July 3 (Reuters) – Three civil rights groups filed a complaint against Harvard on Monday, claiming its preferential policy for undergraduate applicants with family ties to the elite school overwhelmingly benefits white students, days after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down its race-conscious admissions policies.
The groups filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education claiming that Harvard’s preferences for “legacy” applicants violates a federal law banning race discrimination for programs that receive federal funds, as virtually all U.S. colleges and universities do.
Last week, the Supreme Court said race-conscious policies adopted by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina to ensure that more non-white students are admitted are unconstitutional. The decision was a major blow to efforts to attract diverse student bodies and is expected to prompt new challenges to admission policies.
Harvard College is the undergraduate school of Harvard University.
The groups in Monday’s complaint said the Supreme Court ruling had made it even more imperative to eliminate policies that disadvantage non-white applicants.
Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The groups are represented by Lawyers for Civil Rights, a Boston-based nonprofit that describes itself on its website as working with “communities of color and immigrants to fight discrimination.”
Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, the group’s executive director, said the Supreme Court last week made clear that any policies that disadvantage racial groups are unlawful by noting that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”
“Your family’s last name and the size of your bank account are not a measure of merit, and should have no bearing on the college admissions process,” he said in a statement.
Students and pedestrians walk through the Yard at Harvard University, after the school asked its students not to return to campus after Spring Break and said it would move to virtual instruction for graduate and undergraduate classes, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., March 10, 2020. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo
Legacy policies, which are common at U.S. colleges and universities, have become increasingly controversial
President Joe Biden, a Democrat, in remarks following las week’s Supreme Court ruling, said schools should consider eliminating legacy policies because they “expand privilege instead of opportunity.”
Several prominent lawmakers from both parties made similar comments. Representative Barbara Lee, a Democrat from California, called legacy policies “affirmative action for white people” in a tweet.
According to Monday’s complaint, nearly 70% of Harvard applicants with family ties to donors or alumni are white and are about six times more likely to be admitted than other applicants.
About 28% of Harvard’s class of 2019 were legacies, the groups said in the complaint. That means fewer admissions slots were available for non-white applicants who are far less likely to have family ties to the school, they said.
The groups are asking the Department of Education to investigate Harvard’s admission practices and order the school to abandon legacy preferences if it wants to continue receiving federal funding. Michael Kippins, one of the lawyers who filed the complaint, said in an email that Lawyers for Civil Rights has not ruled out filing a lawsuit against Harvard in the future.
When the Supreme Court heard the Harvard and UNC cases last October, a lawyer for the group that had sued the schools argued that eliminating legacy preferences “would make Harvard far less white, wealthy, and privileged.”
Conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas appeared to agree, pressing Harvard’s lawyer on why the school could not get rid of the legacy policy instead of granting separate preferences to non-white students.
The lawyer, Seth Waxman, told the court that there was no evidence that ending legacy preferences would lead to a more diverse student body.
Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Leslie Adler
Dan Wiessner (@danwiessner) reports on labor and employment and immigration law, including litigation and policy making. He can be reached at daniel.wiessner@thomsonreuters.com.
[1/3] Members of the University of North Carolina’s diverse student body mingle and make their way across campus as the Supreme Court weighs the issue of race-conscious admissions to colleges, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U.S., March 28, 2023. REUTERS/Jonathan Drake/File Photo
WASHINGTON, May 24 (Reuters) – In 1998, the year a voter-approved measure barring the use of race-conscious admissions policies for public colleges and universities in California took effect, the percentage of Black, Hispanic and Native American students admitted at two of the state’s elite public schools plummeted by more than 50%.
Those figures for UCLA and the University of California, Berkeley offer a cautionary tale as administrators at schools around the United States await a Supreme Court decision due by the end of June that is expected to prohibit affirmative action student admissions policies nationwide.
That potential outcome in cases involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina has brought new urgency to efforts by schools to maintain or increase racial and ethnic diversity in their student populations, according to interviews with senior administrators at a dozen colleges and universities.
