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Alexia Korberg Publishes Op-Ed on Texas’s Anti-Abortion Law in The Washington Post
September 9, 2021
Litigation partner Alexia Korberg published an opinion piece in The Washington Post that highlights the threat that Texas’s draconian new anti-abortion law poses, not only to those providing and seeking access to abortion care but also to the rule of law and fabric of society.
Alexia’s op-ed observes that the Texas law has chilling precedents, most notably in a law that Paul, Weiss challenged half a decade ago. Mississippi passed a prototype for the Texas law in 2016: a sweeping anti-LGBTQ law that gives the public license to target gay and trans people for discrimination, and the right to sue and collect money from anyone who tries to interfere.
The Supreme Court allowed both the Texas and Mississippi laws to stand under similar reasoning: that because they empower the mob, rather than the government, to enforce them, these laws get a pass under the technical limitations governing who can sue and be sued. Laws like these, Alexia notes, will be the template for future legislation that should concern all of us, regardless of our sexual orientation, gender identity, or opinions about abortion.
“These laws don’t just target constitutionally protected activity, whether accessing abortion care in Texas or living your life as a gay or trans person in Mississippi; they encourage harassment, discrimination and vigilantism,” Alexia writes. “They reward and protect it. And they ensure the mob’s targets live in fear of those around them.”
Alexia observed that part of the power and purpose of these laws is to instill fear. And Alexia has experienced that fear firsthand as a queer and trans person who has cause to visit Mississippi on behalf of their client, Jackson Women’s Health Organization—the last abortion clinic remaining in the state—which is the plaintiff in a series of challenges to unconstitutional abortion restrictions and is currently the appellee in a case now before the Supreme Court, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.