The United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit last week upheld the ban on a common procedure for second-trimester abortions in Texas. The decision reversed a lower court’s decision that held Texas’s limits on dismemberment abortions were unconstitutional. The ruling dealt with a 2017 Texas law, Senate Bill 8, which effectively banned the use of D&E, or dilation and evacuation, to perform an abortion.

The ruling stated, “The district court declared SB8 facially unconstitutional. It held that SB8 imposes an undue burden on a large fraction of women, primarily because it determined that SB8 amounted to a ban on all D&E abortions. But viewing SB8 through a binary framework — that either D&Es can be done only by live dismemberment or else women cannot receive abortions in the second trimester — is to accept a false dichotomy. Instead, the record shows that doctors can safely perform D&Es and comply with SB8 using methods that are already in widespread use.”