United States: Texas ready to ban the vast majority of abortions

In the United States, the right to abortion is reduced a little more. While Arkansas has already virtually banned abortion, it is Texas’ turn to tighten the screw again with the entry into force of a law prohibiting any intervention after the sixth week of pregnancy and encouraging the population to denounce offenders. Unless the Supreme Court of the United States decides in extremis, the vast majority of abortions will become illegal – even in cases of incest or rape – in this conservative southern state where, according to family planning organizations , more than 85% of women abort after six weeks of pregnancy.

Before Texas, twelve states passed laws to ban abortions at this point – as soon as the fetal heartbeats are noticeable, when many women are still unaware they are pregnant. These laws have all been invalidated in court, because they violate the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court which recognized a right to abortion as long as the fetus is not viable, that is to say between 22 and 24 weeks of pregnancy. But Texas has worded its law differently: it is not up to the authorities to enforce the measure, but “exclusively” to citizens, encouraged to bring a civil complaint against organizations or people who help women to have abortions.

The text provides that citizens who initiate proceedings receive at least $ 10,000 in “compensation” in case of conviction. Critics of the text see it as a “premium” to the denunciation, but its defenders have already set up forms on the internet to file “anonymous information”.

For procedural reasons, this device makes it more difficult for the federal courts to intervene, which have so far refused to take action against the law. Faced with their refusal, several organizations defending the right of women to abort on Monday urgently seized the Supreme Court of the United States to ask it to block the entry into force of the text or to force the federal courts to do so.

The high court, where the conservatives are in the majority (six out of nine), is not obliged to pronounce before the entry into force of the law. The entry into its ranks of three judges appointed by former Republican President Donald Trump has galvanized abortion opponents, who vie in imagination to provide him with opportunities to reverse his landmark 1973 judgment, Roe v. Wade, having recognized the right of women to have an abortion.

The High Court will also review in the fall a Mississippi law that prohibits most abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. It could take the opportunity to begin to unravel its case law by returning to the criterion of “fetal viability” posed so far.