US Supreme Court to hear Texas abortion Case

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case with far-reaching implications on how tightly states can regulate abortions clinics.

Advocates for women’s rights and reproductive rights praised the high court action in agreeing to take up the Texas case.

Parts of the law not at issue before the Supreme Court have caused about half the state’s 41 abortion clinics to close. Nationally, it would give the go-ahead to dozens of similar provisions that, until now, have been blocked by the lower courts.

In 1992, the Supreme Court ruled that states could impose a few restrictions on abortion, provided they did not pose an undue burden on a woman’s access to the procedure. “The Casey standard is unworkable and was ill-designed to begin with”.

The Texas abortion law requires doctors who provide abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and that abortion clinics meet the same standards as ambulatory surgical facilities.

After the state legislature passed the new abortion clinic law in 2012, the two other doctors at the clinic sought admitting privileges from seven local hospitals near the clinic. “We are confident the court will recognize that these laws are a sham and stop these political attacks on women’s rights, dignity and access to safe, legal essential health care”.

This limit on state power is absolutely critical, and one that was completely ignored by the Fifth Circuit when it ruled against abortion providers in Whole Woman’s Health. “A finding of an undue burden is a shorthand for the conclusion that a state regulation has the goal or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus”.

The abortion providers have the support of organizations such as the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. That leaves only private hospitals, and many of them have religious affiliations and will not make agreements with abortion clinics.

In recent years, Republican-led states have adopted a series of stringent medical regulations that apply only to abortion facilities.

“On the one hand, the abortion industry clamors for uninterrupted taxpayer funding for alleged ‘women’s healthcare, ‘ denying they use fungible funds for abortion”, the group said in a statement. The clinic agreed to comply with the requirement as long as the law remains in effect. The panel said it was not enough that women seeking abortions could go to a neighboring state for the procedure.

That was the second time the Supreme Court issued a reprieve to the clinics.

Kennedy was one of three authors of the Casey opinion and he wrote the majority opinion in 2007.

In 1989, a plurality of justices called the framework laid out in Roe v. Wade that prevented government regulation of abortion rights in the first trimester “rigid and unworkable”. So far, the Court has not said whether or not it will hear the MS case as well.

The U.S. Supreme Court is once again entering the debate over abortion. The liberal justices – Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – objected. This time it was the court’s consistent conservatives – Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito – who were outvoted.

Justice Kennedy has not cast a vote for abortion rights since joining the Casey compromise. Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole criticizes that law, in part because the number of clinics would drop by 75 percent were the law upheld.