The anti-abortion group behind the Texas law is already working with three other states on their own legislation.
Texas’ near-total abortion ban is likely to start a national trend after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law, as Florida state lawmakers became the first in an expected string of Republican state legislators Thursday to signal they intend to pass their own anti-abortion legislation that copies Texas and lets private citizens, rather than the government, enforce the law. Despite being narrow and based more on procedural issues than the actual law itself, the Supreme Court’s ruling that upheld SB 8 “seem[s] to indicate that this is a good strategy,” Seago told Forbes about the Texas law’s stipulation that private citizens enforce the ban instead of the government. Seago noted that the law’s “specific enforcement mechanism” putting the onus on private citizens is what appeared to prompt the Supreme Court to give the bill the “green light.” “This is not a ‘What happens in Texas stays in Texas’ situation,” Kristin Ford, NARAL Pro-Choice America’s acting vice president of communications and research, told HuffPost before the Supreme Court’s ruling came out. “There’s also the very real threat that this has a domino effect in other states that are hellbent on ending legal abortion.” In addition to South Carolina, the next states to move forward with Texas-style abortion legislation could be Arizona and Ohio, abortion rights groups that track state policy predicted to Politico, along with other states that have previously passed fetal heartbeat bills like Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and North Dakota.
