The US supreme court allowed a Texas law that bans the vast majority of abortions to temporarily remain in effect, but will hear arguments on 1 November. The law, known as Senate Bill 8, bans the procedure after roughly six weeks gestation or before most women know they are pregnant.
The justices said they will decide whether the federal government has the right to sue over the law. The court’s action leaves in place, for the time being, a law Texas clinics say has led to an 80% reduction in abortions in the nation’s second-largest state.
The refusal by the court’s conservative majority to block the law while oral arguments are prepared was excoriated by the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor, who called the decision “cold comfort” to Texas’s 6 million women of reproductive age.
