![]() "It concerns me, yeah, because the statute was never intended to restrict access to medically-necessary abortions," he said. On the advice of her doctors, she traveled to Colorado for an emergency abortion that doctors recommended but said they could not provide under the law.Īsked about that case, Mitchell expressed surprise that the law he helped draft would be interpreted to prohibit medically-necessary abortions. 8 took effect, Zargarian says she went into labor around 19 weeks, too early for the pregnancy to survive. "Where else in medicine do we do nothing and just wait and see how sick a patient becomes before acting?" ![]() They said they wanted to help but couldn't under Texas law," she said. "I begged my doctors to give me the care I needed. She spoke during a March press conference announcing the lawsuit outside the statehouse in Austin. 8 has forced difficult and sometimes dangerous choices.Īnna Zargarian is among a group of Texas women who were denied abortions for medical emergencies and are now suing the state. They announced the lawsuit at a press conference in Austin in March.īut for many patients in Texas who wanted and could no longer get abortions, S.B. 8 to take effect – to the surprise of some legal observers.Ī group of women who say they were denied medically necessary abortions under Texas law, including S.B. ![]() And in 2021, with three justices appointed by former President Donald Trump on the bench, the Supreme Court allowed S.B. Mitchell thought letting private citizens file civil lawsuits could be a way to get around Roe. "We were thinking a lot over the years about tactics to try to make our laws just more immune from court challenge," Mitchell said. During an interview inside Hughes's office at the Austin statehouse, Mitchell said the two men had known each other for years, and had seen state legislatures around the country pass abortion bans only to have them struck down under Roe v. Mitchell employed that technical acumen when he worked with Republican State Sen. "You give him 10 cases and five statutes and all this stuff and he can figure out the way to cut through this mess better than virtually anybody else you could meet." "He's kind of a technical magician," Epstein said. His former law professor, Richard Epstein, describes Mitchell as one of the brightest legal minds ever to sit in his classrooms over Epstein's more than five decades of teaching at the University of Chicago and NYU. Shots - Health News 'I'll lose my family.' A husband's dread during an abortion ordeal in Oklahoma Residents spent hours debating a local anti-abortion ordinance he helped draft as part of a nationwide effort by a Texas-based group to pass local restrictions on abortion. Two days before the hearing in Austin, Mitchell had been the elephant not in the room during a public hearing in the small town of Edgewood, New Mexico. On matters large and small, Mitchell has become an expert at finding tiny openings in the law and leveraging them on behalf of his conservative clients and their causes.Ī former Texas solicitor general, Mitchell said his legal work now focuses on helping conservative lawmakers draft legislation "in a way that will make them not only effective, but also able to withstand a court challenge if one arises." He also represents individuals and government entities involved in litigation like the library case. On April 25, residents and outside activists packed a meeting room in Edgewood, N.M., as the town commission debated an anti-abortion ordinance drafted with help from Jonathan Mitchell. Lane told Mitchell the whole thing had been a waste of the court's time, before adjourning the hearing. ![]() Mitchell, who grew up in Pennsylvania and whose law firm is based in Austin, said he believed the other side hadn't followed all the rules, and he was simply acting in his clients' best interest by advising them not to appear. Judge Lane asked why Mitchell's clients hadn't shown up. Local library patrons are challenging the removal on First Amendment grounds. He is defending local officials who've been sued over the removal of public library books after conservative activists deemed them offensive. Mitchell was inside a federal courtroom in Austin for a discovery hearing in a book-banning case from tiny Llano, Texas. "What part of courteous lawyering is this?" Magistrate Judge Mark Lane asked from the bench, on a recent morning in late April, after Mitchell's clients had failed to show up for a scheduled deposition. But he's also relentless - even when he knows he's about to exasperate a federal judge. In person, Jonathan Mitchell is polite and even soft-spoken. Jonathan Mitchell, pictured on April 27 inside the statehouse in Austin, Texas, is credited with devising the legal strategy behind the near-total abortion ban in Texas known as S.B.
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