The impact of the court’s ruling will sweep more broadly than Texas. A provision in HB2 required abortion providers to have admitting privileges with a hospital cut that number in half.
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Both were signed into law by Governor Rick Perry in 2013. But despite the controversy in Congress surrounding Planned Parenthood’s abortion services, the justices did not mention the procedure in discussing the case.
The high court’s decision not to hear the dispute came three days after the justices announced they would decide their first major abortion case since 2007.
“The state has wide discretion to pass laws ensuring Texas women are not subject to substandard conditions at abortion facilities”, Paxton said. The legislature’s real aim, the clinic says, is to make it more hard for Texas women to gain access to abortion. “These laws have nothing to do with protecting women, and everything to do with creating coercive and almost impossible-to-navigate hurdles for those who seek abortion”, said Jessica González-Rojas, executive director of the organization. In that ruling, the court said the closure of clinics deemed medically sub-standard by the state and women having to drive several hours for an abortion did not constitute an “undue burden” on them.
“Texas paints a devastating picture of what’s at stake for women across the country – where women are already traveling hundreds of miles, crossing state lines, and waiting weeks to get an abortion, if they can at all”.
Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group, has draft legislation that it encourages states to adopt. “A woman’s very right to make personal medical decisions about abortion is now before the court”, said Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Abortion clinics will have been given carte blanche to operate outside medical norms and immune from following the best medical practices. This led to the closure of many clinics, and today, in one of the largest states in the continental US, only 18 abortion clinics remain open in Texas. There would also be a significant reduction in the more than 26,000 women that the abortion industry conservatively estimates suffer abortion-related complications each year.
Texas passed the law in 2013 but has not been fully enforced.
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In total, 22 states have specific licensing standards for abortion clinics, although not all are as strict as Texas’, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports the right to an abortion, but whose research is cited by both sides in the debate. To rule in favor of women’s health and safety, however, the justices will simply have to remember what was decided more than 40 years ago in Roe: a state’s legitimate interest in regulating abortion “obviously extends at least to [regulating] the performing physician and his staff, to the facilities involved, to the availability of after-care, and to adequate provision for any complication or emergency that may arise”.
