The Texas Supreme Court on Friday ruled that state licensing officials lack authority to enforce the state’s 6-week abortion ban, handing a major defeat to abortion providers in their legal challenge to the restrictive law.
The unanimous 23-page ruling effectively eliminated the final legal avenue providers had pursued in their bid to obtain a federal court order blocking state officials from enforcing Texas’s S.B. 8, the nation’s strictest abortion measure.
The ruling effectively determined that the last remaining group of state officials who were named as defendants are beyond the reach of federal courts in the case.
“With this ruling, the sliver of this case that we were left with is gone,” said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, one of the challengers in the case. “An unconstitutional ban on abortion after six weeks continues unchecked in the state of Texas. The courts have allowed Texas to nullify a constitutional right.”
At issue was a procedural fight that arose after a sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled last December that abortion providers could contest the ban in federal court and list Texas state licensing officials as defendants.
Abortion providers had asked the Supreme Court to send the case back to a federal district court, where the judge presiding over their challenge had previously blocked the Texas law. But the justices instead returned the case to the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which has allowed the ban to remain while the case proceeds.
The 5th Circuit, in turn, asked the top Texas state court to interpret the law, S.B. 8, and determine whether state licensing officials are appropriate defendants in the federal suit, under a legal mechanism known as state certification.
The Texas Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday provided the answer: Based on its reading of S.B. 8, the court wrote, “we conclude that Texas law does not grant the state-agency executives named as defendants in this case any authority to enforce the Act’s requirements, either directly or indirectly.”
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