What does the Texas abortion law say?

The law, which passed in May and went into effect Sept. 1 , says any pregnancy in which a heartbeat is detected cannot be aborted. That effectively means that if you’re six weeks pregnant, you cannot have an abortion in Texas, because that is around the time when most fetal cardiac activity can be detected. (Doctors opposed to this legislation say that is misleading language and that the fluttering detected isn’t necessarily a heartbeat so early in a pregnancy.) The law makes no exceptions for rape, sexual abuse or incest, an extreme policy that is becoming more common in red states as they push the envelope on abortion bans. The law also does something new: It incentivizes the public to police abortions. It allows private citizens to sue abortion providers or anyone else they suspect is “aiding and abetting” abortions after that six-week mark. So the person seeking an abortion in Texas can’t be sued. But the provider can, or the person who drives that individual there, or the referring counselor, and on and on, explains The Washington Post’s Caroline Kitchener . The law sets a $10,000 award (to be paid by the defendant) for any successful lawsuit. The Biden administration said Texas was setting up ordinary citizens “to be bounty hunters.” Taken together, those features allowed Texas lawmakers essentially to end abortions in their state — and made the law nearly impossible to knock down in court. Texas Republicans do not deny this. The law, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said, “ensures that the life of every unborn child who has a heartbeat will be saved from the ravages of abortion.” Now other states are copying the unique structure of Texas’s law, and not just for abortion. In Florida, Republicans passed a law restricting conversations and teachings about LGBTQ issues in classrooms, which is enforced by allowing parents to sue the school district at the district’s expense. On the left, California is considering allowing any resident to sue the gun industry, and Illinois may allow business owners to sue customers who present fake covid-19 vaccination cards, report The Post’s Kimberly Kindy and Alice Crites .

What did the Supreme Court do to keep the law in place?

The court has passed on three chances to stop the law. In their September ruling right after the law went into effect, the court’s most conservative justices — including the three President Donald Trump nominated — said there are “serious questions regarding the constitutionality” but indicated they were unsure how to stop it from taking effect, given its unique setup. The three liberal justices, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., dissented and said such a boundary-pushing law should at least be temporarily paused while the courts debate its constitutionality. The conservative justices were referring to the fact that Texas lawmakers designed the abortion ban so that regular people — not government officials — enforce the law and stop abortions by suing anyone who aids an abortion. That circumvents the court system, which is set up to tell state officials to stop enforcing a law, not regular people. In December, the court dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit against the Texas law, declining to widen the scope of who abortion rights supporters could sue to end the law. Justice Sonia Sotomayor fumed in her dissent: “The Court should have put an end to this madness months ago.” For now, abortion rights supporters are stuck in an endless loop of legal wrangling to try to end the law. They fear the message the court is sending by keeping it in place. “The justices know that this Texas law violates Roe v. Wade,” said Lisa Soronen, executive director of the State and Local Legal Center, which supports municipalities in cases before the Supreme Court. “They all know that.” The Supreme Court is signaling its readiness to strike down its own precedent, created nearly 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade: It guarantees a woman or pregnant individual’s right to an abortion in the first half of pregnancy, before the fetus would be viable outside the womb. In December, the court heard arguments for and against a 15-week abortion ban in the state of Mississippi. At least four conservative justices seemed open to using that case to overturn Roe v. Wade and end some or even all abortion protections. (The court only needs five votes to make such a dramatic change.) If the court upholds some or all of the Mississippi law, abortion could quickly become illegal in as much as half the country, and Texas’s law could stand. The court is expected to rule on Mississippi this summer.

What does this mean for abortion restrictions in other states?

Texas Republicans’ success at nearly banning abortion in their state has emboldened Republicans across the country. Idaho passed a copycat law , though a state court has temporarily held it up. Oklahoma passed a law criminalizing anyone providing an abortion, and other states, such as Florida, have passed 15-week abortion bans. The abortion landscape would drastically change if the Supreme Court were willing to revisit Roe v. Wade . The Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, estimates that abortion could be severely restricted or made illegal in as many as 22 states if the Supreme Court overturns its legal protections for abortion. Congress could step in to change that. There is no federal law protecting abortion rights. House Democrats passed a bill that would effectively allow abortions up to a fetus’s being viable outside the womb, and after that only if the continuation of the pregnancy poses a health risk to the mother. President Biden said he supports it. But it will be blocked by Republicans in the Senate.

Could Roe v. Wade stand a chance?

Possibly. In past decades, when the Supreme Court has debated restrictive abortion laws, the outcome has gone abortion providers’ way. The court upheld the right to abortion with Roe v. Wade in 1973, followed by another landmark case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey , in 1992. Last summer — when the court was 5-to-4 leaning conservative — it knocked down an abortion law in Louisiana. That’s a lot of precedent the court would have to overturn to get rid of the right to abortion. But this year, the court has swung dramatically in favor of abortion opponents, and many observers expect that trend to continue, with the potential for the court to end all Roe v. Wade protections entirely in the coming months.

Where do things stand Texas for abortion providers and people seeking abortions?

Other than a two-day period when a lower court stopped the law before another court reinstated it, abortion has been largely illegal in Texas for months. Abortion rights advocates estimate that 85 to 90 percent of those seeking abortions in Texas are at least six weeks into pregnancy. Abortion providers said they have been sending patients to Oklahoma, Kansas and New Mexico for abortions. Since Texas’s law went into effect in September, nearly 1,400 women left the state each month to access abortions, according to research from the University of Texas at Austin . (Most of them went to Oklahoma, which recently passed its own law banning abortion , forcing patients who can afford it to travel further.) One doctor in San Antonio, Alan Braid, said he performed an abortion after six weeks in defiance of the law. “I have daughters, granddaughters and nieces. I believe abortion is an essential part of health care,” he wrote in The Post . “I can’t just sit back and watch us return to 1972.” As red states restrict abortion, there is renewed interest nationally in abortion pills, which can be delivered by mail, and the Biden administration ended long-standing restrictions on the pill. This report has been updated with the latest news.

The Fix

What to know about the Texas abortion law

The controversial state law and the legal battle over it, explained

Analysis by Amber Phillips

Staff writer

Updated April 21, 2022 at 4:46 p.m. EDT|Published October 9, 2021 at 12:52 p.m. EDT

Abortions rights advocates rally in Austin in 2019. (Eric Gay/AP)

Though abortion rights are — for now — still protected in America, Texas has effectively banned most abortions. After the state passed the strictest antiabortion law in the nation last year, the conservative Supreme Court has allowed the law to stay in effect indefinitely despite expressing reservations about its constitutionality. Now other states are copying Texas, and pushing the envelope on abortion.

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How does the Texas law work, and what are its ramifications for abortion in the state and in the rest of the country?

What to know about the Texas abortion law

The latest: The Supreme Court on Dec. 10 left in place Texas’s six-week abortion ban and provided only a narrow path for providers to challenge the law in federal court.

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What to know about the Texas abortion law

State abortion policies have become more extreme — without Roe v. Wade, the divide could widen

When people in Texas can’t get abortions: ‘Diapers save a lot more babies than ultrasounds’