Swiping at anti-abortion laws, former “Friends’ star Jennifer Aniston, echoing a moment during the series where her character Rachel told Ross “no uterus, no opinion,” wrote on Instagram, “I repeat … no uterus, no opinion.”
In June 2019, Aniston supported Netflix, which said it would pull production from Georgia if an anti-abortion bill passed there. She stated, “I think it’s fantastic. Good for them. They have the voices, they have the power, and that’s the way you have change happen.”
Aniston joins President Biden, who said on September 2 after the Supreme Court declined to stay a Texas law effectively banning most abortions after six weeks in a 5-4 decision that the “extreme Texas law blatantly violates the constitutional right established under Roe v. Wade and upheld as precedent for nearly half a century.”
Biden added, “My administration is deeply committed to the constitutional right established in Roe v. Wade nearly five decades ago and will protect and defend that right.”
According to The New York Times:
The Texas law bars state officials from actually enforcing it, a design intended to make it difficult to challenge in the courts. Usually a lawsuit aiming to block such a law as unconstitutional names state officials as defendants. Instead, the Texas law deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who performs an abortion or “aids and abets” a procedure. Plaintiffs who have no connection to the patient or the clinic may sue and recover legal fees, as well as $10,000 if they win.
The Biden administration announced on September 9 that it was taking legal action against the state of Texas.
The Wall Street Journal reported, “The case sets up a federal-state clash over the future of abortion rights, and a test of whether the department can upend a state law that Texas lawmakers drafted in a manner that makes it difficult for abortion-rights advocates to challenge the ban in court. The Biden administration has faced pressure from Democrats and abortion-rights groups to take action to stop the Texas restrictions after the Supreme Court last week allowed them to take effect.”
Meanwhile, Attorney General Merrick Garland stated, “[Texas Heartbeat Act] is clearly unconstitutional under long-standing Supreme Court precedent. Those precedents hold in the words of Planned Parenthood versus Casey, that quote, regardless of whether exceptions are made for particular circumstances, a state may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability.”
On Friday, William T. Thompson, a lawyer for the state of Texas, told Judge Robert L. Pitman, that the federal government could not argue in the case against the Texas law because the law did not damage the government. He stated, “If the Texas Heartbeat Act actually, you know, created a liability for the federal government, there would be at least a potential injury there that would be worth litigating. But the Heartbeat Act doesn’t do that.”