The U.S. Department of Justice is suing Texas over its new heartbeat act. Attorney General Merrick Garland made the announcement yesterday following what he called a "careful assessment" of the facts and the law:
"Our position is set out in detail in our complaint. Its basis is as follows: SB8 bans nearly all abortions in the state after six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they are pregnant and months before a pregnancy is viable. It does so even in cases of rape, sexual abuse, or incest, and it further prohibits any effort to aid the doctors who provide pre-viability abortions for the women who seek them.
"The Act is clearly unconstitutional under long-standing Supreme Court precedent. Those precedents hold in the words of Planned Parenthood v. Casey that 'regardless of whether exceptions are made for particular circumstances, a state may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability.' Texas does not dispute that its statute violates Supreme Court precedent."
American Family News spoke with Kimberlyn Schwartz, director of media and communication at Texas Right to Life, which supports the Heartbeat Act and helped get it passed.
"This is another example of Joe Biden's radical abortion position, especially for somebody who claims to be a devout Christian," notes Schwartz. "This is extremely out of touch with the American people and what all of us, especially Christians, believe about the sanctity of human life."
Attorney Roger Gannam with Liberty Counsel tells AFN he isn't sure how "careful" the DOJ's analysis was "because the recent headlines about the Supreme Court not taking up this Texas law recently had to do who had been sued by the plaintiffs challenging that law," he explains.
"What Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice have done now," Gannam continues, "is just sue the state of Texas generically, intending to accomplish the same result – [which is] to have a court say the law is unconstitutional.
"But I'm not sure why this Justice Department thinks that their case won't meet the same fate as the last case that failed, because they're not suing the people who are actually going to enforce the law, which is the citizens of the state of Texas because of how innovatively the law was drafted."
Meanwhile, Schwartz says an extreme false narrative has been perpetuated by the media and the Left about the Texas Heartbeat Act.
"The [first of the] two biggest myths [is] that the law punishes women," says the Texas pro-lifer. "That is completely false [because] pregnant mothers who seek abortions are not liable to lawsuits under the Texas Heartbeat Act; [rather] it is the abortionist himself who is the criminal, and that is who is punishable under this law."
The second falsehood, says Schwartz, asserts that a rapist who attacks a woman would be able to sue an abortionist if the rape survivor had an abortion. "That also is not true," she says. "Rapists are explicitly excluded from being able to file these lawsuits in the law."
Schwartz says the most important thing that pro-life advocates can do now is to pray for Texas Right to Life.
"We've endured several spiritual attacks within the last week – but where the struggle abounds, grace abounds even more, and we've also seen tremendous blessings, far greater than any struggles that we've faced over the last week," Schwartz shares. "That's because we're shielded with the power of prayer and we're being held by God's hands."
