Texas’s hardline abortion restrictions upheld by federal court
Appeals court rules Texas law governing where and how women may obtain an abortion ‘does not impose an undue burden’
THE GUARDIAN (UK) / ASSOCIATED PRESS IN AUSTIN
A federal appeals court on Thursday upheld tough new abortion restrictions in Texas that forced the closure of many of the state’s abortions clinics.
WITH SELECT COMMENTS
A panel of judges at the New Orleans-based 5th circuit court of appeals overturned a lower court judge who said the rules violate the US constitution and served no medical purpose. In its opinion, the appeals court said the law “on its face does not impose an undue burden on the life and health of a woman”.
Texas lawmakers last year passed some of the toughest restrictions in the US on when, where and how women may obtain an abortion. The Republican-controlled legislature required abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and placed strict limits on doctors prescribing abortion-inducing pills.
Most Republican leaders in Texas oppose abortion, except in cases where the life of the mother is at risk. In passing the new rules, they argued they were protecting the health of the woman.
But abortion-rights supporters called the measures an attempt to stop abortions in Texas through overregulation. Many abortion doctors do not have admitting privileges and limiting when and where they may prescribe abortion-inducing pills discourages women from choosing that option, they say.
Other aspects of the new abortion laws, including a requirement that all procedures take place in a surgical facility, do not take effect until September.
US district judge Lee Yeakel ruled in October that the provisions place an unconstitutional burden on women’s access to abortion.
Three days after Yeakel’s ruling, the 5th circuit allowed Texas to enforce the law while the state appealed the decision. At least a dozen Texas abortion clinics closed after the law took effect.
COMMENTS
27 March 2014 10:48pm
No surprise here: another overwhelmingly right-wing appellate court engages in a predictable act of judicial activism. From the perspective of the 5th Circuit Court, of course the Texas restrictions do not impose an undue burden on women–certainly not on any of the women the judges know. Wealthy right-wing women who want abortions will not be inconvenienced by the Texas laws any more than they have been by any abortion restrictions anywhere in the history of the ‘pro-life’ circus.
Roughly 50% of the federal judiciary as it is now constituted has been drawn from the ultra-reactionaryFederalist Society (or judges similarly disposed to rightist extremism); court-packing has been Job One for the right’s visionaries since the rise of Reaganism, and over the last three decades they’ve done quite a job of it.
The Federalist Society is of course the uptown version of the John Birch Society–it’s the Birch Society with a posh mahogany gloss and tasteful black robes. By design, it has gone about the business of transforming the American judiciary into something pro-corporate, anti-worker, anti-reform, hostile to racial accommodation, anti-women’s rights–part of the right’s overall political strategy to roll back a century of progress (and see to it that it stays rolled back).
val traina