USA – The anti-abortion movement’s next radical legal argument

If a law is blocked by a court, is it possible to break it?

By Rachel M. Cohen
Mar 20, 2023

Until very recently, nearly everyone accepted some basic ideas about the American legal system. If a state passes a law, and that law is challenged in court, we should act as if that law is still in effect while the case works its way through the court system. That changes only if a judge issues a “preliminary injunction” blocking the law while the lawsuit plays out or a “permanent injunction” to strike the law down. In that case, we all act as if the law is not in effect.

But in recent years, an aggressive wing of the anti-abortion movement has been working to challenge this broadly held idea of legality — a push that has attracted little notice, but is further complicating the debate over abortion access.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/policy/2023/3/20/23641072/walgrens-abortion-pregnancy-jonathan-mitchell-sb8

Are Texas’s abortion laws being used for state-sponsored spousal harassment?

A Texas man is suing his ex-wife’s friends for helping her get an abortion – whether he wins or not, the lawsuit is sending a terrifying message to women
18 Mar 2023
Arwa Mahdawi

Meet Jonathan Mitchell. The former solicitor general of Texas is not a household name but you’ll be familiar with his work. He’s the architect of the dystopian Texas law that lets private citizens act as vigilantes and sue abortion providers or anyone who “aids or abets” the procedure. As the New York Times noted in a 2021 profile of Mitchell, he’s devoted much of the past decade to “honing a largely below-the-radar strategy of writing laws deliberately devised to make it much more difficult for the judicial system – particularly the supreme court – to thwart them.” In other words: he’s brilliant at finding sneaky ways to inflict his beliefs on everyone else. And he appears to have made it his life’s work to weaponize the law to terrorize and control women.

Mitchell’s latest project is representing a Texas man called Marcus Silva who is currently suing his ex-wife’s friends for helping her get an abortion. Silva is demanding more than $1m in damages from each of the two friends his ex-wife talked and texted with when she planned her abortion as well as the woman who provided abortion pills. He’s also planning to sue the manufacturer of the abortion pills.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/18/are-texass-abortion-laws-being-used-for-state-sponsored-spousal-harassment

18.03.2023

anti-choice abuse

anti-choice cruelty

anti-choice harassment

anti-choice hatred

anti-choice misogyny

anti-choice terrorism

Three Texas women are sued for wrongful death after allegedly helping friend obtain abortion medication

In the first lawsuit of its kind since Roe v. Wade was overturned, a husband seeks damages from women who allegedly helped his ex-wife obtain the medications to terminate her pregnancy.

BY ELEANOR KLIBANOFF
MARCH 10, 2023

A Texas man is suing three women under the wrongful death statute, alleging that they assisted his ex-wife in terminating her pregnancy, the first such case brought since the state’s near-total ban on abortion last summer.

Marcus Silva is represented by Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general and architect of the state’s prohibition on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, and state Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park. The lawsuit is filed in state court in Galveston County, where Silva lives.

Continued: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/10/texas-abortion-lawsuit/

10.03.2023

News

Aid Access

Briscoe Cain

Charles “Rocky” Rhodes

self-managed abortion

Abortion opponents pushing for more restrictions, laws across U.S.

By Amy Forliti and Geoff Mulvihill, The Associated Press
Posted July 30, 2022

Now that Roe v. Wade has been toppled, abortion opponents are taking a multifaceted approach in their quest to end abortions nationwide, targeting their strategies to the dynamics of each state as they attempt to create new laws and defend bans in courts.

One anti-abortion group has proposed model legislation that would ban all abortions except to prevent the death of a pregnant woman. New legal frontiers could include prosecuting doctors who defy bans, and skirmishes over access to medication abortions already are underway. Others hope to get more conservatives elected in November to advance an anti-abortion agenda.

|Continued: https://globalnews.ca/news/9027063/u-s-abortion-opponents-more-restrictions/

30.07.2022

Alliance Defending Freedom

model anti-choice bills

National Right to Life

Roe v. Wade

A 49-year crusade: Inside the movement to overturn Roe v. Wade

Antiabortion activists and their Republican allies are on the cusp of reaching a goal they have sought for decades in tossing out the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion.

By Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey, Caroline Kitchener and Rachel Roubein, Washington Post
May 7, 2022

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell still remembers the shock he felt when Donald Trump won the 2016 election. He also recalls what happened next.

“The first thing that came to my mind was the Supreme Court,” McConnell said in an interview this past week, remembering his reaction that night as he watched results from a basement office at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He soon called Donald McGahn, campaign counsel to the president-elect, who was slated to become the top White House lawyer.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/07/abortion-movement-roe-wade/

Anti-abortion lawyers target those funding the procedure for potential lawsuits under new Texas law

Attorneys who helped design Texas’ novel abortion ban have asked a judge to allow them to depose the leaders of two abortion funds, seeking information about anyone who may have “aided or abetted” in a prohibited procedure.

BY ELEANOR KLIBANOFF
FEB. 23, 2022

For nearly six months, as Texas’ novel abortion law has wended its way through the courts, abortion providers and opponents have been locked in a stalemate.

The law, known as Senate Bill 8, empowers private citizens to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. With one exception as soon as the law went into effect, abortion providers in Texas have stopped performing these prohibited procedures — so opponents haven’t tried to bring one of these enforcement suits.

Continued: https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/23/texas-abortion-sb8-lawsuits/

If Roe falls, some fear ripple effect on civil rights cases

If the Supreme Court decides to overturn or gut the decision that legalized abortion, some fear that it could undermine other precedent-setting cases, including civil rights and LGBTQ protections

By LINDSAY WHITEHURST, Associated Press
7 December 2021

If the Supreme Court decides to overturn or gut the decision that legalized abortion, some fear that it could undermine other precedent-setting cases, including civil rights and LGBTQ protections.

Overturning Roe v. Wade would have a bigger effect than most cases because it was reaffirmed by a second decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, three decades later, legal scholars and advocates said. The Supreme Court's conservative majority signaled in arguments last week they would allow states to ban abortion much earlier in pregnancy and may even overturn the nationwide right that has existed for nearly 50 years. A decision is expected next summer.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/roe-falls-fear-ripple-effect-civil-rights-cases-81604652

Justice Department asks Supreme Court to block Texas’ 6-week abortion ban

By Ariane de Vogue, CNN Supreme Court Reporter
Mon October 18, 2021

(CNN)The Justice Department formally asked the Supreme Court Monday to step in and block a controversial Texas law that bars most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy while legal challenges play out.

The law is "clearly unconstitutional" and allowing it to remain in effect would "perpetuate the ongoing irreparable injury to thousands of Texas women who are being denied their constitutional rights," the Justice Department argues.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/18/politics/supreme-court-abortion-appeal/index.html

Two disbarred lawyers sued a Texas doctor who performed an abortion. Flustered ‘pro-lifers’ are backpedaling

Anti-choice groups are embarrassed that their draconian law is being enforced the way it was designed

Sun 26 Sep 2021

Dr Alan Braid, an OBGYN based in San Antonio, broke the law on purpose. In an essay published in the Washington Post last Saturday, the doctor announced that he performed an abortion on a woman who was past six weeks of gestation, the limit imposed by Texas’s new abortion ban, SB8. The doctor wrote that he felt morally obliged to perform the procedure, his worldview shaped by his years in obstetric practice having conversations with patients who revealed that they were terminating their pregnancies because they couldn’t afford more kids, because they had been raped, because they were with abusive partners, or because they wanted to pursue other dreams.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/26/texas-doctor-abortion-sued-pro-lifers-backpedaling

Behind the Texas Abortion Law, a Persevering Conservative Lawyer

Jonathan Mitchell has never had a high profile in the anti-abortion movement, but he developed and promoted the legal approach that has flummoxed the courts and enraged abortion rights supporters.

By Michael S. Schmidt
Sept. 12, 2021

Jonathan F. Mitchell grew increasingly dismayed as he read the Supreme Court’s decision in June 2016 striking down major portions of a Texas anti-abortion bill he had helped write.

Not only had the court gutted the legislation, which Mr. Mitchell had quietly worked on a few years earlier as the Texas state government’s top appeals court lawyer, but it also had called out his attempt to structure the law in a way that would prevent judicial action to block it, essentially saying: nice try.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/12/us/politics/texas-abortion-lawyer-jonathan-mitchell.html