On Thursday, United States (US) President Joe Biden said the Texas abortion law, which came into effect on Wednesday, is an “unprecedented assault on a woman’s constitutional rights” and unleashes an “unconstitutional chaos.”
Texas law SB8 imposes a ban on most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and criminalises abortion providers or any person “aiding and abetting” abortions in Texas. It also gives any citizen of Texas the right to file a lawsuit against abortion providers and claim up to $10,000 in damages in a civil court. The law contradicts the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade judgement that legalised abortion and places it at risk of dissolution.
Biden has condemned the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the law and said his administration stands staunchly against it. He believes that the far-reaching capacity of the law “empowers self-anointed enforcers to have devastating impacts on women’s bodies.”
Furthermore, the President directed the White House Counsel to launch a “whole-of-government” effort to counter the decision. His statement read: “I am looking specifically to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice to see what steps the Federal Government can take to ensure that women in Texas have access to safe and legal abortions as protected by Roe, and what legal tools we have to insulate women and providers from the impact of Texas’ bizarre scheme of outsourced enforcement to private parties.”
In an earlier statement, Biden vowed to protect women’s right to abortion as per the Roe v. Wade judgement.
Meanwhile, US House of Representative Speaker Nancy Pelosi pledged to bring a bill codifying Roe v. Wade to the House floor against the law SB8. “We will be putting Roe v. Wade codification on the floor of the House, to make sure that women everywhere have access to the reproductive health that they need,” Pelosi announced, referring to the law as “Supreme Court’s cowardly, dark-of-night decision.”
The Court’s cowardly decision to uphold a flagrantly unconstitutional assault on women’s rights and health is staggering. The House will bring up Congresswoman Judy Chu’s Women’s Health Protection Act to enshrine into law reproductive health care for all women across America.
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) September 2, 2021
Critics suggested that the easy passing of this law without a proper evaluation was made possible due to two Trump-appointed Conservative judges, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, in the Supreme Court. Rendering Texas a pro-life state has long been on the Conservative agenda. They also held the Supreme Court responsible for granting the “social conservatives a huge victory on Wednesday by letting stand a Texas law that effectively bans all abortions in the state.”
Similarly, Biden criticised the Supreme Court, saying, “The highest Court of our land will allow millions of women in Texas in need of critical reproductive care to suffer while courts sift through procedural complexities.” He also highlighted that the Supreme Court dismissed the dissenting claims by Chief Justice John Roberts and the three Liberal justices, including Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, and pushed the law regardless.
Although belonging to the Conservatives, Chief Justice Roberts said the lower courts had not been given adequate time to scrutinise the law. He added that the case presented complex questions, none of which were thoroughly considered before its passing.
Justice Breyer, citing the famous 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison, noted that usually when a legal right is invaded, the law itself “provides a legal remedy by suit,” but Texas Law SB8, he said, does the opposite. Likewise, Justice Sotomayor and Justice Kagan expressed their contempt towards the law, referring to it as “flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny.”
According to Attorney General Merrick Garland, the US Justice Department is “deeply concerned” and “evaluating all options to protect the constitutional rights of women, including access to an abortion,”