“We cannot afford as a nation to regress on our goals to create an educated and equitable society,” said Seth Allen, head of admissions at Pomona College in California. “So it’s incumbent on higher education to figure out how to work collectively together to ensure that we’re not furthering the enrollment gap among different groups of students.”
Many selective U.S. colleges and universities for decades have used some form of affirmative action to boost enrollment of minority students, seeing value in having a diverse student population not only to offer educational opportunity but to bring a range of perspectives onto campuses.
Affirmative action refers to policies that favor people belonging to certain groups considered disadvantaged or subject to discrimination, in areas such as hiring and student admissions.
Schools are exploring numerous options. Administrators said they are drafting strategies to expand their recruitment of diverse applicants, remove application barriers and increase the rate of minority students who accept their admissions offers.
An official at Rice University in Houston said the school will lean on student essay responses to ensure it admits students from diverse backgrounds. The U.S. Air Force Academy will focus on recruiting more students from diverse congressional districts.
The president of Skidmore College in New York said connecting with high school counselors will become “more important than ever” to broaden the school’s applicant pool.
Many schools said they already have waived fees, made standardized testing optional and are looking to improve financial aid offers – steps that could help boost minority enrollment.
All of the administrators said their plans could change to comply with the scope of the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the Harvard and UNC cases. Some acknowledged that whatever steps schools take to circumvent a ban on race-conscious admissions policies might face legal challenges of their own.
“We’re likely to see a whole new generation of lawsuits arise from the new admission standards that will be adopted by colleges and universities,” said Danielle Holley, current dean of Howard University School of Law in Washington and incoming president of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.
Lawsuits backed by an anti-affirmative action activist accused Harvard and UNC of unlawful discrimination in student admissions either by violating the U.S. Constitution’s promise of equal protection under the law or a federal law barring discrimination based on race and other factors.
UNC was accused of discriminating against white and Asian American applicants. Harvard was accused of bias against Asian American applicants. The schools denied these allegations.
GOING LOCAL
Many of the school administrators said they plan to focus resources on recruitment, a part of the admissions cycle they do not expect the court will restrict.
Admissions officers said they were broadening their outreach to high schools and community-based organizations in neighborhoods with lower incomes and educational attainment – places often populated by racial minorities.
Yvonne Berumen, vice president of admissions at Pitzer College in California, said her team might run essay workshops at high schools in those targeted zip codes – postal regions – in hopes of generating applications.
Chris George, dean of admissions at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, said high school data from national organizations like the College Board, which offers information on neighborhood income and housing stability, will help guide which high schools the college sends representatives to visit and the recruitment events they attend.
Community-based organizations that identify local students who show academic promise and help them apply to college will be crucial partners for identifying and recruiting potential applicants from diverse backgrounds, the administrators said.
“They become extensions of our recruiting and admissions team in many ways, and we’re seeing each year a bigger and bigger percentage of our students come from those community-based organizations,” said Kent Devereaux, president of Goucher College in Maryland.
Administrators at schools located in or near major cities, including Pomona College near Los Angeles and Sarah Lawrence College in New York, said they would hope to draw more students from racially diverse local high schools and take more transfer students from local community colleges.
Colonel Arthur Primas Jr., the U.S. Air Force Academy’s admissions director, said his racially diverse recruiting team will continue to visit schools in U.S. congressional districts with heavy concentrations of minorities and will try to encourage more students to seek nominations to the academy from their local members of Congress.
“The Air Force Academy has had a long tradition of actively recruiting diverse candidates,” Primas said. “But we’re going to have to really be expansive.”
Reporting by Gabriella Borter; Additional reporting by Donna Bryson; Editing by Will Dunham and Colleen Jenkins
Gabriella Borter is a reporter on the U.S. National Affairs team, covering cultural and political issues as well as breaking news. She has won two Front Page Awards from the Newswomen’s Club of New York – in 2020 for her beat reporting on healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2019 for her spot story on the firing of the police officer who killed Eric Garner. The latter was also a Deadline Club Awards finalist. She holds a B.A. in English from Yale University and joined Reuters in 2017.
