Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor called the high court’s decision to allow Texas’s six-week abortion law to stand “catastrophic.”
Sotomayor said she “cannot capture the totality of this harm in these pages” in her opinion.
She wrote “but as these excerpts illustrate, the State (empowered by this Court’s inaction) has so thoroughly chilled the exercise of the right recognized in Roe as to nearly suspend it within its borders and strain access to it in other States.”
“The State’s gambit has worked. The impact is catastrophic,” she added.
Sotomayor also warned those women unable to travel to get an abortion may “resort to dangerous methods of self-help.”
“None of this is seriously in dispute. These circumstances are exceptional. Women seeking abortion care in Texas are entitled to relief from this Court now,” she added. “Because of the Court’s failure to act today, that relief, if it comes, will be too late for many.”
