Women’s March Statement on Supreme Court Ruling on S.B.8

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, the Supreme Court allowed abortion providers to move forward with their challenge to Texas’ 6 week abortion ban, while denying the Biden Administration's request to block the law entirely. The ruling will once again allow the most restrictive abortion law in the country to remain in effect—which has effectively ended reproductive freedom in Texas and criminalizes anyone who attempts to help women exercise their right to choose. Women’s March Executive Director Rachel O’Leary Carmona issued the following statement in response: 

“Yet again, the Supreme Court has abdicated its duty to protect and defend the Constitution by allowing Texas’s S. B. 8, the most radical and unprecedented anti-abortion law in the country, to stand. The Court’s ruling accomplishes the bare minimum of allowing abortion providers to sue someone to block the unconstitutional ban. But that means little to the women in Texas who are still being impacted by it every day. 

“At the end of the day, Texas continues to successfully circumvent the Constitution. And the politicized Supreme Court continues to aid and abet them. It’s the job of federal courts to protect our constitutional rights—even and especially when state laws infringe upon them—and the Supreme Court is refusing to do it. 

“We’ve always said this is how we’d lose Roe—not with a bang but a million procedural cuts and hold-ups. This is what we meant. And now, we mean this quite literally too: our very right to an abortion is on the line. If Democrats in D.C. care about the women who voted them into power in 2020, they need to start acting like it. We’re sick and tired of politicians who used the threat of laws like S. B. 8 to get us to the polls last year, promised us they would fight laws like S. B. 8 if they were elected, and now sit on their hands and claim they can’t do anything as laws like S. B. 8 remain in effect. 

“It’s long past time to start treating this like an emergency. That means fighting back against this unconstitutional attack—and all unconstitutional attacks—on reproductive rights. It means codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law and expanding the Supreme Court now.