The 33-year-old Texas woman drove alone four hours through the night to get to the Louisiana abortion clinic for a consultation. She initially planned to sleep in her car, but an advocacy group helped arrange a hotel room.

Single and with three children ranging from 5 to 13, she worried that adding a baby now would take time, food, money and space away from her three children. She doesn’t have a job, and without help from groups offering a safe abortion, she said, she probably would have sought another way to end her pregnancy.

A federal judge on Wednesday issued an order temporarily blocking the enforcement of Texas’s heartbeat abortion law, which allows private citizens to sue providers that perform abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected.

U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman granted the Biden administration’s request to temporarily block enforcement of the abortion ban and denied the state’s request to pause his ruling pending appeal, saying “this Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right.”

A federal judge ordered Texas to suspend the most restrictive abortion law in the U.S., calling it an “offensive deprivation” of a constitutional right by banning most abortions in the nation’s second-most populous state since September.

The order Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman is the first legal blow to the Texas law known as Senate Bill 8, which until now had withstood a wave of early challenges. In the weeks since the restrictions took effect, Texas abortion providers say the impact has been “exactly what we feared.”

A federal judge in Texas issued an order Wednesday blocking the state's six-week abortion ban.

"From the moment S.B. 8 went into effect, women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution," US District Judge Robert Pitman said in the decision, granting a request from the Justice Department, which brought the lawsuit.

The Biden Justice Department wants a federal judge to temporarily block Texas’ abortion law, arguing it is a “severe intrusion” on women’s constitutional rights.

The Department of Justice on Tuesday night filed an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction in the U.S. District Court for Western Texas.

In the 49-page complaint, the DOJ said Texas’ ban on abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which typically occurs about six weeks into a pregnancy, unlawfully curtails women’s reproductive rights.

Joe Biden and top Democrats are scrambling for a strategy to counter Republican restrictions on women’s reproductive rights amid the fallout from a Texas statute that has banned abortions in the state from as early as six weeks into pregnancy – but the options available to the administration are thin.

The conservative-dominated supreme court in a night-time ruling refused an emergency request to block the Texas law from taking effect, in a decision that amounted to a crushing defeat for reproductive rights and threatened major ramifications in other states nationwide.

Just before midnight, the Supreme Court, over the incoherent objections of four dissenting justices, denied the request by Texas abortion providers for emergency relief against the Texas Heartbeat Act. The compelling procedural grounds on which five justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — ruled have no direct bearing on the substantive question whether the Court will overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in next term’s blockbuster abortion case, Dobbs v.

Abortion has long been a contentious issue in the United States, and it is one that sharply divides Americans along partisan, ideological and religious lines.

The cry of "Freedom!" echoes across the land, rising from places like Texas, controlled by Republican officials who are using every tool at their disposal to ban mask mandates or vaccine requirements. It's curious, then, that as of Wednesday morning, the women of Texas are essentially banned from choosing to get an abortion.