A Texas law effectively banning an abortion procedure commonly employed during second-trimester pregnancies in the United States was upheld by the Fifth Circuit on Wednesday, reversing a ruling last year by a three-judge panel of the same court. The 2017 law, which imposes civil and criminal penalties on physicians who perform dilation and evacuation abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy without first ensuring that the unborn child does not have a detectable fetal heartbeat, has never been enforced. The dilation and evacuation (D&E) method accounts for the majority of second-trimester abortions in the United States. Eleven percent of abortions in the United States take place after the first trimester, and national estimates suggest that D&E accounts for roughly 95 percent of these procedures, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The full 17-member Fifth Circuit said on Wednesday (pdf) that a lower federal court erred when it permanently blocked the law after ruling …