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Texas’s SB8 Abortion Bill Also Allows Pro-Choice People to Sue Everyone too.

Malicious Compliance and Lateral Thinking can be used to challenge stupid legislation.

Michelle Steele
3 min readSep 10, 2021

There’s a concept called ‘malicious compliance’ that I’d like to introduce you to — I think it’s ideal for this ridiculous situation. Malicious compliance is all about conforming to the letter of the request/law… but not conforming to the spirit of it.

You can sue anyone for anything that contributes to assisting abortions. You don’t have to be involved in any way since there’s no requirement under the law to prove injury, which means it’s carte blanche.

Anti-choice people are under the impression that this means they can sue abortion clinics out of existence but they’ve failed to realize the full ramifications of the law. You can’t sue the woman who got the abortion but outside of that (with a few exceptions) everyone can sue everyone which means that multiple people can bring lawsuits to bear on every big business in the State of Texas. They can continue to do so until the stupidity of SB 8 is repealed. The irony of this law is that it’s up to the accused party to prove that they aren’t aiding abetting pregnant women to get abortions.

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Michelle Steele
Michelle Steele

Written by Michelle Steele

Writing for the love of it. A puntastic atheist, an awful cook, an amateur scientist. A noob on Medium but an expert on Quora.

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