WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear two cases challenging the near-total ban on abortions in Texas.
The arguments for both cases are set for Nov. 1 and the justices will only consider the questions presented in the case, which concern procedural matters and not the constitutionality of the law. The court will not block the ban while considering the case.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred in part and dissented in part in the Biden administration’s challenge to the law, agreeing the case should be heard but disagreeing that law should stay in effect in the meantime.
“For the second time, the court declines to act immediately to protect these women from grave and irreparable harm,” Sotomayor wrote.
She added, “These women will suffer personal harm from delaying their medical care, and as their pregnancies progress, they may even be unable to obtain abortion care altogether. Because every day the court fails to grant relief is devastating, both for individual women and for our constitutional system as a whole, I dissent from the court’s refusal to stay administratively the Fifth Circuit’s order.”
Abortion providers and activists called the court’s decision to not block the law “devastating” and “catastrophic.” While the court will not be considering the merits of the Texas law, Marc Hearron, senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights and counsel in the case brought by abortion providers, said if the court allows the law to stand, its abortion rights precedent would effectively be overturned.
“The court is not going to decide whether to overturn Roe or Planned Parenthood v. Casey,” Hearron said in a press conference. “That said, if the court were to hold that federal courts are powerless to stop state laws that prohibit the exercise of a fundamental federal constitutional right, then that gives states an easy avenue to get around Roe and Casey. Roe has been a dead letter in Texas for nearly two months now.”
The Department of Justice declined to comment further on the case and attorneys representing the lead state defendant in the abortion providers’ case did not respond to requests for comment.
The Supreme Court's decision to hear the dispute on Nov. 1 comes after the Biden administration filed a brief with the court on Friday morning in its effort to thwart a near-complete ban of abortions in Texas, calling the state’s defense of the law not only wrong but dangerous as the baton is passed to the high court to decide if it will hear the case.
Abortions in Texas were banned after the detection of fetal cardiac activity — approximately six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period and two weeks after a woman’s first missed period — following the implementation of Senate Bill 8, also known as the Texas Heartbeat Act, in September. The law was passed along party lines in the GOP-controlled Texas legislature in the spring.
In an attempt to preemptively stop the law, Whole Woman’s Health and other abortion providers filed a suit in Austin federal court. The suit was halted after the Fifth Circuit issued a three-paragraph order canceling the injunction hearing. The abortion providers then appealed to the Supreme Court to block the Fifth Circuit ruling but were denied an emergency order in a 5-4 decision that let the law go into effect.
The Biden administration then tried its hand to stop the ban and was granted a favorable ruling from U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman, an Obama appointee who found the law unconstitutional. However, the victory was short-lived. The Fifth Circuit moved only 48 hours later to overturn Pitman’s ruling in a 2-1 decision.