When the Supreme Court toppled the constitutional right to abortion, some prosecutors country vowed to refrain from enforcing new state-imposed bans on the procedure. Such promises may be hard to keep.
Andrew Warren, the twice-elected state attorney in Hillsborough County, Fl., a state where abortion is now illegal after 15 weeks of pregnancy, was ousted by Gov. Ron DeSantis after he joined a group of prosecutors and some state attorneys general in a written pledge not to pursue criminal charges in abortion cases.
The Florida dispute shows how the legal fight over abortion has shifted since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and said states can regulate abortion, Bloomberg reports.
While states including California, New York and Illinois have declared they will protect access to the procedure, more than a dozen including Texas, Wisconsin and Louisiana now have bans either in place or temporarily on hold by judges, and more are expected, creating rifts among local officials.
The 90 prosecutors, including Warren, who signed a statement in June said personal medical decisions shouldn’t be criminalized.
In explaining their pledge not to enforce bans, the prosecutors said they’ve long had wide latitude over charging decisions. Some have used that power to focus more on violent crimes and less on things like undocumented immigrants or marijuana offenses.
“We decline to use our offices’ resources to criminalize reproductive health decisions and commit to exercise our well-settled discretion and refrain from prosecuting those who seek, provide, or support abortions,” the prosecutors said.
It isn’t clear how effective such pledges can be in the more than two dozen states where abortions are prohibited, severely restricted or where bans are being litigated. Of those who signed the statement, only 16 local prosecutors were in jurisdictions with abortion clinics facing new bans.
In New Orleans, the City Council voted unanimously to deprioritize the investigation of abortion cases and the Orleans Parish district attorney promised not to prosecute them. All three of the abortion clinics in Louisiana are moving out of state.
The City Council in Austin, Texas -- a state with a near-complete ban on abortions -- adopted a recommendation to deprioritize abortion-related cases and to restrict the use of city funds for such investigations. It’s a non-binding measure because Texas law prohibits the city council from directing how its employees handle criminal cases.
Even if prosecutors say they won't act, “There are going to be police and sheriffs who might not be ideologically aligned with their prosecutor, and so abortion providers and even pregnant people and other people associated with the process could find themselves being harassed anyway, or arrested anyway or surveilled anyway,” said Somil Trivedi of the Criminal Law Reform Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
By the end of August, nearly all of the abortion trigger bans in the U.S. will have taken effect.
Thirteen states have laws designed to outlaw abortions automatically once the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
A number of states have codified abortion bans without the use of a trigger law. So far, a total of 14 states have near-total abortion bans or bans after six weeks of pregnancy, NPR reports.
Three of those states are expected to implement even more draconian laws starting Aug. 25.