I think the law is built as sort of a convoluted legal Rube Goldberg machine to sneak around existing case law about abortions, so all of these weird constructions are to avoid doing something that's already been ruled unconstitutional.

It's a legal trick to prevent federal courts from immediately ruling the law unconstitutional.

It is certainly the end of medical privacy in the US, but it may even be the end of the Supremacy Clause, which gives the federal government the ability to pass laws that override state laws.

It's difficult to overstate how much of a threat this law is to the US Constitution.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/meet-the-legal-st...

The best suggestion I heard for fighting this would be to have Massachusetts or some other deep blue state copy and paste this law to get around the 2nd amendment.

Edit to add because I guess it wasn't obvious enough: The strategy would force the Supreme Court to quickly strike down both laws.

I'm not sure how those two are equivalent. The second ammendment is in the literal text of the Constitution, whereas abortion is derived (as far as I can tell) solely from case law.

AIUI, Roe v Wade says that abortion rights flow fairly directly from the 14th amendment.

"Directly" is a strong word. It's an interpretation which assumes there is such a thing as a right to an abortion such that the states would then be violating by passing legislation.

Now, I am not of the opinion that something has to be explicitly protected in the constitution for it to be a right. I prefer to assume a limited view of what behavior government has the authority to limit. However, if something is not explicitly protected in the constitution, then it is at least up for debate.

There's procedural implications for this distinction as well: the Supreme Court can overturn its prior precedent (as Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson). But the Supreme Court cannot overturn the text of the Constitution itself. Only an amendment by Congress can do that.

EDIT: Just to clarify, that procedural distinction means that the Supreme Court could uphold the Texas law while overturning a similar law restricting gun ownership without contradiction.

The second amendment is neither clear nor absolute. For example the constitutionality of an assault weapons ban is still unclear. Your point would stand if Massachusetts banned the right to bear arms. However, if they banned everything but single shot rifles, it comes back to precedent. Like the Texas law, it's obviously unconstitutional based on precedent, but not obviously unconstitutional based on the text of the amendment alone.

All laws require some interpretation in their enforcement, but this is pretty blatant equivocation.

Aside from some archaic language, the second amendment is actually fairly clear. It is clearly talking about guns, and the phrase "shall not be infringed" is fairly strong, clear language.

On the other hand, the 14th amendment say nothing about abortion, and there's no reason to suggest the authors of that amendment had abortion in mind when they wrote it.

That does not mean that such a right does not exist, or that it needs to be explicitly mentioned in the Constitution to receive protection, but any judge who wants to assert that such a right exists is going to have to do a lot more work than one who wants to assert the existence of an individual right to own guns, even "assault weapons" (which is a largely nonsense category anyway).

I thought about that and wonder if that still leaves us with an utterly broken country anyway.

Because states can't prosecute it, they already lost that one before the Supreme Court. So the hack is that the state isn't the one enforcing it.

Because abortion is a constitutional right in the US, and it would immediately be enjoined as a flagrant violation of constitutional rights (at least pending the current court's likely, but not certain, overruling of Roe v Wade and Casey).

Instead, this is a way to get around constitutionality since it's not the government who is violating the constitution. Never mind all of other constitutional bits about due process that are being horribly trampled on (such as allowing people to sue without standing...).

This just shifts enforcement to the courts, which are part of the government.

Would you care to go on record as asserting that limits can not be placed on Constitutional rights?