The United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit last week upheld the ban on a common procedure for second-trimester abortions in Texas. The decision reversed a lower court’s decision that held Texas’s limits on dismemberment abortions were unconstitutional. The ruling dealt with a 2017 Texas law, Senate Bill 8, which effectively banned the use of D&E, or dilation and evacuation, to perform an abortion.
The ruling stated, “The district court declared SB8 facially unconstitutional. It held that SB8 imposes an undue burden on a large fraction of women, primarily because it determined that SB8 amounted to a ban on all D&E abortions. But viewing SB8 through a binary framework — that either D&Es can be done only by live dismemberment or else women cannot receive abortions in the second trimester — is to accept a false dichotomy. Instead, the record shows that doctors can safely perform D&Es and comply with SB8 using methods that are already in widespread use.”
Later, the ruling said, “The plaintiffs have failed to carry their heavy burden of proving that SB8 would impose an undue burden on a large fraction of women.”
Reuters reported that this is the first time “a U.S. federal court has upheld a prohibition on the standard abortion method used after 15 weeks of pregnancy.”
The ruling went into detail about D&E, a brutal and barbaric procedure. In arguments in this case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Paxton, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and other defendants argued that SB8 does not impose an undue burden on the majority of women because there are other safe alternatives to abortion that do not use forceps. Forceps are particularly cruel, undoubtedly causing pain as they are used to dismember an unborn baby’s tiny limbs, causing the baby to die by bleeding to death. SB8 states: “A person may not intentionally perform a dismemberment abortion unless the dismemberment abortion is necessary in a medical emergency.”
Alliance Defending Freedom filed an amicus brief in support of Texas’s law, and in a statement, attorney Elissa Graves of ADF applauded the ruling. “Texas has the right to respect the life of unborn children, and it did so when it chose to strictly limit the gruesome procedure of dismemberment abortions,” Graves said. “The 5th Circuit was on solid ground to reverse the lower court’s decision striking down the law, finding that ‘the district court committed numerous, reversible legal and factual errors.’ … The law is both humane and constitutional.”
This ruling is a solid victory for pro-life advocates who have slowly but methodically enacted state laws that both bolster the rights of unborn babies, acknowledging their personhood and humanity, and chipped away at the sweeping abortion rights embedded in cases such as Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
To be able to institute and then uphold a law that recognizes the cruel nature of dismemberment abortion also infers that we as a society should recognize that fetuses are actually unborn babies — tiny human beings with rights, DNA, and nerve receptors that feel pain.
This ruling is yet another step closer in dismantling at least parts of Roe and Casey and the liberal defense of all kinds of abortion. Mothers should not have the right to abort a baby in a way that is barbaric and inhumane.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
