Pro-life leaders who lobbied for H.B. 2 claim that it will not restrict abortions—but their followers, like this group rallying at March for Life, have trumpeted the Bill’s true effects. PHOTOGRAPH BY TOM WILLIAMS / CQ ROLL CALL/ GETTY

The stated purpose of Texas House Bill 2 is pretty uncontroversial. As the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals put it last week, in an opinion upholding the law, H.B. 2 aims “to provide the highest quality of care to women seeking abortions and to protect the health and welfare of women seeking abortions.” The problem is that H.B. 2—which requires that all doctors who perform abortions have admitting privileges at a hospital within thirty miles of their practice, and that every facility where abortions are performed meet the elaborate construction standards of ambulatory surgical centers (A.S.C.s)—will in fact make abortions not safer, but rarer. Its provisions are so onerous (the trial court found that building or buying an A.S.C. would cost an abortion provider millions of dollars) that all but nine or ten of the forty-one abortion providers that operated in Texas before H.B. 2 passed, in 2013, have been forced to close. (H.B. 2 also bans abortions after twenty weeks, but that wasn’t part of the latest litigation.)

The mainstream medical community is unanimous that the bill’s requirements have no medical justification. As the American Medical Association and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists argued in an amicus brief, abortion is already extremely safe, with a mortality rate of .0006 percent, and a 0.2 percent risk of serious complications. Most of the A.S.C. requirements, which concern things like operating room dimensions and maintaining sterile environments, are irrelevant to abortions, which require neither operating rooms nor external sterility. “By imposing unnecessary A.S.C. and privileges requirements on abortion providers and facilities, H.B. 2 harms women’s health by reducing access to safe and legal abortion,” the brief concluded. Texas has barely tried rebutting that evidence. Its argument, accepted by the Fifth Circuit, is essentially that the legislature doesn’t have to listen to doctors when deciding medical policy.

The legislators who voted for H.B. 2 and the lawyers defending it have been careful to maintain that the law is about making abortions safer, not harder to get. So have the pro-life leaders who lobbied for it—but not their followers. That has led to some surreal effects. While the state’s lawyers spent last summer’s district court trial arguing that it would be easy to get an abortion under H.B. 2, pro-life groups carrying posters with pictures of fetuses rallied outside the courthouse in support of the law. Last week, Texas Alliance for Life director Joe Pojman hailed the Fifth Circuit ruling as a victory for “the health and safety of women,” in a press release titled “Federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Upholds Pro-Life House Bill 2.” And in an amicus brief filed Monday night opposing a stay of the ruling, Texas Alliance for Life and two other pro-life groups trumpeted their role in getting the law passed, and their commitment to eradicating abortion—and then insisted that H.B. 2 would do no such thing.

It’s clear to both supporters and opponents that H.B. 2, like similar laws in other Republican-controlled states, is designed to prevent women from getting abortions. The only place that fact isn’t obvious is the one place it matters: in court. In a 1992 case called Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court held that regulations that impose an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to an abortion are unconstitutional. An undue burden, the Court said, exists when “a state regulation has the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion.” (Jeffrey Toobin wrote about Casey’s undue-burden standard last year.) As a result, Texas can’t admit that H.B. 2’s real purpose is to make it harder for women to get an abortion; if it did, even the conservative Fifth Circuit would have to strike down the law. Yet the purpose of H.B. 2 has received oddly little attention in the convoluted legal challenges. Federal District Judge Lee Yeakel’s opinion did conclude that the law’s purpose was improper, but that finding was practically a footnote. The portion of the Fifth Circuit ruling overturning his finding was similarly brief.

Most of the debate around H.B. 2 has instead focussed on the “effect” part of Casey’s vague standard: How far can the state force women to drive to get an abortion before the distance counts as a substantial obstacle? How many women need to be burdened for the law to be struck down statewide? Judge Yeakel held the law unconstitutional because it would leave seventeen per cent of Texas women of childbearing age—some nine hundred thousand women—more than a hundred and fifty miles from the nearest abortion provider. (In a previous round of litigation, the Fifth Circuit held that anything less than a hundred-and-fifty-mile journey could never be an undue burden.) A panel of three Fifth Circuit judges, all appointed by George W. Bush, reversed Yeakel, holding that the law could only be struck down if it burdened a “large fraction” of women, and that seventeen per cent is “nowhere near” a large fraction. (Technically, the panel dismissed the plaintiffs’ statewide challenge to the law on procedural grounds, but it also ruled on the merits of the case.)

The Fifth Circuit did agree to exempt one clinic in McAllen, near the Mexico border, since its closure would force the disproportionately poor women of the Rio Grande Valley to drive an average of two hundred and thirty-five miles to the nearest facility, in Houston or San Antonio. But the court denied similar relief to a clinic in El Paso, even though women there are now five hundred and fifty miles from the nearest Texas provider. Because those women can get abortions just a few miles away in New Mexico, the court reasoned, “it would ignore reality” to say they are being unduly burdened.

The court’s embrace of reality turned out to be selective. On the question of H.B. 2’s purpose, the judges refused to see through the state’s justifications, holding, “All of the evidence referred to by the district court is purely anecdotal and does little to impugn the State’s legitimate reasons for the Act.” Some of the evidence of H.B. 2’s purpose is indeed anecdotal—but anecdotes can tell a clear story. At trial, four of the state’s expert witnesses admitted, when confronted with incriminating emails, that their reports had been ghostwritten by Vincent Rue, an anti-abortion activist with no medical training, best known for inventing “post-abortion syndrome” in the nineteen-eighties. (Rue drafted at least one witness’s rebuttal report before she had even read the report she was supposedly rebutting.) And, in an act of Texas-sized chutzpah, forty-four Republican state legislators signed an amicus brief in support of the law that had been prepared by Americans United for Life, whose website declares, “Americans United for Life, the nation’s premier pro-life legal team, works through the law and legislative process to one end: Achieving comprehensive legal protection for human life from conception to natural death.”

But the most telling evidence that H.B. 2’s purpose is to restrict abortion access is the fact that no reasonable legislator could have expected it to accomplish anything else. As the plaintiffs put it in their brief, citing a Supreme Court case, “the effect of a law in its real operation is strong evidence of its object.” The fact that the legislature knew H.B. 2 would close all but a handful of abortion providers without making abortions safer strongly implies that preventing abortions was the purpose of the law, not a side effect.