A prosecutor in South Texas said Sunday he will seek to dismiss a murder charge against Lizelle Herrera, a Texas woman who was arrested and jailed Thursday after authorities claimed she caused the death of an individual.
The pro-choice protesters march outside the Texas State Capitol. Texas passed a bill that effectively banned nearly all abortions.
The top prosecutor in Starr County, Texas, said that he did not commit a criminal act and will file a motion to dismiss her indictment.
Ramirez said that officers at the Starr County Sheriff's Department did their duty by investigating the abortion.
The sheriff's department took her into custody Thursday on $500,000 bond, after she was indicted for causing death by self-inducted abortion.
The abortion rights advocacy group paid her bail and she was released from jail Saturday night.
It's not clear if she helped someone else perform an abortion or if she herself had one.
The indictment has drawn national attention, but it was not clear why he was charged. Texas lawmakers are using a strategy to make it more difficult to strike the law down for skirting the Supreme Court because it is enforced through civil suits from private citizens rather than criminal charges. Women who receive abortions are exempt from the new law, which makes anyone who aids or abets the procedure liable in civil court. Texas law exempts mothers who end their pregnancies from being charged with a crime.
Lynn Paltrow, the executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, told the Associated Press that there is no statute in Texas that allows the arrest of a woman for an abortion.
The Supreme Court, currently consisting of six conservative-leaning justices to just three liberals, may soon overturn the 1973 ruling that established abortion as a constitutional right. Mississippi asked the high court to reconsider the landmark ruling in an ongoing challenge to the state's 15-week abortion ban.
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