The Supreme Court of Texas has ruled against a coalition of abortion clinics in a case involving the conservative state's heartbeat law.
On Friday, the Texas Supreme Court issued a 9 to 0 unanimous decision that ruled against the heads of four state boards, namely the Texas Medical Board, Texas Board of Nursing, Texas Board of Pharmacy and Texas Health and Human Services Commission, which they said do not have the authority to enforce the heartbeat abortion ban, which prohibits abortions when an unborn child's heartbeat is detected.
Texas' Heartbeat Act went into effect on September 1, 2021 and empowers private citizens to enforce the law, thereby allowing them to sue abortion doctors who violate the pro-life measure.
According to the Christian Headlines, a pro-abortion group led by Whole Woman's Health filed a lawsuit against the four government officials in the hopes of blocking Texas' Heartbeat Law. But the Texas Supreme Court opinion stated, "We conclude that Texas law does not authorize the state-agency executives to enforce the Act's requirements, either directly or indirectly."
Texas' Heartbeat Act "may be enforced by a private civil action, that no state official may bring or participate as a party in any such action, that such an action is the exclusive means to enforce the requirements, and that these restrictions apply notwithstanding any other law," the decision by the Supreme Court said.
The opinion argued further that based on the provisions, they concluded that the Texas' heartbeat law "does not grant the state-agency executives named as defendants in this case any authority to enforce the Act's requirements, either directly or indirectly."
The heartbeat law case is another attempt of pro-choice groups to block the Texas abortion ban, which the U.S. Supreme Court declined to block. Texas Right to Life celebrated this pro-life win, taking to Twitter to describe it as "a big victory" and saying that it would "continue saving thousands of lives."
However, recent studies have shown that despite the Texas heartbeat law, the restrictions have reduced abortions by much less than previously thought. The Blaze reported that two teams of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin determined how many women were obtaining abortions through pills purchased online or by traveling outside of state and found that there has been an increase in women traveling to nearby Oklahoma or New Mexico to get an abortion.
"The law has not done anything to change people's need for abortion care; it has shifted where people are getting their abortion," Kari White, who led the research, commented to the New York Times. "The numbers are way bigger than we expected. It's pretty astounding."
One of the two recent studies found that there was a 12-fold increase in the typical number of Texas women who traveled out of the state to get an abortion every month between September 2021 when the Texas heartbeat law was passed. Moreover, more women are also ordering chemical abortions through Aid Access, a nonprofit service that offers telemedicines to women in the U.S. from doctors in Europe or pharmacists in India.
Researchers found that the number of women who ordered abortifacients every month tripled before the heartbeat law took effect in September. Moreover, orders for the abortion pill went from an average of 11 per day to 138 per day after the law went into effect. This led researchers to conclude that women are now seeking other ways to legally obtain an abortion despite the Texas heartbeat law.
