Lyft, Uber lash out at legal threat from strict Texas abortion law
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Where is the line drawn? Can you sue govt officials for providing electricity and building roads to abortion clinics?
What about Google Maps and Navigation for showing the clinic on the map and showing the directions? Google knows everything from your searches, browsing, emails, calls and texts that you're pregnant and going to get an abortion.
Can you be or act pregnant and ask people nearby for directions to the abortion place and then sue them?
1. A stark reminder that pro-lifers aren't giving up, and that 48 years of fighting later, they are stronger and getting stronger over time. And that the pro-abortion side should take notice.
2. A law that, even though it will almost inevitably fail, in the eyes of pro-lifers, several dozen children will be saved (due to inability to get abortions) and thus it is worth throwing the curveball regardless of the method.
3. A law that does a great job at getting pro-abortion women into placing blame on the Biden administration as inept and unable to stop Republicans effectively, hurting morale among his voter base, while boosting morale of Republicans to have gotten an even-temporary win after, what, 48 years of fighting? It can also be a political tactic.
4. Remember that ~50% of Republicans are women. This isn't all just angry men who like controlling women, and the pro-abortion side isn't very effective at reaching them.
What it's more likely to accomplish is to make Texas even more republican, and to make the US appear even more crazy to the outside world.
Additionally, it does not address cases of rape, incest, pregnancies which have a high chance of killing the mother, or children with severe defects (who are likely to remain in foster homes, in the average-to-good case).
You can't define a clump of cells as "good," "evil," or, indeed, as "human." Your own holy book makes no attempt at doing so. If you insist on enforcing your unsupported opinion at gunpoint, it can only happen at the cost of our own free will... just as seen here.
Some will, but some won't or can't, and for many of the supporters of that law, any number >=1 is a success.
> or let the kids grow up in homes that can't support them.
The general argument at that point is that life/society is punishing the parents and family for being immoral or irresponsible, which is kept separate from the goal of saving lives/enforcing punishment by preventing abortion. In other words, the quality of those lives (or lack thereof) thereafter is seen an unrelated concern.
> What it's more likely to accomplish is to make Texas even more republican
I wouldn't say it's planned but I think Republicans are quite happy with an outcome that creates more Republicans.
Believing something doesn't actually make it true. Mother Nature is unaffected by your conceits, even if a crowd of thousands are cheering you on, certain you can fly, your attempt to soar from the roof of the building up into the sky will result in falling to your death 'cos she doesn't give a shit.
They aren't "saving children" by forcing these pregnancies to go ahead except in the same sense they'd be "saving chickens" by enforcing more intensive factory farming techniques like debeaking and cages (also legal in Texas).
It seems to me that under the usual framework in which lawsuits are able to go ahead unburdened by judicial preflight the consequence of these lawsuits when the whole framework is found to be unconstitutional is that those who sued, and perhaps those who sponsored the bill, eat the costs of those defending the suits, such as ongoing child maintenance burden from anyone who can show they were either sued or the threat of suit caused them to go through with a pregnancy that would otherwise have been aborted.
That is, I would assume that "pro-life" groups in Texas and those who support them should expect to be paying for baby food, diapers, kid's clothes, school supplies and eventually college for at least dozens and maybe thousands of children over the expected 12-18 month life of this bill.
In the medium term, we've seen in countries where abortion is outlawed, the nature of modern technology is that the real consequences of that hit home very directly. Rich women of course "go on a trip" to have their abortion safely somewhere with legal abortion, but everybody else is obliged to take matters into their own hands, with too often deadly results.
Consider the Republic of Ireland. Its people were given a free vote on the matter and decided to amend their constitution to provide abortion, mostly in the first trimester although also in some other cases. Of course the US doesn't have a working mechanism to fix its constitution. Too bad, get one or get a fresh system of government and start from scratch.
How would the driver even know the women is pregnant or going to get an abortion? It's not like there are clinics that ONLY do abortions.
Ah, but that's the point. Any clinic that even thinks of performing an abortion will become a social pariah out of fear of repercussions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aiding_and_abetting#United_Sta...
However, since this law leaves the defendant liable for legal fees, it could be used to financially harm any defendant whether or not the allegation has merit.
“regardless of whether the person knew or should have known that the abortion would be performed or induced in violation of this subchapter”
> Civil liability for aiding and abetting, however, represents a very underdeveloped theory within common law tort. Courts have stated, seemingly in jest, that precedents in this area of law are "largely confined to isolated acts of adolescents in rural society."
https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
Looks like uncharted waters.
