Supreme Court expected to weigh in on Texas' emergency coronavirus abortion restriction

The Supreme Court is expected to weigh in on a major abortion case out of Texas that could resolve whether states may effectively ban the procedure with limited exceptions during the coronavirus pandemic.

An appeal is expected possibly as soon as Wednesday after a federal appeals court panel upheld the restriction on Tuesday. The fight comes as other states, including Ohio, Oklahoma and Alabama, are stepping up efforts to limit abortion access during the public health crisis.

The case would be the second major dispute to come to the justices over coronavirus. The justices on Monday sided with Republicans in Wisconsin to limit absentee ballot voting in the state, which held elections on Tuesday. That vote was 5-4 along partisan lines.

The Texas case concerns an order signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott last month barring any medical procedures deemed not to be immediately necessary, an effort to conserve resources during the crisis.

Ken Paxton, also a Republican and the state's attorney general, later said the order applied to any abortion that was not required to protect the life or health of the person receiving it, suggesting it would also apply to abortions carried out via oral medication. He announced that the penalty for violating the order was $1,000 or 180 days of jail time.

Abortion providers in the state challenged the order in court, represented by attorneys for Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Lawyering Project.

The providers called the restriction a "a blatant effort to exploit a public health crisis to advance an extreme, anti-abortion agenda, without any benefit to the state in terms of preventing or resolving shortages of PPE or hospital capacity."

A federal district court sided with the abortion providers. The court acknowledged the public health crisis inflicted by COVID-19, but said the Supreme Court had never addressed whether such a circumstance would limit its past abortion holdings.

"This court will not speculate on whether the Supreme Court included a silent 'except-in-a-national-emergency clause' in its previous writings on the issue," District Court Judge Lee Yeakel, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote. "Only the Supreme Court may restrict the breadth of its rulings."

But on Tuesday, a divided panel of the 5th U. S. Circuit Court ... (Read more)

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