Reality weighs in as a Texas judge does the logical thing in protecting abortion workers from the vigilantism of RWNJs. Lyft and Uber also weigh in to protect their workers. More lawfare ahead.
A Texas state judge has stopped the anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life and its associates from suing workers at Planned Parenthood clinics under the pretext ofthe state’s stringent new anti-abortion law, also known asSenateBill 8 (S.B. 8).
“The Court finds that S.B. 8 creates a probable, irreparable, and imminent injury in the interim for which plaintiffs and their physicians, staff and patients throughout Texas have no adequate remedy at law if plaintiffs, their physicians, and staff are subjected to private enforcement lawsuits against them under S.B. 8,” Judge Maya Guerra Gamble wrote in her Friday decision.
Her ruling only involves the parties involved in the suit and doesn’t block the new law from otherwise being in effect,The Hillreported.
Anti-abortion bounty hunters began calling Amy Hagstrom Miller’s chain of four independent abortion clinics in Texas just hours afterthe supreme court issued a two-paragraph orderthat effectively ended access to 85% of abortion services in the state.
Their apparent hope is to make an appointment for an illegal abortion, catch out the clinic and sue for a $10,000 reward, the bountyTexaslawmakers have placed on the heads of anyone – from cab drivers to clergy – who dare aid a woman in obtaining an abortion past six weeks gestation, before most know they are pregnant.
For clinic workers, as well as so many other people, a climate of fear has now descended on Texas. “The staff are directly experiencing people’s anguish and fear and anger about the law that’s coming from all the patients,” said Hagstrom Miller, founder and CEO of Whole Woman’sHealth. “It’s been really, really rough.”
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Most immediately, what will happen to pregnant people seeking abortions in Texas? Most will now simply be unable to travel out of state for abortions, and these people will disproportionately be the poor, people of color and the young. Illegal abortion does not, after all, end abortion. It only ends safe, legal abortion.
What will happen to the abortion clinics of Texas? The longer the law stands, the more will shutter, eroding rights permanently no matter what twists and turns the legal and political fight now takes. How many states will move to follow Texas’s lead? Many, perhaps half of US states. Lawmakers in Florida have already signaled their intent to do so.
Republican fascist criminals don’t care about abortion. They do care about winning the votes of religious extremists so they can keep looting the country.
BREAKING NEWS: The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing examining the Texas abortion ban and the Supreme Court’s abuse of its “shadow-docket.”
As Justice Kagan wrote in her dissent, “the majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this Court’s shadow docket decision-making—which every day becomes more un-reasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend.”
For years we were told it’s hysterical to think a woman’s right to choose might be overturned, that voting might be endangered, that the GOP would embrace violence and intimidation.
This is useful to know. It’s also useful to keep in mind that anti-abortion people don’t actually care either. “Fetal heartbeat” isn’t a morally important milestone, it’s a cheap bit of branding from people who want to criminalize abortion in all cases. https://t.co/WgKhuFrX5l
