WASHINGTON: A US appeals court late on Friday temporarily reinstated Texas's restrictive abortion law, which bars the procedure as early as six weeks into pregnancy and outsources enforcement of the ban to ordinary citizens.
The administrative stay from the Fifth Circuit, a conservative-leaning appeals court, came in a lawsuit brought by the US Justice Department on Sep 9. The purpose of the administrative stay is to give the court time to determine whether to issue a more permanent ruling. The Justice Department has argued that the law impedes women from exercising their constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy that was recognized in the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v Wade decision, which legalised abortion nationwide. The department also argued that the law improperly interferes with the operations of the federal government to provide abortion-related services.