How the Texas abortion law could lead to rollbacks of LGBTQ rights

The Texas law turns private citizens into the enforcers of the law. Many of those same citizens could be empowered to attack LGBTQ rights.

Photo: Lorie Shaull – Wikimedia Commons

On September 1, Texas’s S.B. 8 – which the Texas state legislature passed and the governor signed – went into effect, banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. That’s a moment before many women are even aware they are pregnant.

It’s not the same as other abortion bans, and the key difference could put LGBTQ rights in jeopardy as well.

Related: AOC schools Texas governor after his rape & abortion comments show “deep ignorance”

The law stands in direct violation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade which protects a woman’s right to choose, but found a novel way to circumvent that precedent.

Instead of making the government the enforcer as most laws do, S.B. 8 empowers private citizens – not only residents of Texas but potentially anyone anywhere in the country – to sue women who seek an abortion in Texas, along with anybody who assists them, like driving them to a reproductive health clinic or paying for the procedure.

This led to the Supreme Court’s conservative justices refusing to enforce Roe and stopping S.B. 8 from going into effect. They said that the enforcement mechanism – vigilantism – creates real legal questions, so S.B. 8 will have to go into effect while those questions get worked out.

The Texas law is being challenged in courts by the Biden Justice Department, so there is a chance that it will be overturned in the future.

But the law is a dangerous threat not solely for its impact on women’s reproductive rights but also for other groups, including the LGBTQ community. The same “private citizen vigilante” loophole logic that was used for S.B. 8 could be used…

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