REPORTED BY THE INDIANA LAWYER
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Texas’ widely replicated regulation of abortion clinics Monday in the court’s biggest abortion case in nearly a quarter century.
The justices voted 5-3 in favor of Texas clinics that had argued the regulations were a thinly veiled attempt to make it harder for women to get an abortion in the nation’s second-most populous state.
Justice Stephen Breyer’s majority opinion for the court held that the regulations are medically unnecessary and unconstitutionally limit a woman’s right to an abortion.
Texas had argued that its 2013 law and subsequent regulations were needed to protect women’s health. The rules required doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and forced clinics to meet hospital-like standards for outpatient surgery.
Breyer wrote that “the surgical-center requirement, like the admitting privileges requirement, provides few, if any, health benefits for women, poses a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions and constitutes an ‘undue burden’ on their constitutional right to do so.â€
Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined Breyer.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.
Thomas wrote that the decision “exemplifies the court’s troubling tendency ‘to bend the rules when any effort to limit abortion, or even to speak in opposition to abortion, is at issue.’†Thomas was quoting an earlier abortion dissent from Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February.
Abortion providers said the rules would have cut the number of abortion clinics in the state by three-fourths if they had been allowed to take full effect.
When then-Gov. Rick Perry signed the law in 2013, there were about 40 clinics throughout the state. That number dropped to fewer than 20 and would have been cut in half again if the law had taken full effect, the clinics said.
Texas is among 10 states with similar admitting privileges requirements, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. The requirement is in effect in most of Texas, Missouri, North Dakota and Tennessee. It is on hold in Alabama, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Wisconsin.
In Indiana, U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt is due to rule any day on a request for an injunction to prevent new abortion restrictions from taking effect July 1. An Indiana law passed this year would ban abortions sought due to fetal genetic abnormalities, such as Down syndrome, or because of the race, sex or ancestry of a fetus. The law also would require that aborted fetuses be disposed of through burial or cremation. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky sued to block the law.
The Texas law’s hospital-like outpatient surgery standards are in place in Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and it is blocked in Tennessee and Texas, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represented the clinics in the Texas case.
Texas passed a broad bill imposing several abortion restrictions in 2013. Texas clinics sued immediately to block it claiming it impermissibly interfered with a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. The clinics won several favorable rulings in a federal district court in Texas. But each time, the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the state, at first allowing challenged provisions to take effect and then upholding the law with only slight exceptions.
The Supreme Court allowed the admitting privileges requirement to take effect in most of the state, but put the surgical center provision on hold pending the court’s resolution of the case.
The justices split largely along liberal-conservative lines in their emergency orders, with the court’s conservative justices voting repeatedly to let the law be enforced.
Separate lawsuits are pending over admitting-privileges laws in Louisiana and Mississippi, the other states covered by the 5th circuit. The laws are on hold in both states, and a panel of federal appellate judges has concluded the Mississippi law probably is unconstitutional because it would force the only abortion clinic in the state to close.
A separate appeal is pending at the Supreme Court from Wisconsin, where federal judges have struck down that state’s admitting privileges law.
A victory for sane Americans! The real news here is that even if they managed to bring Scalia back from the dead, they would have still lost. The finding was broad enough to make it apply to other states that have done what Texas did!
Killing 3,000 innocent lives a day for the crime of being conceived is an odd definition of sane.
It would be if it was true. They aren’t “lives”. They are fetuses.
Oh ok so fetuses are dead ,is that what you’re saying Laura ?
Indiana Enoch and EvilTaxpayer….you guys are trying to change the subject and go back and fight Roe vs Wade. That case is OVER. This Texas case was not about that…..your comments pretend it was. Or you need something to yell about.
(Why not just bring up guns. I mean, you need to vent, so anything is available.)
This case was about: LIARS GOT CAUGHT by the Supreme Court. Simple enough.
No, but they aren’t viable human beings, either. That argument is over. The decision today was about the phony “safety” law in Texas and a dozen other copy-cat states. Next at bat, Pence’s loony new law.
Fetus. Embryo. This case is about the mother who is having her legal rights taken away. If it were a man and we were speaking of his gun rights that would be a whole other story. Make of that what you will. Viagra is paid for by insurance every day.
‘The GOP’s status as the “feeling party†goes back at least as far as George W. Bush, who sensed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq long after all evidence pointed to the contrary. It has played out for decades in the abortion debate, where pro-life conservatives reimagine embryos and early-term fetuses as adorable babies and pretend to worry about the emotional ruin faced by women who terminate pregnancies.’ ~~ Meghan Daum
Woo hoo I’m going to have a couple of abortions just to celebrate!
This is America.
The State has no right to tell women what they can and can’t do with their private bodies. It is good to see the Supreme Court yank Texas and all other States with similar disingenuous laws back into legal ground…and with an EIGHT member Court! THAT is how obvious this was.
Texas was transparently trying to complicate and withhold access to a woman’s ability to make her own, private choices.
(This idea the State can invade your private life….is preposterous. But today’s ruling wasn’t about that.)
It was about: Liars got caught by the Supreme Court. ‘Bout sums it up
back alley abortion is alive and well no regulations needed…………..a meat cutter now can perform abortions in a polebarn…………….the radical left third world country at its best……………don’t forget to see how much you get for them baby parts……………..
……THIS is what passes as a Trump voter. Al Sharpie.
Let’s be clear……(and I think he does believe these things, which is as bad as it gets)….EVERY SINGLE COMMENT AL SHARPIE WROTE TODAY…….is a LIE. Not one word of it true.
But he has a right to vote. Al Sharpie is as ignorant as hell, uninformed, stupid and worse….AL SHARPIE IS PROUD OF BEING STUPID AND IGNORANT.
This stuff never wins in the long run. Smart is always better than ignorant, but THEY are out there. And they have a right to vote.
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