Friday’s announcement by the Supreme Court was no surprise, because the justices intervened in June to block the Texas law from taking effect. In 2013, Gov. Rick Perry had signed two provisions of law that requires abortion clinics to be constructed similar to surgical centers. If the clinic did not meet the requirement, their alternative was to contract with a local doctor who already had admitting privileges to serve as an outside covering physician.
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The law would reduce the number of abortion clinics in Texas from more than 40 to about 10, according to the abortion providers challenging the law.
The appeals court declined to grant the challengers a stay, but the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the ruling later that month.
If the court scraps Planned Parenthood v. Casey, it could severely restrict access to abortion because a large percentage of women wouldn’t be able to obtain abortions, one legal professor and pro-choice advocate said.
In a 2014 poll by the Pew Research Center, 51 percent of US citizens said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 43 percent said abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.
After losing at the appellate level, the coalition of abortion providers asked the high court to weigh in.
Opponents claim Texas’ law say lawmakers crafted it not to protect women’s health, but to simply shut down abortion clinics. This case will cover a dispute regarding state regulation on abortion clinics. He applied the standard formulated by the Supreme Court, that abortion restrictions can not impose “an undue burden” on a woman’s access to the procedure.
It is the new abortion case, however it is decided, that is likely to produce the term’s most consequential and legally significant decision.
At the heart of this case is the “undue burden” standard established by the Supreme Court in another landmark abortion case in 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That leaves only private hospitals, and many of them have religious affiliations and will not make agreements with abortion clinics.
Gretchen Borchelt, vice president of health and reproductive rights for the National Women’s Law Association, called Texas “ground zero” in the abortion debate, noting that other states could be discouraged from passing such sweeping legislation if Texas’ law was struck down.
The measure, which was passed by the state’s Republican-dominated legislature in 2013, mandates that abortion doctors get admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. “The abortion industry doesn’t like these laws because abortion clinics would be forced to spend money to meet basic health and safety standards”, she said.
The Texas law on which it is based is an outright attack on women and a shameless effort to ban almost all abortions in Texas.
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The court, whose last decision on abortion was in 2007, is expected to rule on the case in the Texas case next summer, just ahead of the presidential elections.
