Appeals court upholds Texas abortion law.


“The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to a request from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that an injunction imposed against the law be lifted.

On Wednesday, a lower court had temporarily blocked the bill for the “offensive deprivation” of the constitutional right to an abortion.

The restrictive law bans all abortions at about six weeks of pregnancy.

It gives any individual the right to sue anyone involved with providing or facilitating an abortion after foetal cardiac activity is detected, and makes no exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest.

On Wednesday District Judge Robert Pitman granted a request by the Biden administration to prevent enforcement of the law while its legality was being challenged. He held that women had been “unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution”.

However, Texas officials immediately appealed against the ruling, which the New Orleans-based, conservative-leaning Fifth Circuit court has agreed to set aside. It ordered the justice department to respond to its ruling by Tuesday.” BBC

Comment: I would expect that SCOTUS will now have little choice but to take up this dispute between Texas and the federal government, and quickly.

My long held opinion FWIW is that Rowe was wrongly decided on the basis of an imagined “right of privacy” not present in the constitution of the US and that the issue of abortion law is properly a matter for state decision.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58853859

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24 Responses to Appeals court upholds Texas abortion law.

  1. walrus says:

    I lost my best friend at school to abortion law and prudery. He was seventeen, a school prefect. He got his girlfriend pregnant. She had a backyard abortion that went wrong, followed by an emergency hysterectomy. He hung himself.

    The parents involved on both sides could have defused the situation easily. They could also easily have afforded any care required – if they had known what was happening, but the young couple kept it to themselves and tried to resolve it in secret -such was the stigma associated in those days.

    Today, the tragedy of abortion law is that it only applies to the lower classes. The rich will simply send their daughters or girlfriends interstate or overseas – either for an abortion or adoption if wanted. The girl returns after an extended holiday or finishing school course and no one is the wiser.

    This is, in my opinion, an issue that men have no right to intrude upon, let women decide.

    • Pat Lang says:

      walrus

      For me an unborn baby is a human being, not a piece of tissue attached to a woman like a hangnail. But, as I wrote, under the US Constitution this issue should be a matter for state jurisdiction. Thank you for the anecdote.

    • LeaNder says:

      Thanks, Walrus. Your story rings very, very true. Not least since …

      I have no idea what week it was when I got my abortion. I recall I may have bought myself a test too early, it returned negative. Curiously enough, it didn’t calm me down. The second test, no idea how long later, surely not much later, came back positive. It’s too long ago to figure out what time passed between conception and abortion. Let alone understand how that works. Might have been still within Texan limits. I recall I was terrified immediately after.

      Strictly, I could have relaxed after the first test. But then:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstruation#Menstrual_disorders

      Does Texas also forbid the pill the day after? It seems to have some type of informer incentives in place too. I am misinformed on that issue? Would you have been willing to inform on your friend?

    • Fred says:

      Walrus,

      “…. law is that it only applies to the lower classes. The rich will simply ….”

      Does that apply to Covid? Seems like it. Other than the “lower classes” line, since Haitains, Afghans and anyone crossing the the US border illegally doesn’t need any of the shots, masks, or identity cards. Plus all those exempt by the yet to be written OSHA ’emergency’ rule guidance.

      • Laura Wilson says:

        I fail to understand the logic of your analogy. OF COURSE, the law only applies to the lower classes….any law. Immigration ESPECIALLY….you do know you can buy your way in to the US any number of ways….with LOTS of money.

        • Pat Lang says:

          LW

          Looks like you have a second home in the mountains as well as one in Santa Barbara. Do you qualify as a limousine liberal?

        • Fred says:

          Laura,

          You still have not realized that those lesser beings you despise so much, the ‘middle class’, have caught on to the contempt that fine people such as yourself, and the Governor who has yet to vax his own kids, have for them.

  2. EEngineer says:

    Forcing the issue into SCOTUS is also relevant in the Vax debate. If you have the right of privacy to prevent government involvement in you medical decisions for abortion, it follows that those for other procedures follows. So I think the right is trying to force the left to “pick a lane” or wrap itself in a knot of hypocrisy.

    • Barbara Ann says:

      EEngineer

      Hypocrisy is no barrier to this administration, in fact it would appear to be a guiding principal. Americans are abandoned in Afghanistan while concern is expressed for the mistreatment of illegals being prevented from crossing into the US. They wish to force a digital ID on everyone via a Vaxx ‘passport’ system, but proof of identity for something as fundamental as voting is a barrier to be knocked down. Medical staff are sacked over the Vaxx mandate, while there is supposedly a pandemic underway. And that’s before we get into the whole “birthing persons” thing or indeed “my body my choice” as applied to State mandated medical treatments.

