Right to ‘aid in dying?’ Supreme Court sets oral argument date

A federal district court blocked two of the restrictions, a requirement for an ambulatory surgical center and a requirement for admitting-privileges in 2014.

Providers contend the 5th Circuit’s decision is in “direct and acknowledged” conflict with decisions from the 7th and 9th Circuit Courts, as well as the Iowa Supreme Court, which hold that courts, “must examine the extent to which laws regulating abortion actually further a valid state interest in assessing whether the burdens they impose on abortion access are undue”.

“Without the court’s intervention, the impact on Texas women will be immediate and devastating, imposing insurmountable burdens on their access to essential reproductive health care statewide”, said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Abortion providers are also challenging a provision in the 2013 law requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles (48 km) of a clinic. Hendricks said the law interfered with the power granted by the state constitution to the Kansas Supreme Court to administer the courts.

“We have to understand that what happens in Texas won’t stay in Texas”, said Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder of abortion provider Whole Woman’s Health, a plaintiff in the case. Abortion-rights lawyers counter that they are created to restrict abortions since so few clinics now meet them.

The legal dispute has been charged because conservative Republicans have long criticized the Supreme Court over rulings on abortion, capital punishment and education funding. Fast forward twenty years, and another pivotal case was heard by the Supreme Court. This is the real world and these laws have real implications on real women’s lives.

The next Supreme Court session begins in October. Fifteen facilities in Texas are now providing abortions. Its challengers claim the restrictions are meant to limit abortions rather than improve health care and would force all but 10 clinics to close in a state where about 60,000 women seek abortions annually.

“It’s really not a U.S. Supreme Court kind of an issue”.

The only clinics in the state that would be able to satisfy both provisions, the filing said, would be concentrated in the state’s four major urban centers, leaving women who live in a vast section of the remainder of the state without a feasible way to obtain a legal and safe way to end pregnancies.

The Supreme Court is expected to consider the case in the fall.

Alan Chen, a constitutional law expert at the University of Denver’s Strum College of Law, said Wednesday he does not believe the Colorado Attorney General’s Office involvement will factor in whether the court takes the case. That was the argument made when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the law a year ago.