Mississippi is one of several states with “trigger” laws that go into effect once Roe v. Wade is overturned. After the Supreme Court ruled against Roe v. Wade, the only abortion clinic in the state filed a lawsuit. The lawsuit asked that the state’s trigger law, which would ban most abortions, be put on hold for a while. Tuesday, a judge in Mississippi said no to the request. The clinic, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, will close at the end of business today if nothing else changes. Thursday, the state law goes into effect.
Since 2007, Mississippi has had a law on the books. No one has ever taken it to court. The law says that a woman can only have an abortion if her life is in danger or if the pregnancy was caused by a rape that was reported to the police. There is no way around this rule. With a temporary restraining order, it could have stayed open while the lawsuit was going on.
Hillary Schneller of the Center for Reproductive Rights, one of the clinic’s lawyers, said the judge should have stopped the law.
Schneller said, “Right now, people in Mississippi who need abortions are in a panic and trying to get to the clinic before it’s too late.” “No one should have to live like that out of fear.”
Three days after the Supreme Court made its decision, the lawsuit was filed. The judge turned down the request for a temporary ban because the Mississippi Constitution doesn’t say anything about abortion.
The office of the state attorney general said that abortion is not a right in the Mississippi Constitution and that the state has a long history of making it hard to get an abortion.
“The law has changed a lot in the last two weeks,” said Scott Stewart, the state solicitor general, in court on Tuesday.
Chancery Judge Debbra K. Halford wrote on Tuesday, when she turned down the clinic’s request, that “the plain language of the Mississippi Constitution does not mention abortion.” She also said that it is “more than doubtful” that the Mississippi Supreme Court would continue to uphold its 1998 ruling now that the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned its own previous abortion rulings.
McDuff told The Associated Press that the clinic’s lawyers will look over Halford’s decision and decide if they want to appeal it to the state Supreme Court.
We can expect to see more of this kind of action in the near future, as abortion providers who are losing business because of state laws that ban or limit abortions after the Dobbs decision file lawsuits. Since abortion is not a constitutional right, the Supreme Court decided that it is a state issue, not a federal issue. Before 1973, when the Supreme Court made up a woman’s right to an abortion, things were like this.
In another place, a judge in Florida temporarily blocked the state’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks, but the law was back in place on Tuesday. Judge Cooper’s order was quickly fought by the state, and the law went back into effect on its own.
The law in Florida makes exceptions if the procedure is needed to save the life of the pregnant woman, keep her from getting seriously hurt, or if the fetus has a fatal defect. It doesn’t let people get out of it if they got pregnant because of rape, incest, or being sold as a slave.
The Republican-controlled legislature and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis passed and signed the law this spring. It went into effect on Friday.
In Louisiana, where the governor is a Democrat who supports life, there is a question about how clear the law is.
The state attorney general in Louisiana has asked the state Supreme Court to let a ban on most abortions be enforced. The “triggers” in Louisiana’s anti-abortion laws are meant to go into effect right away if the U.S. Supreme Court rules against abortion rights. But a state judge in New Orleans stopped the law from being enforced last week until a court hearing on a lawsuit filed by an abortion clinic in north Louisiana and others.
The lawsuit from Louisiana says that the law isn’t clear about when the ban starts and what medical exceptions there are. In a petition to the Supreme Court that was sent over the holiday weekend and made public on Tuesday, the attorney general says that the order stopping enforcement should be dissolved.
In a brief filed Tuesday afternoon, lawyers for the north Louisiana clinic said that the high court shouldn’t hear the case until the district judge and an appeals court have had more time to think about the issues.
Get ready for arguments about whether illegal immigrants should be allowed to have abortions. Since the Supreme Court’s decision, more people in Texas have called the National Abortion Federation’s hotline. A regional case manager named Penelope DiAlberto said that there has been a huge rise in calls from worried women who are afraid to get abortions because they are in the country illegally. Joe Biden, for example, has promised to make sure that women will be able to go to another state to get an abortion. Illegal immigrants don’t have it so easy.
Lupe Rodriguez, the head of an advocacy group in New York called the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, said that women without legal immigration status are more likely to have trouble crossing state lines to get abortions if the procedure is illegal where they live.
A report from the National Immigration Law Center in 2021 says that several states with so-called “trigger” laws, like Texas, Arizona, and Florida, have large immigrant populations but do not let people without legal status get a driver’s license.
The U.S. Border Patrol runs a network of about 110 checkpoints along U.S. roads. Most of these checkpoints are 25 to 100 miles (40 to 160 km) from the country’s borders. Rodriguez said that many people living in the country illegally can’t cross state lines because they are afraid of being caught at an immigration checkpoint and being sent back to their home country.
I wonder how many American taxpayers know that the Biden administration has been flying or driving illegal immigrant teens from Texas shelters to other states for abortions. I don’t think it’s a lot.
Four anonymous U.S. government officials told Reuters that Biden officials are looking into ways to give pregnant women and girls in U.S. immigration custody access to abortions in states with bans.
Many federal shelters for unaccompanied children caught at the U.S.-Mexico border are in Texas, where a Republican-backed law that went into effect in September banned abortions at six weeks.
U.S. health officials have been flying or driving minors from shelters in Texas to other states for abortions for the past nine months. Supporters say that more direction is needed now and quickly.
Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s reproductive freedom project, said, “Time is really of the essence when someone needs access to an abortion.”
Incredible. This lawless administration will do whatever it takes to push its leftist agenda, even if that means paying for abortions for minors caught at the southern border with tax money. Does DHS not know about the Hyde Act?
