Lawsuits Filed Against Abortionist Who Admitted to Breaking Texas Law — By PRO-ABORTION Former Lawyers

 

An abortionist admitted in an op-ed for the Washington Post that he deliberately broke Texas’ new abortion law banning the procedures after a fetal heartbeat is detected.

Alan Braid is an obstetrician-gynecologist at Alamo Womens Reproductive Services in San Antonio.

Writing in the Washington Post, Braid said that he deliberately violated “Heartbeat Act,” which bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, so that he can challenge it in court.

Now, he is getting his wish.

Two former lawyers in Arkansas and Illinois filed lawsuits against Braid on Monday — both of whom are pro-abortion, making many question if they are attempting to deliberately sabotage the suits to set precedent. 

BBC reports, “Oscar Stilley, a former lawyer in Arkansas who is serving a 15-year federal conviction for tax fraud in home confinement, said he had decided to file the lawsuit after reading Dr Braid’s opinion piece. He said he was not opposed to abortion but sued to force a court to test the legality of the new legislation.”

“I woke up this morning … and I saw a story about this doctor, Dr. Braid,” Stilley told the American-Statesman. “He’s obviously a man of principle and courage and it just made me mad to see the trick bag they put him in and I just decided: I’m going to file a lawsuit. We’re going to get an answer, I want to see what the law is.”

Stilley told Reuters that he believes the Heartbeat Act violates women’s constitutional rights. Still, he said that either the law will be challenged or he will win the $10,000 lawsuit, so he sees it as a win-win.

“(The statute) says any person can bring a lawsuit,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter that I’m a disbarred attorney. It doesn’t matter that I’m in custody. It doesn’t matter that I’m up in Arkansas and not in Texas. It kind of looks like I have nothing to do with it, but they said I can have a chance and I can go in there and I can sue and collect $10,000 for it.

“Well, that’s the law and I want that $10,000 and I intend to be the fastest gun in the West.”

The second lawsuit was filed by a suspended lawyer named Felipe Gomez, from Illinois, who described himself as a “Pro-Choice Plaintiff” in his complaint and said that the law was “illegal as written and as applied.”

In his op-ed, Braid explained that he has been performing abortions for the last 45 years, writing “when the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Roe v. Wade in 1973, recognizing abortion as a constitutional right, it enabled me to do the job I was trained to do.”

“Then, this month, everything changed. A new Texas law, known as S.B. 8, virtually banned any abortion beyond about the sixth week of pregnancy. It shut down about 80 percent of the abortion services we provide. Anyone who suspects I have violated the new law can sue me for at least $10,000. They could also sue anybody who helps a person obtain an abortion past the new limit, including, apparently, the driver who brings a patient to my clinic,” Braid wrote. “For me, it is 1972 all over again.”

Braid wrote that on the morning of September 6 he performed an abortion on a woman who was beyond the state’s limit — five days after the new law went into effect.

Under the law, anyone can sue an abortionist or anyone who aids and abets a woman getting an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected. They cannot sue the woman, however.

“I fully understood that there could be legal consequences — but I wanted to make sure that Texas didn’t get away with its bid to prevent this blatantly unconstitutional law from being tested,” he wrote.

Until the new law was passed, his clinic was performing abortions up to 22 weeks. It is possible for a baby delivered at this age to survive outside the womb.

The abortionist is so committed to terminating pregnancies, he explained, that his clinic has been referring patients out of state and offering to assist with funding if they are too far along to have the procedure under Texas law.

Kimberlyn Schwartz, spokeswoman for Texas Right to Life, an anti-abortion advocacy group, called the lawsuits “self-serving legal stunts” and said Stilley and Gomez are “abusing the cause of action created in the Texas Heartbeat Act for their own purposes,” in a statement to the Austin American-Statesman.