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News This Week: 8/8 - 8/14

On August 5, the full Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a 48-hour mandatory waiting period for abortion in Tennessee. 

• The ruling overturned a district court decision from last year striking down the law. 
• The law requires patients to wait at least two days to access abortion services after receiving in-person, state-mandated biased counseling. That means patients must make two separate trips to a clinic, which can often be far away. 
• Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern suggested this decision – which ignores Supreme Court precedent – could provide Justice Kavanaugh with a blueprint to gut Roe vs. Wade in the Center’s Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case. 

Last week, defendants in the Center’s case challenging Texas’s six-week abortion ban asked the court to dismiss the case.  

• Defendants also asked the Fifth Circuit to force the district court to rule on the motion to dismiss before they rule on the merits of the law. 
• The law creates an unprecedented bounty hunting scheme by asking private citizens to sue people who violate the ban and creating monetary rewards for those who do. 
• The district court has yet to rule in this case on any request, including the plaintiff’s request for a preliminary injunction to block the law while litigation continues. Arguments are scheduled for later this month. 

This week, a federal judge issued a mixed ruling that permanently blocked several Indiana abortion restrictions while upholding others.  

• The ruling permanently blocked the state’s ban on the use of telemedicine for medication abortion, the requirement of in-person examinations before medication abortions, the prohibition on second-trimester abortions outside hospitals or surgery centers, and the requirement that providers tell pregnant people that human life begins when the egg is fertilized.  
• However, in the same ruling, the judge upheld a mandatory ultrasound law and a physicians-only law. 

Coming Up

District Court to hear arguments in Texas six-week abortion ban case (August 30) 

• District Court Judge Robert Pitman will hear oral arguments in a preliminary injunction hearing in the Center’s case challenging Texas’ new six-week abortion ban, just two days before the law is scheduled to take effect September 1.  
• The oral arguments will be held via video conference at 9:00AM CT.

Appeals Court to hear Kansas telemedicine ban case (September 9) 

• The laws challenged in this case are a ban on the use of telemedicine to provide medication abortion and a law that requires physicians be in-person to provide telemedicine.  
• The Kansas Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in the Center’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling denying our request for a preliminary injunction.  

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