Doctor who defied Texas abortion ban gets big win in a Lone Star state courtroom

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday December 08, 2022 · 1:04 PM PST

2022/12/08 · 13:04

A woman, who chose to remain anonymous, talks to Doctor Audrey (R) before recieving an abortion at a Planned Parenthood Abortion Clinic in West Palm Beach, Florida, on July 14, 2022. - Planned Parenthood clinics in Florida have opened their doors on weekends and extended their working hours, with 12-hour days in some clinics, to handle the influx of out-of-state patients, most of them from Georgia, Alabama or Texas. While Florida has reduced its window for abortions to the 15th week of pregnancy -- it was previously the 24th week -- the state's laws are still among the most permissive in the southeast United States. Other Republican-led states in the area -- including Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia -- have almost completely banned the practice or reduced the window to six weeks, seizing on the Supreme Court's stunning reversal of the nationwide right to abortion. (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP) (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)

On Thursday, a state court in Texas threw out a lawsuit brought against abortion provider Dr. Alan Braid. The San Antonio doctor had been sued under Texas’ near-total abortion ban law, Senate Bill 8. Dr. Braid admitted to defying the law just days after it took effect. Dr. Braid was not clandestine about his actions, penning an opinion piece that was promptly published in The Washington Post, titled “Why I violated Texas’s extreme abortion ban.”

Braid was sued by two separate parties. According to the Texas Tribune, the court’s ruling did away with the first of these two cases. While the ruling sets an important precedent, it does not overturn the outrageous law itself. What the ruling does do, according to Center for Reproductive Rights president Nancy Northup (whose group is representing Braid in court), is reject “the notion that Texas can allow a person with no connection to an abortion to sue.”

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Which specific lawsuit was dismissed has not yet been reported, but as the Texas Tribune reported back in September 2021, when the lawsuits were first filed, the two parties suing Dr. Braid sounded like real patriots. Both parties were “disbarred attorneys”: Illinois resident Felipe N. Gomez and Arkansan Oscar Stilley.

In the copy of the suit he posted, Stilley described himself as a “disbarred and disgraced former Arkansas lawyer.” Stilley, who was convicted of tax fraud in 2010, is suing Braid for $100,000.

Stilley said in an interview that he's not personally opposed to abortion, and he doesn't think the law is necessarily a good one. However, he said he wants the $10,000 and will seek advice from anti-abortion organizations on how to best argue his case. If the law is struck down, he'll count it as a win to find out if the lawsuit has merit or not.

The abortion ban was implemented with a level of cynicism and cowardice only available to the more conservative policy thinkers in Texas. The law, as written, “prohibited officials from enforcing the law and has the power to anyone including those outside of the state to sue those who violate it.” The hope was to make Texans and not the law itself accountable for a wildly unpopular attack on more than half of its citizens’ freedoms.

Dr. Braid has had to close his clinic in San Antonio, Texas, that serviced the health care needs of many as a result of the new Texas laws that passed over the last two years. “It is heartbreaking that Texans still can’t get essential health care in their home state and that providers are left afraid to do their jobs. Though we were forced to close our Texas clinic, I will continue serving patients across the region with the care they deserve at new clinics in Illinois and New Mexico.”

The six-week ban on abortions and the attached vigilante law giving any yokel the right to sue and collect a bounty on anyone breaking this Salem-Witch-Trial-era-style law was one of the many big swings towards theocracy made by Republicans before they were trounced in the midterms.

As Dr. Baird wrote:

“I have daughters, granddaughters and nieces. I believe abortion is an essential part of health care. I have spent the past 50 years treating and helping patients. I can’t just sit back and watch us return to 1972.”

Hear, hear.

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