BUCHAREST, Feb 2 (Reuters) – The woman from Moldova thought it was love. Internet celebrity Andrew Tate had offered her a new life. They’d even discussed marriage. He asked for only one thing: absolute loyalty.
“You must understand that once you are mine, you will be mine forever,” Tate told her on Feb. 4 last year in one of dozens of WhatsApp messages cited by Romanian prosecutors who allege he trafficked and sexually exploited several women.
Tate, an influencer with millions of online followers, urged the Moldovan woman to join him in Romania. “Nothing bad will happen,” he reassured her on Feb. 9. “But you have to be on my side.”
The following month, Romanian prosecutors say, Tate raped the woman twice in the country while seeking to enlist her in a human-trafficking operation focused on making pornography for the online platform OnlyFans, a site that allows people to sell explicit videos of themselves.
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The allegations and messages are included in a previously unpublished court document, dated Dec. 30 and reviewed by Reuters, which paints the most detailed picture yet of the illicit business allegedly run by Tate, a former kickboxing world champion, and his brother Tristan.
They came to light following the arrest of the brothers on Dec. 29 on charges of forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women.
British-American Andrew Tate, 36, who’s been based mainly in Romania since 2017, and his 34-year-old brother have denied all the allegations against them. Reuters was unable to reach them in police detention for comment.
In response to questions, their attorney Eugen Vidineac said he couldn’t publicly confirm or deny information about the case while the investigation was ongoing. Romania’s anti-organized crime unit also said its prosecutors couldn’t comment on the probe.
Reuters translated the WhatsApp exchanges with the Moldovan women – which appear in Romanian in the court document – back into English, their original language. While accurate, the translation of the Romanian version provided by prosecutors may not be identical to the initial wording.
The brothers used deception and intimidation to bring six women under their control and “transform them into slaves”, prosecutors said in the document. The 61-page file, produced by Bucharest court officials, comprises minutes of a hearing when a judge extended the Tates’ detention plus evidence submitted by the prosecution.
Attorney Vidineac said the brothers’ alleged victims weren’t mistreated, but “lived off the backs of the famous Tates”, according to the court document. “They were joyful and nobody was forcing them to do these things,” he added.
Vidineac acknowledged in the document that Andrew Tate and the Moldovan woman had sex but he said it was consensual and accused her of fabricating the rape claims.
Reuters couldn’t independently corroborate the version of events provided by prosecutors or the defence lawyer, and was unable to reach the six women named in the document for comment. The news organization does not typically identify alleged victims of sexual crimes unless they have chosen to release their names.
Two of the women told Romanian TV station Antena3 on Jan. 11 that they’re not victims and the Tates are innocent. The station identified them only by first names, Beatrice and Iasmina.
“You cannot list me as a victim if I say I am not one,” Beatrice told the station. The four other women, including the Moldovan woman, haven’t publicly commented.
ONLYFANS: WE’VE MONITORED TATE
The allegations facing Tate have put intense focus on a self-described misogynist who has built an online fanbase, particularly among young men, by promoting a lavish, hyper-macho image of driving fast cars and dating beautiful women.
In 2022, he was the world’s eighth-most Googled person, outranked only by figures such as Johnny Depp, Will Smith and Vladimir Putin, according to Google’s analysis.
Prosecutors say the Tates controlled the victims’ OnlyFans’ accounts and earnings amounting to tens of thousands of euros, underlining concerns among some human rights groups about the potential for the exploitation of women on such platforms.
Reuters couldn’t verify the existence of the alleged victims’ OnlyFans accounts.
UK-based OnlyFans has 150 million users who pay “creators” monthly fees of varying amounts for their content, much of it erotic or pornographic, but also in areas such as fitness training and music.
