Let’s Talk about: Texas

Abortion Rights Scotland member Jane Carnall writes on why we must stand in defence of abortion & in solidarity with pro-choice marches taking place across the US on 2 October.

Abortion Rights Scotland is holding a protest on the Meadows in Edinburgh at 2 pm – we want to ask as many people as possible to attend carrying “Defend Abortion” signs, and we’ll photograph and distribute the protest. We join others in London and across the world, standing together to protest an individual’s new law in the state of Texas, which has shut down safe legal access to abortion in that state since 1st September.

The new Texas law against abortion, SB 8, works by avoiding the legal precedent set in Roe vs Wade that the State may not infringe a person’s right to access abortion, by instead “deputising the State’s citizens as bounty hunters” – as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent.

How it works: The law empowers private citizens to enforce its near-total ban on abortion through lawsuits brought against anyone that “aids and abets” an abortion. The private citizen-led lawsuits can sue someone – anyone – who helped that person get an abortion- a doctor, a nurse, a therapist, a neighbour offering a lift, a parent providing financial support.

The real problem is that so long as Roe vs Wade stands as a legal decision, there is ultimately no absolute victory that would reduce the US’s healthcare to Ceaușescu’s Romania. Clinics and doctors providing abortions have been attacked by terrorists and harassed by petty regulatory schemes, but they go on doing their necessary, righteous work, in providing essential reproductive healthcare.

Roe vs Wade established privacy between doctor and patient as a right protected by the US Constitution. Overturning that right, as the six Republican-appointed judges on the court say they wish to do, would affect judgements made since that rested on that point of Constitutional law. What the Texas legislature hoped to do was evade that restriction by claiming that in Texas, a patient can still consult her doctor in privacy, and the person who has the abortion isn’t directly affected by this law: private citizens are now empowered to take action against anyone who helps her get an abortion. 

In fact, the Texas law may be overturned on just that point: President Biden has instructed the Department of Justice to sue the State of Texas for handing over the state’s right to regulate abortions, to any private citizen who wants to get ten thousand dollars for the trouble. If this legal action succeeds, this may become a second Roe vs Wade, establishing as a legal principle that in the US the State must regulate abortion access, they cannot leave it up to anti-choice activists to do so.

The US Christian Right has announced this year they and their supporters around the world will be carrying out a kind of Ira Levin-Esque counter-Lent, a “40 days for life” not at Easter, but beginning on 22nd September at the autumn equinox and continuing for 40 days to Hallowe’en. In Edinburgh, they’re mustering daily except Sunday outside the Chalmers Clinic, and pro-choice activists are holding our own counter-protest. If you live in Edinburgh and can spare some time during the day on weekdays till October, the pro-choice counter-vigils are organised online.

A new Edinburgh by-law, untested as yet, may prevent these anti-choice activists from holding their daily event outside the clinic: Back Off Scotland, the group which is campaigning for buffer zones to protect patients against anti-choice activists, is watching the situation keenly and urging people to write to their MSPs.

The Texas law doesn’t directly affect us here in Scotland. But the movement which the Texas law was passed to appease, is right here: and they very much want to shut down access to reproductive healthcare in Scotland, if they can.

One of the heartening things about sitting across from the Chalmers Clinic with a sign saying My Body My Choice, or Abortion On Demand Without Apology, is how many people stop and smile or say thank you to us: and how most walk right past the small group of anti-choicers without a word. 

Join us on the 2nd of October to defend the right to abortion for all people everywhere.