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The government of Democrat Joe Biden, through the Department of Justice, announced on Friday that it will ask the Supreme Court of the United States to annul the abortion law in Texas. The law prohibits all abortions as soon as the embryo’s heartbeat is noticeable, around six weeks. The text does not contemplate exceptions for incest or rape.
A law that, in practice, prohibits pregnancy without exception in Texas. It is what the United States Supreme Court allowed to take effect last month. Abortion providers filed a complaint against the law, but the body, with a conservative majority, voted in favor of the text by 5 votes to 4.
On Friday, October 15, the Government of Democrat Joe Biden, through the Department of Justice, announced that it will again ask the Supreme Court to stop the implementation of the text. “The Department of Justice intends to ask the Supreme Court to vacate the Fifth Circuit’s stay of the preliminary injunction against Texas Senate Bill 8,” spokesman Anthony Coley said in a statement.
The date on which the executive will make the request is still unknown, but according to estimates from the newspaper ‘The New York Times’, the decision of the judges could be taken in a week, depending on the speed with which the request is presented.
A written law to seek constitutionality
The new Texas law prohibits any type of abortion from the moment the embryo’s heartbeat is detectable, which occurs around six weeks of pregnancy. During that period of time, many women are still not aware that they are pregnant and the new law does not provide for abortion in cases of rape or incest.
A priori, the law could be unconstitutional. Other Supreme Court precedents guarantee the right to abortion until approximately week 22. However, the drafters of the law sought a loophole to make it difficult to challenge it in court. An accusation of the unconstitutionality of a law should be directed against state officials, but this law delegates all responsibility for the accusation to private citizens.
It not only seeks the prohibition of pregnancy, but also the citizen persecution of women who want to abort and entities that offer abortion services. This “novelty” is precisely the argument that the Supreme Court argued to endorse the law in the previous lawsuit.
The debate on the petition of the Department of Justice is about the legitimacy it has to present the petition to challenge the law. The government understands that it is, since the complainants would be acting as agents of the State. However, there are voices like that of the Texas Attorney General, Republican Ken Paxton, who understand otherwise. Now it will be the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority, who must decide.
With Reuters and local media.
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