Judge vows quick abortion ruling

AUSTIN — A federal trial to determine whether Texas can legally enforce strict new abortion laws wrapped up Wednesday, with a judge vowing to issue a decision before the regulations take effect next week.

Equipped with two full days of witness testimony and stacks of evidence, U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel now has to decide on the constitutionality of laws requiring abortion providers to gain admitting privileges at local hospitals and restricting the use of pregnancy-ending drugs.

Both regulations are set to kick in Tuesday.

“I recognize the clock is ticking toward Oct. 29,” Yeakel said. “Both sides raised strong issues. I will get a final judgment out as quickly as I can get a final judgment out.”

Abortion-rights groups, including Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights, lodged a legal challenge last month, seeking to quash the two regulations.

The trial started Monday and was expected to finish Tuesday. Yeakel, however, stretched the hearing into Wednesday to afford abortion-rights lawyers and Attorney General Greg Abbott's legal team enough time to deliver vigorous closing arguments.

In their final statements, abortion providers argued that Texas' new laws would leave more than 22,000 women without access to the procedure, but state lawyers countered by saying the Legislature can enact stricter regulations to protect “fetal life.”

Janet Crepps, the lead attorney in the case for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a local hospital within 30 miles of their clinic will have a “devastating effect,” resulting in one-third of the state's abortion providers ceasing to provide the procedure.

“As of next Tuesday, there will no longer be abortion services in Lubbock, Waco, Killeen, McAllen, Harlingen or Fort Worth,” she said, noting that clinics in Austin and San Antonio also would stop offering the procedure if the law is upheld.

Delivering the state's closing argument, Deputy Solicitor General Andy Oldham criticized the case put forth by abortion-rights providers as a “house of cards.”

In the process, Oldham took aim at one of the advocacy groups' main pieces of evidence: a study from Joseph Potter, a University of Texas demographer and a Planned Parenthood witnesses, that concluded one-third of the state's abortion clinics would no longer be operational and that tens of thousands of Texas women would be impacted under the new laws.

State lawyers spent portions of Monday and Tuesday grilling Potter over his study's methodology, calling the results biased “eye popping numbers” that were not substantiated by an economic analysis.

“It's based only on the self-interested statements of the plaintiffs and abortion providers who are unhappy with the statute,” Oldham said. “Without that one-third closure rate, the rest of plaintiffs case falls like a house of cards.”

That abortion-rights groups have no way of knowing the full impact of the law before it's fully implemented was one of the state's main arguments throughout the trial. State lawyers cast the figures for projected clinics closures as “hearsay anecdotes.”

To that extent, the abortion-rights groups put multiple witnesses on the stand to highlight what they described as the nearly-impossible task of obtaining admitting privileges that will cause the clinics to shutter.

That included a clinic owner, who testified that some of her businesses will close because all but one of her doctors have been unable to secure admitting privileges so far.

Crepps also raised the point that abortion providers were given only 90 days to obtain admitting privileges before the law actually went into effect. Yet, hospitals have 170 days to respond to an application for admitting privileges.

The abortion-rights groups also argued that new requirements for pill-induced medical abortions are equivalent to “turning back the clock 20 years.”

Under the law set take effect Tuesday, abortion providers dispensing pregnancy-ending drugs would be required to follow a Food and Drug Administration protocol that was approved in 2000.

Compared to the process currently used by most abortion clinics, the FDA protocol requires a different dosage, an additional clinic visit and bans pill-induced abortions at seven weeks, instead of the current standard of nine weeks.

Abortion-rights groups say in recent years they've adopted a different set of rules for administering the two-drug combo that is safer and is currently used widely throughout the industry.

But Oldham argued the regulation legally can be enforced because the state's interest in protecting fetal life extends to trying to prevent birth defects that could be caused by pregnancy-ending drugs.

Abortion providers “think they can do things better than the FDA,” he said. “It is not at all clear that their off-label protocols are better.”