws like SB 8’s dilation and evacuation ban have been opposed or halted in Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, according to a press release from the center. In court Tuesday, neither side pointed to substantive differences between Texas’ law and these others.
Duane said the new law is part of a “coordinated strategy by the state of Texas and by states around the country to ban abortion method by method, one restriction at a time, until it’s practically unavailable for women.”
See here and here for the background. No question, that is the strategy, and it has been a successful one. There will be another hearing on September 14 to either extend the ban, make it permanent pending appeal, or lift it. But as Judge Yeakel acknowledged, this is all just the first aria in a Wagner-length opera:
But this is the first battle in what is likely to be a long legal war. Yeakel wearily acknowledged as much on Tuesday, during a hearing on the temporary halt to the law. He called his court a “whistle stop on the train on the way to New Orleans, then on to Washington” for anti-abortion lawsuits, referring to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court.
There is a “constant never-ending stream of these cases and I think it will continue,” said a frustrated Yeakel about the new law, which would have gone into effect Friday. “It seems like the Legislature just jumps out and produces statutes, they’re signed by the governor, and then we start over here.”
Say it with me now: Nothing will change until the people we elect change. What are you doing to make 2018 different? The Current has more.