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The law is considered one of the strictest in the nation. It blocks women from seeking to end a pregnancy six weeks after conception.
Women don't often know they are pregnant at that point. The law also prevents women from leaving the state to receive an abortion.
The nonprofit Fund Texas Choice, which covers the cost of women who want to get reproductive health outside of the Lone Star State, filed a class action lawsuit against that proviso.
Twenty-one state attorney generals say they agree with Fund Texas Choice. They filed a friend of the court brief in the suit to say that preventing a woman from seeking help outside the state violated her Constitutional rights. They believe Texas laws stop at the border.
“Following (the Supreme Court ruling), we made a commitment to ensure that patients from across the country can access abortion and to protect providers offering that care,” AG Healey said in a news release. “Interstate travel is a constitutional right, and we are going to do everything we can to protect access to critical health care.”
The states' top law enforcement officers say the abortion ban's travel restrictions, put an unfair burden on women and will lead to unnecessary deaths and unwanted pregnancies.
“Texas’ interference with an individual’s right to travel when the purpose of that travel involves legal, out-of-state abortions results in irreparable harms, both within and beyond Texas borders," the brief says. "Texas’ laws are likely to cause unwanted pregnancies, imposing grave socioeconomic and health consequences, including complications resulting in death."
Attorneys generals from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington, and Washington, D.C. , also joined the brief.
The US Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade earlier this year allowed states to choose how they will moderate abortion. Seventeen states have passed a law restricting abortion access. In Massachusetts, women can seek elective abortions up to 24 weeks after conception, but doctors may perform on after that if the mother's life is in danger.
Click here to read the amicus brief.
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