On Thursday, the Biden administration announced that it would be suing the state of Texas over its bill that bans abortion after cardiac activity can be detected in the child – just a week after the Supreme Court rejected a similar lawsuit against the bill.
“The case sets up a federal-state clash over the future of abortion rights, and a test of whether the department can upend a state law that Texas lawmakers drafted in a manner that makes it difficult for abortion-rights advocates to challenge the ban in court,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “The Biden administration has faced pressure from Democrats and abortion-rights groups to take action to stop the Texas restrictions after the Supreme Court last week allowed them to take effect.”
“[The Texas Heartbeat Act] is clearly unconstitutional under long-standing Supreme Court precedent,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a press conference. “Those precedents hold in the words of Planned Parenthood versus Casey, that quote, regardless of whether exceptions are made for particular circumstances, a state may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability.”
The Texas law, which bans abortions when cardiac activity can be detected from a baby, went into effect last week after the Supreme Court ruled: “it is unclear whether the named defendants in this lawsuit can or will seek to enforce the Texas law…in a manner that might permit [judicial] intervention.”
“In a one-paragraph, unsigned order issued just before midnight on Wednesday, the court acknowledged that the providers had ‘raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law,’” SCOTUSblog wrote. “But that was not enough to stop the law from going into effect, the court explained, because of the way the law operates. Specifically, the court observed, it wasn’t clear whether the state officials – a judge and court clerk – and the anti-abortion activist whom the abortion providers had named as defendants ‘can or will seek to enforce the Texas law’ against the providers in a way that would allow the court to get involved in the dispute at this stage.”
