U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman dismissed Attorney General Ken Paxton from the lawsuit, ruling he had no authority to enforce Texas’ abortion bans beyond state lines. Texas AbortionIsHealthcare abortionrights WomensHealth TexasRepublicans
A federal judge ruled Friday that Attorney General Ken Paxton can't enforce Texas' abortion bans against anyone who helped pay for an abortion out of state.
After the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the funds stopped paying for Texans to leave the state, citing their fear of being prosecuted under the state’s intersecting abortion bans. In the lawsuit, they cited expressing an intent to bring charges against abortion funds. Since SB 8 is enforced through private civil lawsuits, neither Paxton nor local prosecutors play any role in enforcing that statute, Pitman noted.
“In other words, if an abortion takes place outside of Texas, a plausible construction of the statute authorizes prosecution for ‘furnishing the means’ of that abortion if that ‘furnishing’ takes place in Texas,” Pitman wrote. “The pre-Roe laws prohibit ‘furnishing the means’ within the state, and do not necessarily limit that prohibition to abortions which occur in Texas.”
But in the ruling, Pitman also argued that the pre-Roe statutes have been repealed and therefore cannot be used to prosecute anyone. But in 2021, in the text of both SB 8 and the trigger law, the Legislature affirmed that Texas “never repealed, either expressly or by implication, the state statutes enacted before the ruling in Roe v. Wade.”
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