Why the C.E.O. Behind Match.com and Tinder Took a Stand on the Texas Abortion Law
John Mackey, who is Match.com’s chief executive, and Susan Fowler, chief operating officer of AngelList, a site that matches potential high-net-worth entrepreneurs with “angel” investors, took a position in favor of a controversial Texas law designed to prevent new reproductive healthcare laws.
In a July 12 New York Times opinion article, Mackey declared:
This will help protect women everywhere. This will protect women by letting women know that, in Texas, there is no room to interfere with their reproductive choice.
The Texas law, House Bill 675, is unconstitutional, however, for a host of reasons that will be explored shortly. A federal judge in New York, which is considering the law’s constitutionality, has issued a temporary restraining order blocking the law from taking effect. The law’s sponsor in the state legislature has called it “unconstitutional” and asked the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, to defend the law in court.
These are the facts:
First, the woman in question has no legal authority to challenge Texas’s reproductive rights law. All she has is the unelected power of her state government to protect her rights, and to refuse to implement laws she finds wanting that are in her state constitution and state statutes.
The problem is that to stop the law, she is relying on the court to act as her legislator and nullify the law, and to overrule the state supreme court decision about how reproductive rights should be interpreted.
This amounts to an action by the courts to invalidate a law that would not allow woman to make decisions about her body within the bounds of constitutional law.
If the Texas courts refuse to protect the woman’s constitutionally-protected reproductive rights, then the federal court will have a binding and enforceable ruling: that all decisions about one’s body, from the time of conception to death, cannot be legally made in Texas.
