Legal Fight Ensues Over Countdown To End Abortion In Tennessee

By Anita Wadhwani, Tennessee Lookout

June 28, 2022

At 10:25 a.m. on Friday, a little more than an hour after the U.S. Supreme Court ended the Constitutional right to abortion, lawyers representing four of Tennessee’s abortion providers sent an email to their legal adversaries in the office of the Tennessee Attorney General.

The lawyers planned to ask a federal appeals court to dismiss a case they had fought for over the past two years — a lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s “heartbeat” abortion law banning most abortions at about 6 weeks of pregnancy, or as soon as a fetal electrical impulses can be detected. With the Supreme Court’s ruling, the issue was moot, the email said.

But by 11:33 a.m. the same day, state lawyers defending the law had beat them to the courthouse.
In an emergency motion to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, where the case ultimately landed, they asked the court lift its temporary injunction of the law — allowing Tennessee officials to enforce it — but not dismiss the case.

On Monday, a series of competing arguments were filed in a federal courthouse in downtown Nashville and with an appeals court in Cincinnati — with each side acknowledging the challenge to the law is a case the clinics can no longer win, but disagreeing on how the litigation should end.
Once the legal challenge ends, so too will abortion access at Tennessee’s clinics in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Friday decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

The 6th Circuit should send the case back to be dismissed by the federal court in Nashville, clinic lawyers said in legal filings Monday.

But state lawyers likened those arguments to a stall tactic designed to allow clinics to eke out more days in which they can legally provide abortions in Tennessee.

Abortion providers “want the Court’s permission to continue violating the (law) for as long as possible without conceding that (its provisions) are constitutional, even though they clearly are under Dobbs,” state lawyers argued.

“The Court should fully stay the preliminary injunction so that the violation of Tennessee’s sovereignty can end today. The lives of Tennessee children are at stake.”

A separate “trigger” law, passed in 2019 by a GOP supermajority in the Tennessee legislature, starts a different countdown clock to the end of nearly all abortion access in Tennessee. That law is expected to take effect 30 days after the Supreme Court’s decision.

That prospect has led some of the state’s providers to cease all abortion care, while others have announced they will carry a full schedule of appointments in the days to come.

Planned Parenthood clinics in Memphis and Nashville hoped to continue providing abortions until July 1, CEO Ashley Coffield told reporters Friday. In Memphis, CHOICES – the Memphis Center for Reproductive Health continued to see patients seeking through the weekend.

State lawyers on Monday asked the 6th Circuit to issue a decision as soon as possible.

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