      It would be comforting to think concern for privacy might register over the medical equivalent of the new Jim Crow laws. However, I fear policies with any sort of logical consistency are an outmoded concept, from the time before we passed through the looking glass.

      • Artemesia says:

        Maybe y’all can help me; I’m too bummed to think clearly.

        Our neighborhood association is gleefully promoting its first in-person monthly meeting since over a year ago.

        It will be held outdoors in a church parking lot.

        The Association president announced the meeting via newsletter, and tacked on the injunction: “Masks are required.”

        UTTER & COMPLETE BS I say (in the solitary confines of my living room).

        But what should I do?

        “All that is necessary for tyranny to succeed is for good men to remain silent.”

        1. Do I simply skip attending the meeting (they are mostly boring and useless, except for the same clique that has been ‘in charge’ for the past 20 years)?
        2. Do I attend without a mask and remain silent?
        3. Do I attend without a mask and make a statement at start of meeting that President has no authority whatsoever to require masks?
        4. Do I “prepare the meeting space” with printed literature on the foolishness of masks, the danger of vaccines, the availability of therapeutics?

        5. What are the chances that ANY of the above actions would have any impact whatsoever, other than to even further ostracize myself?

        • Fred says:

          Artemesia,

          Show up and make them call the cops on you.

        • AK says:

          Whichever of these courses of action is the one that keeps your personal integrity feeling most intact, that is the one you choose. That’s all any of us can do at this point. Considering the reactions of others, especially those who’ve been fully captured and processed by the propaganda mill, is a moot exercise. Alternatively, you could move to a place that does not have a neighborhood association, where people mostly mind their own business.

  3. Babeltuap says:

    Tax payers making it lucrative for men to get an abortion first (vasectomy) before paying for an actual abortion is a viable strategy. It wouldn’t eliminate the abortion issue but it would switch the focus to the fundamental problem; lack of family structure.

    For spooky or taboo reason we are not allowed to discuss it in the media without being branded a racists but there are many articles, even government agencies that do.

    Dangerous cities like Oakland, Cleveland, Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans and Chicago have an excessive population of illegitimate children creating a perpetual cycle of more illegitimate children. This creates an excessive amount of abortions and an excessive amount of late term abortions.

    The abortion issue is not the thing IMO. There is no point trying to apply morality to something by people by and large who have no morality. Start shaming men. Women are part of it to but the men, the men are an easier target.

    • MK says:

      Your comment struck me with a thought of the founder of pp, the sanger angle that, at least prior to this spike protein hysteria, had roughly 200 non white fetuses terminated day in and day out year round for decades. It’s amazing no democrat has really asked the question why such a racial disparity in the who of abortions.

    • Fred says:

      Babeltuap,

      “Start shaming men. ”

      This societly has been doing that for decades. The social welfare system LBJ put in place in his war on poverty incentivized single-motherhood. The State has become the husband. We see the results in all the cities you mention.

  4. plantman says:

    I have to say, I agree with Colonel Lang 100%, but you rarely hear it presented so clearly and rationally.

    Whether you support abortion or not, we should be able to agree that the case was wrongly decided by the Court. The Forth amendment doesn’t have anything to do with abortion. It’s an obvious case of judicial overreach, of twisting the law so it fits one’s own ideology.

    Let the states decide for themselves.

  5. KERRY E. NOONAN says:

    Abortion disappeared in the ancient world through repentance of sin and conversion to Christ, leading to the gradual but steady growth of Christian marriage and family life – chaste, monogamous, and accepting of children as a blessing and responsibility. The trajectory has long since reversed, and we now live in what St. John Paul the Great called the Culture of Death. If the people are debased no legal decision will be decisive in altering the pervasive disrespect for human life. May God have mercy on us.

  6. Ranger+Ray says:

    The Catholic Church teaches that life is defined as running from conception to natural death. Abortion is the ending of human life. Period. In most contexts that is termed murder.

    As a longtime Texan, I fully support the legislature’s bill. It is comforting to see our state politicians standing up for what most of us consider the right position.

  7. Fred says:

    On a related abortion note someone had the termity to invite know abortion supporter Nancy Pelosi to do the second reading at a Catholic Mass in Rome. Just how stupid is the leadership there to think that was a good idea. Of course a ‘security concern’ arose – which coincided with the heckling. I wonder if Merrick Garland is going to investigate all those people or will Nancy just have the Captial Hill police do it?

    https://twitter.com/breeadail/status/1446949855021174784

  8. Jim says:

    The logic purporting that Only Women can determine this, met by fact: Nine Men of SCOTUS in Roe v Wade intruded onto this matter, — renders this as ill-logic and as nonsense.