The company, whose 1.5 million creators can earn anything from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands a month, says on its website it’s “the safest digital media platform”. It was founded in 2016 and grew rapidly during COVID-19 lockdowns.
An OnlyFans spokesperson told Reuters that Andrew Tate “has never had” a creator account or received payments. They said OnlyFans had been monitoring him since early 2022 and taken “proactive measures” to stop him posting or monetizing content, without elaborating on the reasons for the scrutiny or the steps taken.
The spokesperson added that creators as a whole underwent extensive identification checks and that all content was reviewed by the platform, which worked closely with law enforcement. Vidineac declined to comment about the measures taken by OnlyFans against Tate.
HOW I GET WOMEN TO LOVE ME
Andrew Tate’s image has been stoked by a series of contentious comments. He’s compared women to dogs and said they bear some responsibility for being raped. His remarks got him banned from Facebook, Instagram and other leading social media platforms last year.
A spokesperson for Meta said Tate was banned in August 2022 from its Facebook and Instagram platforms for violating its policies, which forbid “gender-based hate, any threats of sexual violence, or threats to share non-consensual intimate imagery”.
Tate said on a podcast in 2021 that he had started a webcam business in Britain that had peaked with 75 women working for him earning $600,000 a month – a sum Reuters was unable to independently verify. He didn’t elaborate in the podcast on what the women did.
Up until last month, his website offered a course costing more than $400 that promised to teach “every step to building a girl who is submissive, loyal and in love with you”.
“THAT IS MY SKILL. To extremely efficiently get women in love with me,” he said on the website. The pages about the course, reviewed by Reuters, were removed in January.
In a separate YouTube video aimed at men who want to make money by putting women on OnlyFans, Tate called the platform “the greatest hustle in the world”. The original date of the video, which was uploaded multiple times, is unclear.
In the court document, lawyer Vidineac said Tate’s online persona was a “virtual character” constructed to gain followers and make money, and had “nothing to do with the real man”.
Tate’s Twitter account, reinstated in November, one month after billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform, protests his innocence to his 4.8 million followers. “They have arrested me to ‘look’ for evidence … which they will not find because it doesn’t exist,” said a Jan. 15 post.
AMERICAN WOMAN ‘VERY AFRAID’
Tate first met the Moldovan woman virtually on Instagram in January 2022 before they met in person in London the following month, and by March she was in Romania, prosecutors said in the court document, which includes WhatsApp exchanges between Feb. 4 and Apr. 8.
Authorities moved on the brothers on Apr. 11, when police raided one of their properties in Bucharest on suspicion that an American woman was being held there against her will.
According to prosecutors, the American woman – another of the alleged six victims – met Tristan Tate online in November 2021, then in person in Miami the following month. They said he lured her to Romania by expressing “false feelings” for her and promising a serious relationship, paid for her plane ticket and said he could help her earn “100K a month” on OnlyFans.
Tristan Tate picked her up at Bucharest airport in a Rolls-Royce on April 5 2022, and took her back to his house, which had two armed guards, the court document said.
He told her she wasn’t a prisoner but said the guards wouldn’t let her outside without his permission, it added. He said it was dangerous for her to leave “because he had enemies”.
There were cameras all over the house, which Tristan Tate monitored remotely, prosecutors said in the document. He once messaged the American to say he could see where she was and what she was doing, they said.
When she moved to another house with four of Andrew Tate’s “girlfriends” she was allowed outside but only if accompanied by other women, said the prosecutors, adding that she was “very afraid” of the brothers.
In the document, Tate’s lawyer said the American woman had a mobile phone, internet access and the freedom to leave the house as she pleased.
The woman has not spoken publicly about the Tates or the prosecutors’ allegations.
Romanian prosecutors said on Jan. 15 that as part of their probe into the suspects they had seized assets worth almost $4 million, including a fleet of luxury cars from Andrew Tate’s compound on the outskirts of Bucharest.
