The U.S. Supreme Court is seen in Washington, D.C., on September 1, 2021. A Texas law that bans abortion after six weeks, before many women even know they are pregnant, took effect on September 1, 2021, after the Supreme Court failed to act on an emergency request to block it. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed a bill in May that bans abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which is usually in the sixth week of pregnancy. | Source: MANDEL NGAN / Getty
The U.S. Supreme Court’s vote Wednesday night to keep in place Texas’ restrictive abortion law that effectively undermines the historic Roe v. Wade decision is also a gut punch to the Black women who have long been demanding reproductive justice.
The 5-4 vote along ideological lines all but confirmed suspicions that the increasingly conservative group of justices have an agenda to ultimately overturn the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized a woman’s right to have an abortion.
Texas’ law went into effect when the clock struck midnight on Wednesday morning — one of 666 new controversial laws that address everything from abortion to voting rights to guns. The Supreme Court decided to uphold the abortion law, in particular, that makes it illegal to perform the procedure in Texas for any woman who is more than six weeks pregnant, timing that physicians have said is sooner than many women even know they’re pregnant in the first place.
That goes against everything that Black women who are reproductive rights leaders have long been calling for; calls that were amplified last month after a federal appeals court overturned a lower court’s decision that such an abortion ban is unconstitutional.
Source: Texas Abortion Ban Comes As Black Women Leaders Have Been Demanding Reproductive Justice
