Texas law limiting abortion comes to Supreme Court

The Supreme Court of the United States, firmly anchored in conservatism, meets Monday to consider a law that for two months has drastically limited the right of Texans to abort and has sparked a fierce legal and political battle.

The influential court will hear, from 10:00 a.m. (4:00 p.m. GMT), two separate appeals against this law which prohibits abortion as soon as the embryo’s heartbeat is perceptible, i.e. around six weeks of pregnancy, even in the event of an abortion. ‘incest or rape.

This threshold is particularly short, since it corresponds to a period delay of about two weeks, so that many women are not aware of being pregnant.

It comes much earlier than the limit set by the Supreme Court itself. After recognizing in 1973 the right of women to abort, the High Court clarified in 1992 that it applied as long as the fetus is not viable outside the womb, or around 22 weeks of pregnancy.

These historic judgments, although having authority over the whole country, still do not pass with part of the population – especially on the right and in religious circles.

To satisfy their voters, local Republican officials therefore regularly adopt laws which openly flout the jurisprudence of the High Court. But so far, the courts have always prevented their implementation.

– “Denunciation” –

Texas, a real laboratory of the most conservative ideas, has however devised a new device that complicates the intervention of the federal justice.

Its law indeed entrusts citizens “exclusively” with the task of enforcing this prohibition, by encouraging them to take civil action against people and organizations which help women to have an abortion beyond six weeks.

In the event of victory before the judge, these citizens will obtain 10,000 dollars in compensation, the law provides. Its detractors see it as a “bonus for denouncing”.

“Perfect strangers will now be able to interfere in the most intimate and personal health decisions that women have to face,” regretted Democratic President Joe Biden on September 2, the day after the law came into force.

Seized urgently for the first time during this deadline, the Supreme Court had refused to intervene, sheltering behind the “new questions of procedure” posed by the text.

Since then, the battle has intensified with the intervention of the federal government and conflicting rulings from a trial judge and a court of appeal.

On October 22, the Supreme Court finally decided to jump into the fray and act quickly: it planned a hearing ten days later, a speed that it had not shown since its intervention to award the contested presidential election. from 2000 to George W. Bush.

– Improbable ally –

On Monday, the Nine Wise Men will hear the arguments of the parties. They should not address the right to abortion but only the legal mechanism created by Texas.

So that it does not lose sight of the enormous human stakes of the case, the powerful organization of Family Planning sent them a compilation of testimonies collected in its Texan clinics.

She quotes in particular a 12-year-old pregnant girl, whose mother cannot afford to travel outside the State, who lets go during the consultation: “Mom, it was an accident, why do they want me to keep?”

The Supreme Court could render its decision fairly quickly.

Even if the conservative magistrates are in the majority (six out of nine, including three appointed by Donald Trump), defenders of the right to abortion display cautious optimism because the Texan mechanism arouses criticism even on the right.

They have indeed received the support of unlikely allies: in an argument sent to the Court, the Firearms Policy Coalition, which defends the right to carry weapons, stressed that the mechanism chosen by Texas could be adopted in other states to attack other rights.

Whatever the outcome of this battle, the war will not be over: the Supreme Court is due to examine on December 1 a Mississippi law which prohibits abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. For observers, it could take advantage of this more classic text to begin to unravel its jurisprudence, by returning at least to the criterion of “viability of the fetus”.

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