In a five to four vote, the Supreme Court refused Wednesday to block the new Texas law prohibiting most abortions.
The unsigned majority opinion, made up of a single paragraph, said the abortion providers who had challenged the law had not made their case in the face of “complex and novel” procedural questions. The majority stressed that it was not ruling on the constitutionality of the Texas law and did not mean to limit “procedurally proper challenges” to it, the New York Times reports.
All four dissenting justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, filed opinions.
“The court’s order is stunning,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. “Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”
“The statutory scheme before the court is not only unusual, but unprecedented,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “The legislature has imposed a prohibition on abortions after roughly six weeks, and then essentially delegated enforcement of that prohibition to the populace at large. The desired consequence appears to be to insulate the state from responsibility for implementing and enforcing the regulatory regime.”
As previously reported by Human Events News, the new law prevents abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy
