The Supreme Court dealt yet another blow to abortion rights activists on Thursday when it declined to expeditiously send a legal challenge on Texas’ near-total ban on the procedure to a trial judge. Consequently, the challenge will remain on the docket of the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, where it has floundered for months.
No reason was given for the ruling.
When the Supreme Court declined – for now, at least – to strike down Texas’ abortion ban last month, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the New Orleans Court should resolve pending litigation related to the challenge “without delay.”
In a dissent to Thursday’s ruling, Justice Stephen Breyer said the New Orleans court ignored that instruction. “As a result,” Breyer wrote, “an unconstitutional 6-week abortion ban remains in effect in Texas — as it has for over four months.”
Justices Elena Kagen and Sonia Sotomayor also penned dissents.
Sotomayor’s was particularly scathing. She called the ruling “a disaster for the rule of law and a grave disservice to women in Texas.”
“I will not stand by silently as a State continues to nullify this constitutional guarantee,” she wrote.
“It has been over four months since Texas Senate Bill 8 took effect. The law immediately devastated access to abortion care in Texas through a complicated private bounty-hunter scheme that violates nearly 50 years of this court’s precedents.”
“Today, for the fourth time, this court declines to protect pregnant Texans from egregious violations of their constitutional rights,” Sotomayor argued, adding “Instead of stopping a Fifth Circuit panel from indulging Texas’ newest delay tactics, the court allows the state yet again to extend the deprivation of the federal constitutional rights of its citizens through procedural manipulation.”
Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement, “By enabling the state’s obvious ploy to delay any resolution to this case, this Court is complicit in the widespread harm to Texans who remain unable to make meaningful decisions about their own bodies.”