Texas’ ban on nearly all abortions in the state will remain in effect as the U. S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 late Wednesday in favor of the state, declining to block the law as abortion advocacy groups had asked the court to do and leaving in place the U. S.’s most significant restrictions on abortion since Roe v. Wade, though the court did not rule out the possibility it could be overturned in the future.“In reaching this conclusion, we stress that we do not purport to resolve definitively any jurisdictional or substantive claim in the applicants’ lawsuit. In particular, this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law,” the justices in the majority wrote in their opinion, which was unsigned. Sotomayor slammed the majority’s opinion as “stunning” in her dissent and criticized the justices for “silently acquiesc[ing]” in Texas’ “enactment of a law that flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents.” “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 wrote in her dissent, which Kagan and Breyer joined. “Because the Court’s failure to act rewards tactics designed to avoid judicial review and inflicts significant harm on the applicants and on women seeking abortions in Texas, I dissent.”The Texas law, known as Senate Bill 8 (SB 8), bans all abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected—typically around six weeks into a pregnancy—which is before most people realize they’re pregnant and is expected to affect approximately 85% of abortions in the state. Unlike other state abortion bans which are typically swiftly struck down in court, the law attempts to evade judicial scrutiny by empowering private citizens and not government officials to enforce the law—a tactic that helped it survive the Supreme Court’s ruling. SB 8 allows citizens to bring lawsuits against anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion and receive at least $10,000 in damages if they’re successful. Texas abortion providers told reporters Wednesday they’re remaining open for abortions before fetal heartbeats are detected in compliance with the law, but said in their lawsuit the rise of “vigilante” legal challenges could potentially bankrupt providers by forcing them to spend money and resources defending themselves against the flood of litigation. The law is also expected to significantly restrict abortion access in Texas and potentially drive some to seek abortions without medical supervision, with the pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute finding Texans seeking abortions will now have to travel an average of 248 miles one way to obtain one, 20 times as far as before SB 8 took effect. The Supreme Court’s ruling on SB 8 comes before the high court is already scheduled to issue a major abortion ruling next term.


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