Texas Supreme Court shuts down challenge to restrictive abortion law | Courthouse News Service

The United States Supreme Court, in Whole Women's Health on August 30, 2021  refused to enjoin enforcement of the Texas `fetal heart beat' law known as SB-8 which virtually outlaws elective abortions by setting a limit of six weeks post conception.  Then in October it granted certiorari before judgment.  It also agreed to hear a direct challenge to Texas  by the Biden administration  which had won a preliminary injunction against the Texas law by United States District Judge Robert Pitman.  The Supreme Court granted cert in that case, then dismissed the grant as "improvident" when it sharply narrowed the Whole Women's Health providers challenge.  The injunction was stayed by the Fifth Circuit so the case technically remains alive but it is a zombie. 

The cases' complex history is chronicled by the Center for Reproductive Rights.

On December 10 the Supreme Court allowed only one part of the suit by  Whole Women's Health to survive.  Only Texas medical disciplinary authorities remained as defendants.  They could, conceivably `enforce the law' by disciplining a physician who performed an abortion for a woman whose pregnancy was beyond the six week limit..

The United States Supreme Court a week later returned the case to the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit - not to the District Judge who had issued the preliminary injunction.  The Fifth Circuit did not refer the case back to Pitman.  Instead it referred the case to the all Republican Texas Supreme Court for its advice on whether Texas law permitted such a licensing action to be taken.   Sonia Sotomayor wrote a scathing dissent from the Supreme Court's refusal to grant an emergency order staying the referral to the Texas high court.

Today that court answered - the statute forbids any state officer from enforcing the ban.  The state Supreme Court has now held that such disciplinary action is barred by the law.  Texas medical providers are thus left to hazard the onerous burden of defending an unlimited number of private punitive enforcement actions for which they may be compelled to pay in each case a minimum of $10,000 plus attorneys fees under SB8.

- GWC

Texas Supreme Court shuts down challenge to restrictive abortion law   | Courthouse News Service

Texas Supreme Court shuts down challenge to restrictive abortion law  

The federal case against Texas’ near-total abortion ban met its end Friday when the state’s high court, answering a question from the Fifth Circuit, held that licensing officials cannot enforce the law and therefore cannot be sued.

AUSTIN, Texas (CN) — The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday that medical licensing officials cannot enforce the state’s six-week ban on abortions, ending a federal challenge to the controversial law.

After the U.S. Supreme Court allowed abortion providers' case against licensing officials to continue and remanded the case back to the Fifth Circuit, the New Orleans-based appeals court asked the all-Republican Texas high court if the licensing officials can enforce the state’s near-total abortion ban.

In answering no, the federal case comes to an end since licensing officials were the last remaining defendants in the suit.

“Senate Bill 8 provides that its requirements may be enforced by a private civil action, that no state official may bring or participate as a party in any such action, that such action is the exclusive means to enforce the requirements, and that these restrictions apply notwithstanding any other law," Justice Jeffrey Boyd wrote in the court's 23-page opinion.

He added, "Based on these provisions, we conclude that Texas law does not grant the state-agency executives named as defendants in this case any authority to enforce the Act’s requirements, either directly or indirectly.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, took to Twitter to applaud Friday’s ruling.

“Today I secured a major victory in the Texas Supreme Court,” he wrote. “This measure, which has saved thousands of unborn babies, remains fully in effect and the pro-abortion plaintiffs’ lawsuit against the state is essentially finished.”

The Center for Reproductive Rights acknowledged the end to the lawsuit it helped bring. 

“Today’s ruling will result in dismissal of the remaining portion of the challenge to the six-week ban, meaning SB 8 will likely remain in effect for the foreseeable future,” the group said.

Nancy Northup, the group’s president and CEO, said in a statement that the ban has gone unchecked by the courts.