Abortion

What A Surprise: Texas Crusade To End Abortion Clinics Might Be Unconstitutional

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File this under: “another complete waste of time by Republican lawmakers.”

Texas recently passed a slew of draconian anti-abortion laws. You might have heard about them, people protested and stuff.

Some of the laws placed unreasonable burdens on women and abortion doctors, restrictions that were almost certainly going to be overturned by the courts.

Well today, a federal judge overturned some of those restrictions. Meaning that Texas has once again put us through a whole lot of BS for nothing…

The Washington Post has today’s ruling:

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel represents a legal victory for abortion rights providers, who had challenged new requirements that abortion doctors must have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of their clinic and that all abortions must take place in surgical centers, rather than allowing women to take abortion drugs at home.

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These restrictions were always a thin attempt by the Texas legislature to make abortions impossible to obtain in practice. In a state as huge as Texas, the 30 miles provision would have essentially closed most of the abortion clinics in the state.

That was always going to be a constitutional problem. And Judge Yeakel knocked it down today. He held that the anti-abortion statute: “does not bear a rational relationship to the legitimate right of the State in preserving and promoting fetal life or a woman’s health and, in any event, places a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus and is thus an undue burden to her.”

In terms of where women are allowed to take drugs prescribed by a doctor, Yeakel didn’t go as far:

On the question of whether women should be required to take both doses of medication to terminate a pregnancy under a doctor’s supervision, the judge issued a more limited injunction, ruling that while these provisions “do not generally place an undue burden on a woman seeking an abortion, they do if they ban a medication abortion where a physician determines, in appropriate medical judgment, such a procedure is necessary for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.”

Yeakel didn’t rule on Texas’s ban on abortions after 20 weeks.

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Supporters of the law have vowed to appeal. And that appeal would go first to the Fifth Circuit. And the Fifth Circuit interprets laws like God is watching, so who knows what they’ll do. But it shouldn’t surprise anybody that this thing got struck down on the first round. The Texas law is a pretty blatant attempt to stop abortions all together.

Federal judge blocks key parts of Tex. antiabortion law Monday [Washington Post]

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