‘SEXUALLY EXPLOITATIVE CONTENT’
The detention of the Tates, along with two Romanian women accused of working for them, has been extended to Feb. 27. Their appeal against that detention was rejected by a court on Wednesday. A judge can order their detention for up to 180 days while the investigation is ongoing, which means it could stretch into late June.
The suspected accomplices, Georgiana Naghel and Luana Radu, controlled the six victims’ OnlyFans and TikTok accounts on behalf of the Tates, skimming off half the revenue and fining women for being late or sniffling on camera, said prosecutors.
The pair threatened to beat the women up if they did not do their job, according to the court document.
Naghel and Radu have denied all the allegations against them. Vidineac, who also represents Naghel, and Radu’s lawyer said they couldn’t comment on the case.
The Tates’ operation put women on TikTok to drive traffic to OnlyFans because of its lucrative subscriptions, prosecutors said. Reuters couldn’t independently verify the existence of the TikTok accounts in question.
TikTok said in a statement that Andrew Tate was banned from its platform, and that it had been taking action against videos and accounts related to him that violated its prohibition against “sexually exploitative content”.
The company declined to comment further, citing Romania’s ongoing investigation.
Reporting by Luiza Ilie, Octav Ganea and Andrew R.C. Marshall. Editing by Jason Szep and Pravin Char
WASHINGTON, Jan 3 (Reuters) – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will allow retail pharmacies to offer abortion pills in the United States for the first time, the agency said on Tuesday, even as more states seek to ban medication abortion.
The regulatory change will potentially expand abortion access as President Joe Biden’s administration wrestles with how best to protect abortion rights after they were sharply curtailed by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the landmark Roe v Wade ruling and the state bans that followed.
Pharmacies can start applying for certification to distribute abortion pill mifepristone with one of the two companies that make it, and if successful they will be able to dispense it directly to patients upon receiving a prescription from a certified prescriber.
The FDA had first said it would be making those changes in December 2021 when it announced it would relax some risk evaluation and mitigation strategies, or REMS, on the pill, that had been in place since the agency approved it in 2000 and were lifted temporarily in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The changes included permanently removing restrictions on mail order shipping of the pills and their prescription through telehealth.
The agency finalized the changes on Tuesday after reviewing supplemental applications from Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, the two companies that make the drug in the United States.
“Under the Mifepristone REMS Program, as modified, Mifeprex and its approved generic can be dispensed by certified pharmacies or by or under the supervision of a certified prescriber,” the agency said on its website on Tuesday.
Mifeprex is the brand name version of mifepristone which, in combination with a second drug called misoprostol that has various uses including miscarriage management, induces an abortion up to 10 weeks into a pregnancy in a process known as medication abortion.
Abortion rights activists say the pill has a long track record of being safe and effective, with no risk of overdose or addiction. In several countries, including India and Mexico, women can buy them without a prescription to induce abortion.
“Today’s news is a step in the right direction for health equity,” Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson said in a statement.
“Being able to access your prescribed medication abortion through the mail or to pick it up in person from a pharmacy like any other prescription is a game changer for people trying to access basic health care,” Johnson added.
NO EQUAL ACCESS
The regulatory change will, however, not provide equal access to all people, GenBioPro, which makes the generic version of mifepristone, said in a statement.
Abortion bans, some targeting mifepristone, have gone into effect in more than a dozen states since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to terminating pregnancies when it scrapped the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling last year.
Women in those states could potentially travel to other states to obtain medication abortion.
The president of anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America, Marjorie Dannenfelser, said the latest FDA move endangers women’s safety and the lives of unborn children.
“State lawmakers and Congress must stand as a bulwark against the Biden administration’s pro-abortion extremism,” she said in a statement.
FDA records show a small mortality case number associated with mifepristone. As of June 2021, there were reports of 26 deaths linked with the pill out of 4.9 million people estimated to have taken it since it was approved in September 2000.
Retail pharmacies will have to weigh whether or not to offer the pill given the political controversy surrounding abortion, and determine where they can do so.
