The three female Supreme Court justices led an attack Wednesday on a Texas law that would shut down about three-fourths of the state’s abortion clinics, clashing with their conservative colleagues over what could be the court’s most important abortion case in decades.
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The law also requires doctors to obtain admitting privileges from a hospital 30 miles from the clinic where they perform abortions.
Whole Woman’s Health is taking the health department to court because it says the law is putting an “undue burden” on women’s right to having a termination (something that was previously ruled unconstitutional by a certain Justice Kennedy, 24 years ago in Planned Parenthood vs Casey). Lawyers fighting the Texas law said the two requirements would reduce the number of abortion providers from 41 to 10.
Keller said the state was motivated by the case of Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortion doctor who in 2013 was convicted of multiple crimes including murder of infants born alive.
The Supreme Court granted Louisiana abortion clinics’ request on Friday to halt enforcement of an abortion provider restriction temporarily that required doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.
The two sides disagree about the law’s impact.
Requiring admitting privileges “ensures doctors are qualified, promotes continuity of care in the case of complications that require hospitalization, and reduces communications errors and delays when a patient must be treated at a hospital”. She is senior legal analyst and vice president of Law and the Courts at RH Reality Check, co-author of Crow After Roe: How “Separate But Equal” Has Become the New Standard in Women’s Health and How We Can Change That.
Clinic advocates have said the admitting privileges requirement could leave Louisiana with just one abortion clinic, located in New Orleans.
“She has said on many occasions that for women to attain true equality with men, they must have sole control over their fertility”.
Supreme Court appears split in abortion arguments. The other requires the clinics to meet the same standards as ambulatory surgical centers that perform more complicated procedures than the typical first-trimester abortion. The votes of the other justices, however, were not disclosed.
Ginsburg was incensed by an assertion in Kennedy’s majority opinion that said it was “self-evident” that women who had abortions through such a method could come to regret their choice and, consequently, suffer from “severe depression and loss of esteem”. While that decision upheld a federal law, said Forsythe, it also “leaves more deference to the states to protect maternal health”. The petition further notes that one of the two doctors would be forced to cease providing abortions if the Supreme Court did not intervene. Currently, a temporary court order allows one clinic in the Rio Grande Valley to remain open while the case is pending.
“Based on the argument, it did not seem that the abortion clinics would get 5 votes on any ground”, he said in a March 2 statement.
The Louisiana Coalition for Reproductive Freedom applauds the U.S. Supreme Court’s order to vacate the stay entered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. It could make abortion functionally inaccessible in large swaths of the country, furthering the disparities in state-by-state access that have been rapidly growing in recent years and encouraging the anti-abortion movement to increase its efforts.
Louisiana’s law was struck down by a trial judge, but the appeals court said last week that the law could be enforced.
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The Supreme Court has overturned an appeals court order allowing a pro-life law to go into effect in Louisiana that has already closed abortion clinics unable to provide for women’s health.
