A group of Texas abortion clinics and nonprofits filed a sweeping lawsuit against the state Thursday challenging dozens of abortion laws, some of which were passed at least two decades ago.
The move led by the Whole Woman’s Health Alliance comes two years after the abortion provider successfully challenged two provisions of a Texas abortion law at the Supreme Court. The decisionmarked the most significant abortion rights ruling in a generation and paved the way for groups to challenge abortion laws in other states.
The latest lawsuit argues that other Texas abortion limits, such as specific licensing standards for abortion clinics and waiting periods for patients, pose an undue burden on a woman’s right to have an abortion and threaten access to the procedure in the state.
“We were able to leverage that new standard and use it to take a look historically at all of the laws that have been on the books for some time that cannot stand now,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health. “It’s never been done before because we never had a win before like the one we had two years ago.”
Previous challenges have focused on a single law or restriction. This time, Whole Woman’s Health and the Lawyering Project, which is representing the organization, spent more than a year looking at various Texas abortion laws to determine which ones to challenge.
“Internally, I’ve been calling it the ‘big fix,’” said Miller.
Miller said that the plaintiffs wanted to file the suit while the five Supreme Court justices who formed the majority in the 2016 decision are still on the bench. But it’s unclear how long the suit will proceed through lower courts. A judge could opt to call separate trials on different categories of restrictions. And the state of Texas is likely to aggressively fight the challenge.
The suit, filed in the Western District of Texas, comes amid a revived national debate over abortion rights, with the Trump administration and conservative states seeking new measures to limit the procedure.
Federal courts are weighing challenges to early abortion bans imposed by conservative states such as Mississippi and Iowa. The courts have also temporarily blocked Texas laws requiring the burial or cremation of fetal remains and struck down a Texas ban on a common second-trimester abortion procedure, which was passed along with other abortion restrictions during a special legislative session last summer.
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