Trump's Texas Judge Tries, Fails to Keep Abortion Hearing a Secret

Plus: Florida's six-week abortion ban moves a step closer to becoming law

March 17, 2023

Here’s another edition of Hard to Believe It’s Only Tuesday, a weekly roundup of the top headlines, tweets (for now!), toks, takes, and more in abortion news. You can always email me ([email protected]) or DM me on instagram with action items, takes, and news clips.

Regular readers will notice a new feature! If you make it all the way to the end of the newsletter, you’ll be treated to Goodnight and Good Dunk, a little sign-off nug featuring a pro-abortion burn. If you spot a good dunk out in the wild, tag me/shuffle it into my inbox.

The big takeaway: This week, two stories from nearly opposite ends of Texas give form and shape to the legalized terror of the modern anti-abortion landscape. First: an anti-abortion Trump appointee to the U.S. Northern District of Texas, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, tried to prevent the public and the media from finding out about a hearing in his Amarillo courtroom on Wednesday in a lawsuit demanding the FDA rescind approval for the abortion medication mifepristone. When the hearing got underway, only a handful of reporters and members of the public were allowed to view the proceedings. And second: last Friday, a Galveston man named Marcus Silva filed suit demanding $3 million in “wrongful death” compensation from his ex-wife’s friends for, he claims, assisting his ex-wife in ending her own pregnancy. Silva is being represented by Jonathan Mitchell (who designed Texas’ “bounty hunter” abortion ban), Texas State Rep. Briscoe Cain (who wants to prosecute people for funding abortion), and the anti-abortion Thomas More Society.

While marginalized Americans have for hundreds of years rebuked and attempted to reform a fundamentally racist, sexist, and classist justice (“justice”) system established to protect and preserve white supremacy, patriarchy and property, the 2022 Dobbs ruling shattered a comfortable fiction for many who previously believed that the rule of law would forever serve as some sort of immutable, freedom-defending forcefield that would always prevent the worst incursions on civil and human rights. With the Supreme Court’s commitment to ending abortion confirmed, we now wait to see whether more courts — federal and state — will serve as further proving grounds for legitimizing the increasingly powerful fear-mongering fascism of the anti-abortion political establishment.

When (I don’t think it’s a question of “if”) these courts do engage in such legitimization, I hope we recognize it not as betrayal of American democratic principles, but rather the system working as intended, serving the people it was always intended to serve.

The Top Headlines

The Takes

  • Mississippi Today’s Bobby Harrison wonders why Mississippi Republicans are afraid of putting a vote on abortion rights in front of their constituents. (You know why.)

  • A coalition of media outlets sent an open letter to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the judge who tried to hide this week’s medication abortion hearing from the public: “Across the ideological spectrum, the public is intensely interested in this case. The Court’s delayed docketing of notice of Wednesday’s hearing, and its request to the parties and their counsel not to disclose the hearing schedule publicly, harm everyone, including those who support the plaintiffs’ position and those who support the defendants’ position.”

  • Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern argue that a Texas man’s lawsuit against women who he claims helped his ex-wife end a pregnancy is all about fear-mongering: “The fear of winding up ensnared in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit that ruins the lives of one’s closest friends is certainly a good motivator. Mitchell, Cain, and the Thomas More lawyers want all pregnant Texans to understand that they are being watched —in this case, by a vindictive ex—and will be reported to the state if they seek to terminate a pregnancy. They are never safe from men who will wield litigation as a tool to punish women who attempt to escape a manipulative partner. This is spousal abuse via lawsuit.”

  • Physician Alyssa Burgart reminds medical providers that “we are not cops,” and that there is no legal or moral obligation to report people who have abortions to law enforcement: “We need it to be clear that health systems, healthcare workers, and health data companies primary responsibilities are to patients, not law enforcement.”

The Tweets/Toks/Grams

  • The Utah Abortion Fund fact-checks Utah Gov. Spencer Cox:

  • The West Alabama Women’s Center’s Robin Marty reminds us how valuable the knowledge held and services provided by abortion professionals can be.

The Fuck Are We Supposed to Do About It?

Goodnight and good dunk: There’s a bad op-ed in the New York Times this week from an OB-GYN who appears to have very recently realized abortion access is under attack, arguing that what this country needs now is a centrist approach to abortion restrictions, something nobody ever thought of before in the whole history of time. We Testify’s Renee Bracey Sherman offers a few choice thoughts, among them: “I can’t believe we still have people out here not getting the fucking lesson: we cannot protect some abortions over others because they will eventually come for all of them. The exceptions has never worked, both when Alan Guttmacher dreamed it up or for this useless sack of hair.”

That’s all for this week. I’m sure I’ve missed something you’d like to see featured in this roundup, for I am but one woman with a computer and an abortion-news-induced drinking problem. Holler at me — [email protected], or DM me on Instagram, and I’ll try to add follow-ups as I’m able.