The first lawsuit against a Texas abortion doctor who allegedly violated the state’s new pro-life law has been filed, and it is just as weak and bogus as the other attempts made by abortion advocates to strike down the law.
The suit was filed by Arkansas citizen Oscar Stilley, who admitted that he is a “disbarred and disgraced former Arkansas lawyer” and a felon currently on house arrest. The first two pages of his complaint have almost nothing to do with the Texas law at all. Instead, he complains about his felony conviction and sentencing, which he claims were “baseless.”
Eventually, Stilley gets to the crux of his suit, saying he has the legal standing to sue Dr. Alan Braid, a San Antonio abortionist who claimed in a Washington Post op-ed last week that he purposefully broke the Texas law to invite a lawsuit, because the law does not limit its private enforcement mechanism to Texas residents only. At first glance, Stilley appears to be correct. The law states that “any person, other than an officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity in this state, may bring a civil action against any person who performs or induces an abortion.” Moreover, the law does not require that Stilley prove personal injury, so it does not matter whether Braid’s actions affected Stilley personally — Stilley still has the right to sue him.
But that does not mean Stilley will succeed, because it is not at all clear the law was broken. In his op-ed for the Washington Post, Braid claimed he “provided an abortion to a woman who, though still in her first trimester, was beyond the state’s new limit.” However, as National Review’s Ed Whelan notes, the law does not implement a time “limit,” as Braid suggests. It only says abortions cannot be performed once “a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child” is detected. The fact that Braid did not say specifically that he detected a fetal heartbeat before performing the abortion leaves open the possibility that he might not have detected a heartbeat at all, which would mean no laws were violated.
The lawsuit is an obvious setup. Stilley has admitted that he is pro-choice and only filed the suit to collect the $10,000 reward guaranteed by the Texas law. To understand just how unstable this man is, read the way he described Braid’s alleged procedure: “On information and belief, [Braid] is kind and patient and helpful toward bastards, but ideologically opposed to forcing any woman to produce another bastard against her own free will.”
What?
I would be surprised if any court took this lawsuit seriously, but it does expose one of the weaknesses in Texas’s pro-life law. Its failure to limit legal standing to those directly affected by violations of the law, or abortions performed, is by design — it imitates the Endangered Species Act in its aim of tying up industry (in this case the abortion industry) in lawsuits. Yet this law will continue to produce legal headaches just like this one because any old idiot can file a lawsuit. Inevitably, many such lawsuits will come from radical abortion advocates seeking to exploit the law’s weaknesses and use them to defeat it.
