With the blessing of the highest court in the country, the Texas six-week abortion ban went into effect on September 1st, 2021. Since then, the ban has been challenged successfully, and unsuccessfully in court, leaving Texan women and abortion providers scrambling.
According to the new ban, women cannot terminate their pregnancies later than six weeks after they become pregnant, or after the detection of a heartbeat. Problematically, the ban is at odds with Roe vs. Wad and 24 weeks). Additionally, the ban makes no exception for cases of rape or incest. More perniciously, however, the ban also states that any United States citizen can sue any Texan who helps a woman get an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. Furthermore, if the suit is successful the plaintiff can receive $10,000, including the reimbursement of legal fees, which led The Economist to dub the ban ‘a bounty-hunting abortion law’. In the past, most laws that attempt to ban existing legislation have been immediately challenged and blocked in federal court by suing the government officials who enforce the law, such as an attorney general or governor. However, this ‘bounty hunting’ style law is uniquely protected because it is enforced by the people, rather than a government official. Although the ban was blocked by the federal court on the 7th of October, it was reinstated just two days later when the appeals court allowed the ban to continue.
What’s more, the Texan abortion ban has drawn huge amounts of criticism from politicians and political action groups alike, both within the United States and abroad. When speaking on the precarious position of the law, Amy Hagstrom Miller, CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, a group that owns four abortion clinics in Texas, said, “the legal limbo is excruciating for both patients and our clinic staff… We’ve had to turn away hundreds of patients since the ban took effect, and this ruling means we’ll have to keep denying patients the abortion care that they need and deserve.” As reported by The Guardian, the Chair of the United Nation’s Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls called the ban “structural sex and gender-based discrimination at its worst”.
The ban is a classic example of legislation that serves a political agenda, and not women’s health. Studies consistently show that banning abortions does not lead to fewer abortions, only an increase in unsafe ones. In fact, a new study from the Guttmacher Institute demonstrates that abortions occur at roughly the same rates across countries where abortions are mostly legal, and in countries where they are banned outright. The only difference being that when abortions are legal, they can be regulated, and are therefore significantly safer for the women seeking the operation.
Additionally, most women do not realize they are pregnant until at least six weeks of their pregnancy have passed. Even if a woman realizes she is pregnant before the six-week benchmark, or before there is a detectable heartbeat, abortion clinics in Texas are so overrun with patients seeking abortions that they have weeks-long waitlists, and sometimes need to refer women to out-of-state clinics.
The implications of the ban for Texan women have already been drastic. Take the story of Madi, a 21-year-old college student. Madi realized she was pregnant in September when she was already 10 weeks along (exceeding the limit indicated in the ban by five weeks). As a result, Madi was left frantically calling abortion clinics across the country, many of which had multiple week-long waiting lists. Madi ended up traveling over 400 miles to the only abortion clinic left in the state of Mississippi. The director of the clinic, Shanon Brewer, noted that the clinic has recently seen an influx of Texan women desperately seeking abortions. With the new ban, Madi’s story is but one example of the lengths Texan women will have to go to maintain their right to choose. The ban is a clear and blatant infringement by the government on women’s control over their bodies and their futures. Becoming a parent should be a choice decided by the mother. Regardless of the ban’s legal future, it has severe implications for Texan women now. The ban is not just an ‘inconvenience’ but a catastrophic detriment and, ultimately, a danger to the rights and physical wellbeing of women in the United States.