    These men — seven of them — intruded onto something they had no right to say: Deeming Life Begins ~13 weeks — circa Jan. 22, 1973, just as Nixon was starting his second term in office.

    Yes, they said so.

    1] on what authority?

    2] on what expertise?

    3] ?

    Zip, Zero and Nada.

    These obvious questions never seem to get asked when US Senators, ostensibly opposed to abortion, get to grill any SCOTUS nominee. Nor by those ostensibly in favor of abortion.

    Nor do they ever get to the root of this matter: given the general western historical progress over centuries that says human beings are no one else’s property–and all that this imply.

    In rough outline, from when all peasants of a manor were the property of their Lord, or lord.

    Eventually man was freed and his wife and children [and his cattle and property] were all his property.

    And women eventually, no longer property of men.

    Question, who owns children, or are they human beings and with no right to be owned by another human being?

    Absent from all abortion discussions is acknowledgment of this perplexity.

    We assume children are no ones property.

    The right to an abortion, however, assumes just the opposite — that a woman can kill a being inside of her body — since her body is her property.

    This is a big thing to always leave out of abortion discourse. It’s at heart of the matter.

    All manner of dressing this up as liberty or progressivism etc. does not change cold hard fact: that the unborn child, with right to abortion, flies in face of western civilization’s general progress toward the right not to be owned by another human being.

    And so what we’ve seen, among many arguments, is stuff like “viability of fetus” and “when does life begin” and “my body my choice”. . . and with the Texas law: Life begins at ~6 weeks, instead of ~13 weeks.

    In Roe v Wade, the doctor, who was under legal scrutiny already for having performed other heretofore illegal abortions, “alleged that, as a consequence, the statutes were vague and uncertain, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, and that they violated his own and his patients’ rights to privacy in the doctor-patient relationship and his own right to practice medicine, rights he claimed were guaranteed by the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments.”

    This argument carried the day in 1973.

    As many have been pointing out recently: proponents of this rationale for one type of doctor/patient relationship — abortion; has been interrupted for another type of doctor/patient relationship — covid shots.

    Put another way, this means that proponents of this rationale for abortion, by simple logic, that actually do not accept this rationale as a principle, either of law or morality are fragmented.

    And thus, it Not being a Principle, can only mean: the 1973 decision has nothing to stand on, save partisan agenda, or something to that effect.

    Roe v. Wade, it seems to me, was a landmark in that it ushered in fragmented consciousness at unprecedented bucket fulls. And consequences of those consequences, in full bloom, now.

    Taking the liberty to be incoherent, seven men deemed they had authority to decide when life begins!

    And taking the liberty to be further incoherent, deemed liberty itself to be a fragmented narrative of their own making and in doing so, rendered a most catastrophic opinion in US history of jurisprudence.

    [[. . .”the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.” That right necessarily includes the right of a woman to decide whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.]]

    In other words, the unborn are a woman’s and only a woman’s private property.

    This has to be accepted in order to accept abortion as the law and morality of the land; this is what it all boils down to.

    Is this Liberty, Equality, Fraternity?

    Many do not and cannot accept this fragmented consciousness, and this protracted conflict continue.

    That SCOTUS conclusion continues to live in catastrophic infamy.

    https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/410/113/

    Recall that Marie-Louise Giraud was guillotined in France, 30 July 1943, for doing 27 illegal abortions in Cherbourg vicinity.

    [[At trial, the President stressed the immorality of the accused. Twenty-seven women had used Giraud’s services. According to the Advocate General, the death penalty was necessary in Giraud’s case. The court sentenced Giraud to death. Only a presidential pardon could save her life, but Marshal Pétain refused to commute the sentence.]]

    https://www.wikii.org/en/wiki/marie-louise-giraud-275822

    The Texas law also focuses on those doing abortions.

    [[While abortion patients themselves can’t be sued under the new law, anyone who performs or aids with the abortion can be sued — and by almost anyone. Legal experts interviewed by The Texas Tribune have said the law dramatically expands the concept of a civil lawsuit and is aimed at keeping providers from using the constitutional right to an abortion under Roe v. Wade as a legal defense.]]

    [[For example, 10 different plaintiffs could sue one abortion provider for a single abortion, but only one could collect damages.

    The law does not protect a defendant from having to fight off multiple lawsuits for the same abortion and being forced to defend themselves (costing time and money) as each case progresses.]]

    https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/10/texas-abortion-law-ban-enforcement/

    Nor does Texas law allow abortionist to suffer beheading.
    -30-

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