DALLAS — Thirteen abortion clinics in Texas were forced to close immediately after a federal appellate court on Thursday sided with Texas in its yearlong legal battle over its sweeping abortion law and allowed the state to enforce one of the law’s toughest provisions while the case was being appealed.
The decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, will have a far-reaching effect on abortion services in Texas, lawyers for abortion providers said. The ruling gave Texas permission to require all abortion clinics in the state to meet the same building, equipment and staffing standards as hospital-style surgical centers, standards that abortion providers said were unnecessary and costly, but that the state argued improved patient safety.
Thirteen clinics whose facilities do not meet the new standards were to be closed overnight, leaving Texas — a state with 5.4 million women of reproductive age, ranking second in the country — with eight abortion providers, all in Houston, Austin and two other metropolitan regions. No abortion facilities will be open west or south of San Antonio.
The “ruling has gutted Texas women’s constitutional rights and access to critical reproductive health care, and stands to make safe, legal abortion essentially disappear overnight,” said Nancy Northup, the president and chief executive of the Center for Reproductive Rights, whose lawyers were part of the legal team representing the clinics that sued the state.
But Lauren Bean, a spokeswoman for Greg Abbott, the Texas attorney general, whose lawyers represented the state and who is the front-runner as the Republican nominee in the Texas governor’s race, praised the ruling. “This decision is a vindication of the careful deliberation by the Texas Legislature to craft a law to protect the health and safety of Texas women,” Ms. Bean said.
The three-judge panel agreed with the state’s lawyers that there was insufficient evidence that a “large fraction” of women seeking abortions would face an unconstitutional burden because of the surgical-center requirements and clinic closings. They wrote that the data provided by one of the plaintiffs’ experts, Dr. Daniel Grossman, suggested that about one out of six Texas women seeking an abortion would live more than 150 miles from the nearest clinic if the surgical-center rules went into effect.
“This is nowhere near a ‘large fraction,’ ” the panel wrote.
Two of the three judges were appointed by Republican presidents, and one, Judge Stephen A. Higginson, was appointed by President Obama. Judge Higginson concurred in part and dissented in part from the majority opinion.
The panel’s decision was only temporary and left open the possibility that the clinics could reopen as the case proceeds. Nevertheless, abortion providers and their lawyers said they were considering all of their legal options, including appealing to the Supreme Court or to the full Fifth Circuit. Meanwhile, Texas Republicans and anti-abortion groups who backed the law praised the decision and said it countered a series of court rulings that struck down other abortion restrictions across the South.
Joe Pojman, executive director of the anti-abortion group Texas Alliance for Life, commended Mr. Abbott’s legal team for “their effective defense of Texas law from challenges from the abortion industry.”
In July 2013, the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature passed some of the toughest abortion restrictions in the United States, after a marathon filibuster that turned a Democratic state senator, Wendy Davis, into a national political star and set the stage for her campaign for governor. Some parts of the law were already being enforced, but the surgical-center requirement had yet to take effect.
This August, Judge Lee Yeakel of United States District Court in Austin ruled that the surgical-center rule put an unconstitutional burden on women seeking abortions, and that the effect of clinic closings and the reduced geographic distribution of clinics operated “just as drastically as a complete ban on abortion.” In the months before the law was enacted last summer, Texas had 41 facilities providing abortions. In recent weeks, that number had decreased to 21.
Judge Yeakel also blocked a requirement that doctors performing abortions obtain admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of a clinic.
In an unusual move, the judge granted the abortion providers who sued the state broader relief than they had requested. Lawyers for abortion facilities had asked him to strike down the requirement as it applied to two clinics, in El Paso and McAllen. But Judge Yeakel ruled the admitting-privileges requirement and the surgical-center standards, operating together, put undue burdens on women statewide, and created “a brutally effective system of abortion regulation that reduces access to abortion clinics.”
Lawyers for Mr. Abbott appealed Judge Yeakel’s ruling to the Fifth Circuit, asking the court to temporarily block the decision while the appeal proceeded.
The Fifth Circuit, regarded by many as one of the most conservative federal appellate courts, had given Texas favorable rulings in past abortion cases and was expected to do the same this time. In March, a different Fifth Circuit panel sided with Texas in the first lawsuit over the new abortion restrictions, overturning a decision by Judge Yeakel and upholding the admitting-privileges rule as constitutional.
In court documents and at a hearing in New Orleans, lawyers for Texas had attacked Judge Yeakel’s decision on several fronts, and some of their arguments influenced the circuit panel’s ruling. Jonathan F. Mitchell, the state’s solicitor general, said Judge Yeakel was legally barred from ruling on the statewide impact and constitutionality of the admitting-privileges requirement because the Fifth Circuit had already upheld it in March.
Judge Yeakel’s actions “border on defiance of this court,” Mr. Mitchell wrote in court documents.
The panel, in its ruling on Thursday, appeared to agree with Mr. Mitchell. Judge Yeakel’s decision to invalidate the admitting-privileges requirement throughout Texas was “inappropriate because plaintiffs did not request that relief” and was “directly contrary to this circuit’s precedent,” the judges wrote.
Lawyers for Texas argued that the abortion patients who will face burdensome driving distances because of the law did not amount to a “large fraction,” and that an abortion regulation cannot be invalidated unless it imposes an undue burden on what the Supreme Court called “a large fraction of relevant cases.”
The lawyers representing abortion clinics said Judge Yeakel did not have to apply the “large fraction” test, and that even if he did, the affected population was indeed large. The clinics’ lawyers said in one analysis that about 17 out of 100 Texas women of reproductive age would face a substantial obstacle to abortion services.
An earlier version of this article, along with a picture caption, misstated when the 13 abortion clinics in Texas will have to close after a federal appellate court sided on Thursday with the state in its legal battle over a sweeping law. It is immediately, not next Thursday.