A spokesperson for CVS Health (CVS.N) said the drugstore chain owner was reviewing the updated REMS “drug safety program certification requirements for mifepristone to determine the requirements to dispense in states that do not restrict the dispensing of medications prescribed for elective termination of pregnancy.”
A spokesperson for Walgreens (WBA.O), one of the largest U.S. pharmacies, said the company was also reviewing the FDA’s regulatory change. “We will continue to enable our pharmacists to dispense medications consistent with federal and state law.”
Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Additional reporting by Eric Beech in Washington, Shivani Tanna, Rahat Sandhu, and Kanjyik Ghosh in Bengaluru; Editing by Himani Sarkar
Washington-based correspondent covering U.S. healthcare and pharmaceutical policy with a focus on the Department of Health and Human Services and the agencies it oversees such as the Food and Drug Administration, previously based in Iraq and Egypt.
NEW YORK, Oct 22 (Reuters) – Lev Parnas, a onetime associate of Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, was found guilty on Friday of violating U.S. campaign finance laws during the 2018 elections.
Parnas, a Ukraine-born American businessman, and his former associate Igor Fruman had been accused of soliciting funds from Russian businessman Andrey Muraviev to donate to candidates in states where the group was seeking licenses to operate cannabis businesses in 2018.
Parnas also concealed that he and Fruman, who pleaded guilty in September, were the true source of a donation to a group supporting Republican then-President Trump, prosecutors said. Giuliani’s attorney has said the Parnas case is separate from a probe into whether violated lobbying laws while representing Trump.
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Giuliani, a U.S. prosecutor in the 1980s before he was elected New York’s mayor in 1994, has not been charged with any crimes and denies wrongdoing.
Parnas was found guilty on all six counts of federal election law violations that he faced, which included illegally helping a foreigner contribute to a U.S. election campaign, making contributions in the names of others, and lying to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC).
Andrey Kukushkin, a Muraviev associate and California resident who was tried alongside Parnas, was found guilty on Friday of two counts of campaign finance violations. Kukushkin is also a Ukraine native.
The trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan has drawn attention because of the role Parnas and Belarus-born U.S. citizen Fruman played in helping Giuliani, who was Trump’s personal attorney while he held office, to investigate Democrat Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign. Biden won the election, denying Trump a second term.
Parnas, dressed in a blue suit, stared straight at the jury as the verdict was read. Kukushkin, wearing a grey sweater, shook his head after he was pronounced guilty on the second count.
“I’ve never hid from nobody,” Parnas said as he left court wearing a black “Combat COVID” mask. “I’ve always stood and tried to tell the truth.”
His attorney Joseph Bondy said they would be filing a motion to vacate the verdict “in the interest of justice.”
Lev Parnas, Ukrainian-American businessman and former Giuliani associate, walks to the United States Court in Manhattan in New York City, New York, U.S., October 18, 2021. REUTERS/Mike Segar
“It’s obviously a very difficult time for Mr. Parnas and his wife and his children,” Bondy said.
U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken denied a request from prosecutors to detain Parnas and Kukushkin. “The defendants have sufficiently established that they’re not a risk of flight,” Oetken said after the jury left.
Oetken set a sentencing date of Feb. 16 for Kukushkin. He did not set a sentencing date for Parnas, who faces another possible trial on separate fraud charges.
‘IN WELL OVER HIS HEAD’
The case provided a glimpse into the inner workings of political fundraising in the United States.
“You saw the wires from Muraviev,” Assistant U.S Attorney Hagan Scotten told the jury during closing arguments on Thursday. “You saw how that money came out on the other side, finding its way into American elections, where the defendants thought they had bought influence to further their business.”
Parnas’ defense lawyers countered that Muraviev’s funds went toward business investments, not campaign contributions, and that the donation to the pro-Trump group was from a company founded by Parnas and broke no laws.
In his closing statement Parnas attorney Bondy characterized his client as a passionate proponent of marijuana legalization who was “in well over his head.” He argued that Muraviev’s money funded business operations, not campaign contributions.
