Supreme Court Takes On Rare Abortion Case

Flattery noted that the ambulatory surgical center requirements are not trying to shut clinics down, but “perhaps the clinics should be trying to improve their cleanliness and get up with the new standards”.

House Bill 2, the one which then-state Senator Wendy Davis staged a 13-hour filibuster to block, banned any abortion after 20 weeks and drastically raised standards for abortion-performing facilities and medical personnel. The only clinic south of San Antonio, in McAllen, it added, would have “extremely limited capacity”. The majority distinguished the ruling from the 2000 case by noting that Congress developed findings that the procedure would never be necessary for the health of the mother. Other cases the court is slated to hear address affirmative action in higher education, the constitutionality of mandatory contributions to public sector unions and the application of the so-called “contraception mandate”. The court in that case held that a woman’s constitutional right to privacy protects her decision to end a pregnancy, and only a compelling state interest can justify regulating abortion.

Simultaneously, Republicans in Congress are seeking to strip funding from Planned Parenthood, which operates women’s clinics around the country a few of which offer abortion services, after activists secretly videotaped a few of its executives discussing providing fetal tissues for medical research, allegedly to generate profits.

The Supreme Court is likely to issue a decision in the case in late June. Ironically, it’s not the 20-week limit on abortions that has been challenged, but another provision requiring abortion clinics to meet the same standards in Texas as all other outpatient surgery clinics. It requires abortion clinics to be set up like costly and sophisticated hospitals and permits doctors to perform abortions only if they are allowed to admit patients to local hospitals.

Amy Hagstrom Miller, president of Whole Woman’s Health, the lead plaintiff, said that “would have devastating effects on women and families around the state”.

“The muddiness of the standard has opened the door to states pushing the envelope with every kind of abortion restriction imaginable, leading to the very real possibility that both “undue burden” and Roe itself become utterly meaningless”, said B. That’s what the court calls an “undue burden” on a constitutional right.

The court said women in west Texas could obtain abortions in New Mexico, a ruling at odds with one from a different panel of the same court that said MS could not rely on out-of-state abortion clinics in defending a law that would have shut down the state’s only clinic.

This June, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to grant an emergency appeal from clinics at risk of closing over the new laws, which were due to go into effect on 1 July. Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented from that order.