A lawsuit in Texas was filed on Monday against a doctor who admitted to performing an abortion under the new restrictive state law.
Alan Braid, a San Antonio physician, stepped forward last week to say he had performed an abortion for a woman in the early stages of pregnancy, but beyond the legal limit set by Texas law.
Braid said the woman had a fundamental right to receive this care, and stated, “I fully understood that there could be legal consequences — but I wanted to make sure that Texas didn’t get away with its bid to prevent this blatantly unconstitutional law from being tested.”
The civil suit was filed by a convicted felon in Arkansas, who is serving a federal sentence from home.
Oscar Stilley, a former lawyer from Arkansas who was convicted of tax fraud in 2010, said he does not personally oppose abortion but decided to file the suit to test the Texas law’s constitutionality.
“If the law is no good, why should we have to go through a long, drawn-out process to find out if it’s garbage?” Stilley said, while also acknowledging a $10,000 bounty in the event of a successful lawsuit for a plaintiff.
A second suit filed Monday — just four paragraphs long — came from a man in Chicago who asked a state court to strike down the abortion law as invalid.
Texas Right to Life quickly disavowed the lawsuits as “self-serving legal stunts.”
The Texas law was deliberately designed to avoid judicial scrutiny by barring state officials, who would typically be the target of lawsuits, from enforcing the ban.
See more at the Washington Post and Axios