Deliberations in the trial began on Friday morning and lasted about five hours.
Fruman, who lives in Florida, pleaded guilty to one count of soliciting campaign contributions from a foreign national. His sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 21.
Parnas and Kukushkin had faced two counts of conspiring to make donations from a foreign national, and making the donations. Parnas had also been charged with four other counts, including making false statements to the Federal Elections Commission.
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Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Editing by Franklin Paul, Grant McCool and Jonathan Oatis
Oct 22 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear on Nov. 1 a challenge to a Texas law that imposes a near-total ban on the procedure and lets private citizens enforce it – a case that could dramatically curtail abortion access in the United States if the justices endorse the measure’s unique design.
The justices took up requests by President Joe Biden’s administration and abortion providers to immediately review their challenges to the law. The court, which on Sept. 1 allowed the law to go into effect, declined to act on the Justice Department’s request to immediately block enforcement of the measure.
The court will consider whether the law’s unusual private-enforcement structure prevents federal courts from intervening to strike it down and whether the federal government is even allowed to sue the state to try to block it.
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The measure bans abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, a point when many women do not yet realize they are pregnant. It makes an exception for a documented medical emergency but not for cases of rape or incest.
Liberal Justice Sotomayor dissented from the court’s deferral of a decision on whether to block enforcement of the law while the litigation continues. Sotomayor said the law’s novel design has suspended nearly all abortions in Texas, the second most populous U.S. state, with about 29 million people.
“The state’s gambit has worked. The impact is catastrophic,” Sotomayor wrote.
The Texas dispute is the second major abortion case that the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has scheduled for the coming months, with arguments set for Dec. 1 over the legality of a restrictive Mississippi abortion law.
The Texas and Mississippi measures are among a series of Republican-backed laws passed at the state level limiting abortion rights – coming at a time when abortion opponents are hoping that the Supreme Court will overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade that legalized the procedure nationwide.
Mississippi has asked the justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, and the Texas attorney general on Thursday signaled that he also would like to see that ruling fall.
A supporter of reproductive rights holds a sign outside the Texas State Capitol building during the nationwide Women’s March, held after Texas rolled out a near-total ban on abortion procedures and access to abortion-inducing medications, in Austin, Texas, U.S. October 2, 2021. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Lower courts already have blocked Mississippi’s law banning abortions starting at 15 weeks of pregnancy.
The Texas measure takes enforcement out of the hands of state officials, instead enabling private citizens to sue anyone who performs or assists a woman in getting an abortion after cardiac activity is detected in the embryo. That feature has helped shield the law from being immediately blocked as it made it more difficult to directly sue the state.
Individual citizens can be awarded a minimum of $10,000 for bringing successful lawsuits under the law. Critics have said this provision lets people act as anti-abortion bounty hunters, a characterization its proponents reject.
Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing the abortion providers, said Friday’s decision to hear their case “brings us one step closer to the restoration of Texans’ constitutional rights and an end to the havoc and heartache of this ban.”
Alexis McGill Johnson, president of healthcare and abortion provider Planned Parenthood, said it is “devastating” that the justices did not immediately block a law that already has had a “catastrophic impact” after being in effect nearly two months.
“Patients who have the means have fled the state, traveling hundreds of miles to access basic care, and those without means have been forced to carry pregnancies against their will,” she added.
Kimberlyn Schwartz, a spokesperson for the Texas Right to Life anti-abortion group, praised the court’s action, saying it “will continue to save an estimated 100 babies per day, and because the justices will actually discuss whether these lawsuits are valid in the first place.”
The Supreme Court only rarely decides to hear cases before lower courts have ruled, indicating that the justices have deemed the Texas matter of high public importance and requiring immediate review.
The Justice Department filed its lawsuit in September challenging the Texas law, arguing that it is unconstitutional and explicitly designed to evade judicial review.
Rulings in Texas and Mississippi cases are due by the end of next June, but could come sooner.
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Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham
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