AUSTIN, Texas -- A federal judge on Wednesday ordered Texas to suspend the most restrictive abortion law in the U.S., which since September has banned most abortions in the nation's second-most-populous state.
The order by U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman is the first legal blow to the Texas law known as Senate Bill 8, which until now had withstood a wave of early challenges.
In a 113-page opinion, Pitman took Texas to task over the law, saying Republican lawmakers had "contrived an unprecedented and transparent statutory scheme" to deny patients their constitutional right to abortion.
"From the moment S.B. 8 went into effect, women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution," wrote Pitman, who was appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama.
"That other courts may find a way to avoid this conclusion is theirs to decide; this Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right."
But even with the law on hold, abortion services in Texas may not instantly resume because doctors still fear that they could be sued without a more permanent legal decision. Planned Parenthood said it was hopeful the order would allow clinics to resume abortion services as soon as possible.
Texas officials are likely to seek a swift reversal from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which previously allowed the restrictions to take effect. State officials did not immediately react to the ruling.
The lawsuit was brought by the Biden administration, which has said the restrictions were enacted in defiance of the U.S. Constitution.
"For more than a month now, Texans have been deprived of abortion access because of an unconstitutional law that never should have gone into effect. The relief granted by the court today is overdue, and we are grateful that the Department of Justice moved quickly to seek it," said Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Texas Right to Life, the state's largest anti-abortion group, said the order was not unexpected.
"This is ultimately the legacy of Roe v. Wade, that you have activist judges bending over backwards, bending precedent, bending the law, in order to cater to the abortion industry," said Kimberlyn Schwartz, a spokeswoman for the group. "These activist judges will create their conclusion first: that abortion is a so-called constitutional right and then work backwards from there."
The legislation, signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in May, prohibits abortions once cardiac activity is detected, which is usually around six weeks, before some women even know they are pregnant.
The Biden administration argued that Texas has waged an attack on a woman's constitutional right to abortion with the GOP-engineered restrictions, which took effect Sept. 1.
"A state may not ban abortions at six weeks. Texas knew this, but it wanted a six-week ban anyway, so the state resorted to an unprecedented scheme of vigilante justice that was designed to scare abortion providers and others who might help women exercise their constitutional rights," Justice Department attorney Brian Netter told the federal court Friday.
Abortion providers say their fears have become reality in the short time the law has been in effect. Planned Parenthood said the number of patients from Texas at its clinics in the state decreased by nearly 80% in the two weeks after the law took effect.
Some providers have said that Texas clinics are now in danger of closing while neighboring states struggle to keep up with a surge of patients. Other women, they say, are being forced to carry pregnancies to term.
Other states, mostly in the South, have passed similar laws that ban abortion within the early weeks of pregnancy, all of which judges have blocked.
At the center of the legal debate over the Texas law is its enforcement mechanism, which essentially deputizes private citizens, rather than the state's executive branch, to enforce the restrictions by suing anyone who performs an abortion or "aids and abets" a procedure. Plaintiffs are incentivized to file suit because they recover legal fees as well as $10,000 if they win.
The Supreme Court declined last month to block the Texas law in a 5-4 decision, though it did not rule on whether the law and its unorthodox enforcement mechanism are constitutional and indicated that it could still take up those questions.
"This is not some kind of vigilante scheme," said Will Thompson, defending the law for the Texas attorney general's office. "This is a scheme that uses the normal, lawful process of justice in Texas."
The Texas law is just one of several across the country to set up the biggest test of abortion rights in the U.S. in decades, and it is part of a broader push by Republicans nationwide to impose new restrictions on the procedure.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court began a new term, which in December will include arguments in Mississippi's bid to overturn 1973's landmark Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing a woman's right to an abortion.
There is no guarantee that the Justice Department's civil suit against Texas will make its way to the Supreme Court. With both sides apt to appeal, the case will reach the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most conservative in the country. Should the appeals court rule that the law is constitutional, then the Supreme Court, which now has an expanded conservative majority, could decline to hear the case.
If the Supreme Court does hear the case, then it will be asked to consider the effect that outsourcing enforcement to private citizens could have on the power of the courts and to rule on the constitutionality of the law.
If the injunction is reversed, then lawsuits can still be filed up to four years after the abortion at issue is performed.
But the head of one of the state's largest abortion providers, Whole Woman's Health, has said the clinics would resume services if the court blocked enforcement of the law.
For the past month, patients in Texas have traveled long distances to Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico and Colorado to terminate pregnancies, advocates say. But some who are seeking abortions say they cannot take time off work or find child care or money for such a trip.
Ahead of the new Supreme Court term, Planned Parenthood on Friday released a report saying that if Roe v. Wade were overturned, 26 states were primed to ban abortion. This year, nearly 600 abortion restrictions have been introduced in statehouses nationwide, with more than 90 becoming law, according to Planned Parenthood.
At least one Texas abortion provider has admitted to violating the law and has been sued -- but not by abortion opponents. Former attorneys in Illinois and Arkansas say they sued a San Antonio doctor in hopes of getting a judge who would invalidate the law.
Information for this article was contributed by Paul J. Weber and Jamie Stengle of The Associated Press; by Katie Benner and Sabrina Tavernise of The New York Times; and by Ann E. Marimow of The Washington Post.