The government of Democratic President Joe Biden has formally asked (Oct. 18) the United States Supreme Court to block an extremely restrictive abortion law in Texas. This law is at the heart of a fierce legal battle. It prohibits abortion as soon as the embryo’s heartbeat is detectable, ie around six weeks of pregnancy, when most women are still unaware of being pregnant. It does not provide for an exception in the event of incest or rape. Maintaining it would “perpetuate the irreparable harm currently done to thousands of women in Texas who are denied their constitutional rights,” Acting United States Attorney General Brian Fletcher wrote in his argument. The latter heads the legal representation of the American state. The jurisprudence of the Supreme Court guarantees the right of women to have an abortion as long as the fetus is not viable, that is to say around 22 weeks of pregnancy. But the text of Texas has a unique device: it entrusts “exclusively” to citizens the care of enforcing the measure by encouraging them to file a complaint against organizations or people who help women to abort “illegally”. The Supreme Court, where the conservative judges are in the majority, had already been seized for the first time and had invoked these “new questions of procedure” to refuse, on September 1, to block the entry into force of the law. She had not commented on the merits, recalls AFP. The federal government then entered the legal arena, filing a lawsuit against Texas on its behalf. Seized, the high court that is the Supreme Court could act in the coming days or weeks. According to Joe Biden’s government, the Texas law is “clearly unconstitutional” because it runs counter to the iconic Roe V. Wade judgment of 1973. In recent years, laws comparable to that of Texas have been passed. by a dozen other conservative states and invalidated in court because they violated this jurisprudence. When the High Court left Texan law in effect last September, following an appeal then brought by defenders of the right to abortion, President Joe Biden had blasted the decision with very strong words, calling it a ‘an “insult to the rule of law” causing “chaos”. Texas is the second most populous state in the country.
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