Lawsuits Filed Against Texas Doctor Could Be Best Tests of Abortion Law
The New York Times
Legal experts said two lawsuits filed this week might test the constitutionality of the Texas law more than federal challenges by abortion providers and the Justice Department.
DALLAS — When the United States’ most restrictive abortion law went into effect in Texas on Sept. 1, it worked exactly as intended: It effectively stopped all abortions in the second-most populous state.
But its very ingenuity — that ordinary citizens, and not state officials, enforce it — has begun to unleash lawsuits that are out of the control of the anti-abortion movement that fought for the law.
On Monday, a man in Arkansas and another in Illinois, both disbarred lawyers with no apparent association with anti-abortion activists, filed separate suits against a San Antonio doctor who publicly wrote about performing an abortion. The suits appear to be the first legal actions taken under the law, known as Senate Bill 8, which deputizes private citizens, no matter where they live, to sue doctors or anyone else who “aids and abets” an abortion performed after a fetus’s cardiac activity is detected.
