Supreme Court declines to block Texas abortion law that bans procedure at six weeks

In a rare statement criticizing the Supreme Court, President Joe Biden on Thursday described the ruling as an “unprecedented assault on a woman’s constitutional rights” and called for an “immediate response,” though he did not say specifically what that might look like other than to say federal agencies would study their options.

Biden predicted the law would unleash “unconstitutional chaos” and said it would require “millions of women in Texas in need of critical reproductive care to suffer while courts sift through procedural complexities.”

Anti-abortion groups, some of which have been fighting for decades to roll back the court’s abortion precedents, celebrated the decision on Thursday.

“Hopefully, this law will begin saving the lives of tens of thousands of Texas babies and we look forward to the day that babies’ lives will be spared across America,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life.

Asserting that the questions raised by the case are “particularly difficult,” Roberts said he would have blocked the law’s enforcement temporarily. But Roberts, nominated to the court by President George W. Bush, was unable to convince the court’s other conservative justices of that position.

The decision drew a sharply worded dissent from Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who described the Texas law as an effort to “circumvent” the court’s precedents.

“The court’s order is stunning,” Sotomayor wrote in a dissent joined by Associate Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. “Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”

Abortion providers in Texas filed the emergency appeal at the Supreme Court on Monday, challenging how lower courts handled the case. A federal appeals court based in New Orleans also declined to block enforcement of the law.

The Texas case, by contrast, involves more technical questions about how such challenges should be handled in the meantime. The court’s majority stressed that its decision was not “based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit postponed a district court hearing in Texas this week in which abortion opponents intended to ask a judge to temporarily block the law. That ruling prompted the emergency appeal Monday to the Supreme Court. The groups asked the Supreme Court to either reverse the 5th Circuit’s decision so the case can continue or temporarily halt the law itself.