Constitutional rights for millions of Americans should not be stripped away in the dark of night. But that is exactly what the architects of Texas’s abortion ban law have done, and the U.S. Supreme Court is letting them do it.

At midnight Sept. 1, Texas’ now infamous law, S.B. 8, went into effect. This state law flouts the Supreme Court’s landmark holding in Roe v. Wade and effectively bans abortion in Texas, even in cases of rape and incest. As the U.S. Department of Justice argued in a court filing last week, S.B. 8 “unacceptably and unconstitutionally” deprives Texans of access to reproductive health care. Yet today it is the law of the land for millions of Americans in the nation’s second-largest state.