Supreme Court to Hear Texas Abortion Case, May Have Major Impact

Republican lawmakers, working closely with an anti-choice front group known as the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), are pushing to strip Planned Parenthood of federal money, even though abortions account for 3 percent of its services.

Schaefer claimed that the study did “not appear to be designed as an objective, unbiased research”, and said it resembled a “marketing aid” for Planned Parenthood – one that uses taxpayer dollars, which would be against Missouri law. The justices failed to act on an appeal of another Fifth Circuit ruling that affirmed a MS law that requires admitting privileges for abortion doctors. “Emergency room physicians, hospital-based physicians, and on-call specialists already provide prompt and effective treatment to all patients with urgent medical needs, including women with abortion-related complications”, it added. Either way, what’s at issue is not just abortion but the way abortion has, for the most part, been performed in the US since its legalization: in freestanding clinics, separate from hospitals and the rest of the medical establishment.

These include colonoscopies, laser eye surgery and vasectomies. The laws, in other words, impose burdensome and expensive restrictions on abortion clinics even when those restrictions bear no relationship whatsoever to advancing women’s health.

“When the leading medical groups like the AMA oppose these laws, you have to ask yourself what they are really about”, said Jennifer Dalven of the American Civil Liberties Union.

To rule in favor of the abortion industry, the court will have to ignore an increasingly dismal health and safety record and the dangers faced by every woman who walks through the doors of an abortion clinic.

Twelve other states including Florida, SC and Arkansas, have this year considered enacting similar laws, but the bills did not pass, according the Guttmacher Institute.

If upheld by the high court, the law would reduce the number of abortion facilities in Texas from what had been about 40 to fewer than 10. Legal abortion clinics across the country continue to offer risky “back alley abortions”. The justices would do well to uphold the reasonable law in Texas and reconsider the long, deadly shadow its abortion decisions have cast over law, medicine, and society. This will leave many women in Texas without a nearby site to obtain abortions.

An anti-abortion protester holds a placard as protesters line the railing on the second floor of the rotunda of the Texas State Capitol as the state Senate meets to consider legislation restricting abortion rights in Austin, Texas, July 12, 2013.

Pro-Life Waco, a Texas group targeting Bank of America, says on its website that it has also gone after the Girl Scouts and Susan G. Komen for those organizations’ support for Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood says that’s an attempt to limit health care resources for women, too.

Since this summer’s release of doctored sting videos targeting Planned Parenthood, Congress has been embroiled in a fiery debate over funding for the women’s health care provider. Given his credentials – Hawley successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that Hobby Lobby stores had the right to refuse to pay for contraception services – Schaefer sees him as a credible threat, according to the Kansas City Star.