Anyone that "knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion" is liably under this new law. That's a very broad statement that can easily target a lot of people.
I haven't seen anyone deny that the main issue is unreasonable restrictions on access to abortion. It's certainly valid to discuss the recklessness of the law's coercive mechanisms and their broader, negative side effects on unrelated groups.
I don't see how this could possibly hold up in court.
Thus you have a case you didn't knowingly do it. I'm only speaking technically though.
Sorry if this is rude, but what the hell were you thinking?
edit: Also, one needs to separate the impact of the democratic system from that of the social/cultural system. A country with a very homogenous population tends to have less issues under any system of government.
I could also counter that the extra weight to "minority extreme views" is much less of an issue than most votes in most US states being meaningless because of the first past the post system on a state basis. But I don't really see this as a meaningful discussion, it's undebatable that the US system is flawed to the point where it can't be called a real democracy.
Edit: this isn’t to say Democrats will or won’t win…but it’s also not to say Abbott won’t simply get primary’d out.
- A former Texan
Is a newsworthy and heavy handed anti-abortion bill likely to make a republican governor more vulnerable to a primary challenge? In Texas?
i'm kind of puzzled by that extension of legal standing to everybody. I mean anybody who notices say a woman losing a bit of weight and that basically allows to file a suit, trigger discovery, and now the woman should prove that it was just a morning exercises?
It takes Neghbourhood Watch to new, medieval, heights so to speak.
Does that mean that multiple people can sue a single person?
If the person proves that there was no abortion, who covers the legal fees?
Would it be possible to bait people into suing, get expensive lawyers and then provide proof that there was no abortion?
I suspect this will crash and burn not because it is insane, but because it's also a mess legally. But that will take time.
Yes, the bill enables thousands of suits to be filed, even if frivolous, against abortion providers.
> If the person proves that there was no abortion, who covers the legal fees?
The bill explicitly covers the fees of the person bringing the suit, but provides no means for the person being sued to recover legal costs.
The combination of these two facts means that operating a clinic that even is abortion adjacent will no longer be economically viable.
Fortunately, I don't live anywhere near Texas...
The abortion has this ugly side, the father has zero rights. This is why I cannot agree with any side, pro-abortionists are wrong in some points, pro-lifers are wrong in some points and there is no effort to make it right, from any side. Such laws are not making it right, they are just an abuse (or farce) of the judicial system.
It designed to maximize the legal threat surface for anyone connected to abortion while immunizing the law against the pre-enforcement review it would have been subject to had it been state-enforced.
It’s a study in how to design a law for maximum chilling effect when you know you have an ideologically supportive Supreme Court but one with enough respect for legal precedent that it is unlikely that they’d simply uphold a 6-week abortion ban.
(Viewed another way, its a study in how to conduct an overt, brazen conspiracy against rights and deprivation of rights under color of law and test whether the federal criminal laws against those mean anything.)
Absurd arguments both for and against standing are hardly new, and most don't have statutory authority behind them.
Narrowly crafting laws to avoid pre-enforcement review specifically to maximize the impact knowing that they will almost certainly be struck down as unconstitutional is, on the other hand, unusual, if perhaps not completely new (something similar may have been done before, but I am not aware of any examples.)
Not sure if it's been litigated.
Is a non-profit defending frogs meant to be self-evidently absurd?
Why would a special interest group be able to sue to protect frogs, but another wouldn't be able to sue to protect unborn babies?
And this Texas law gives statutory standing.
Like clockwork, the outrage ball is now in the court of the Republicans again. I guess it's up to Biden again to do something bad to keep the theater going.
And Abbott is a terrible politician and knows that even moderates hate him. He's don't everything he can to get every Trump voter on his side.
Here's what we really need. We need a blue state to pass a law, the substance of which is this:
> No person with the state of X shall possess a firearm. Any citizen but no government official may sue anyone who possesses, attempts to purchase, attempts to sell or gifts a firearm to any other person for $10,000. They may also sue anyone aiding any such person. No court shall award costs where the case is decided for the defendant.
You get the idea.
Then let's see how supportive conservatives and the Supreme Court are of the idea that this isn't an end run against constitutionality.
The most disturbing thing to me is that such a novel law wasn't stayed pending full judicial review. It really exposes what a self-serving hypocrisy "constitutional textualism" really is.
As for companies, any action less than leaving the state entirely I will view as empty posturing.