Citizens, not the state, will enforce the new Texas abortion law

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“If the bartender at Starbucks hears you talking about your abortion, and it was performed after six weeks, that barista is empowered to sue the clinic where you obtained the abortion and sue anyone else who helped you, such as the Uber driver who took the abortion,” said Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University.

Some laws allow private citizens to sue to enforce the law even if they are not harmed, for example the California Consumer Protection Act, which gives anyone in the state the right to sue a company for spreading false information or engaging in other unfair business practices, Howard M. Wasserman said, Professor of Law at Florida International University in Miami. What is different about Texas law, he said, is that private application does not support state application; Instead, he turned that he was not good for democracy.

What’s more, a Supreme Court ruling last month on a credit reporting company rejected the concept of people suing when they weren’t tangible harm. That case involved lawsuits in federal court, but Professor Wasserman said clinics’ attorneys may be using them in their Texas pleadings.

The most common place for clinics to challenge abortion restrictions in Texas is in federal court, where they have won more than the state level. Supporters of the new law say it is an attempt to defend abortion cases in the courts of the state in which it originated — Texas — without the immediate suspension of anti-abortion proceedings by a federal judge, as is often the case.

John Sego, legislative director of Texas Right to Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion organization, said some people in the anti-abortion movement believe that “this wasn’t working in federal court, so let’s try a different route.”

Clinic lawyers argue that the six-week abortion ban is clearly unconstitutional, and that Texas law is designed to insulate the state from any challenge. Federal protection currently extends pregnancies to the point at which the fetus can sustain life outside the womb, about 23 or 24 weeks, often six weeks before a woman knows she is pregnant. The clinics’ lawyers say that given that the federal courts have the expertise to decide constitutional rights cases, it makes sense to go there for relief. The new law, if it goes into effect, will make this even more difficult.

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