The Supreme Court announced Friday that it will hear a challenge to key parts of Texas’ 2013 abortion law that pro-abortion rights groups say is one of the strictest in the nation. The admitting privileges portion of the law was the portion responsible for closing abortion clinics and, because so many shut down or stopped doing abortions, Judge Lee Yeakel claimed that constituted an undue burden on women.
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These states have pursued restrictions including bans on certain types of abortion procedures, regulatory standards imposed on clinics and abortion doctors, waiting periods, ultrasound requirements and others. Pro-life Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed the omnibus HB 2 bill into law in July 2013. Wendy Davis staged a marathon 13-hour filibuster.
Among other provisions, the law – called HB2 – requires doctors at all abortion clinics to possess admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and for the clinics to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers.
The case focuses in part on a provision that has not yet gone into effect requiring clinics to have costly hospital-grade facilities.
Numerous states have enacted restrictions that lawmakers say protect a woman’s health but abortion providers contend are merely pretext for making it more hard to obtain an abortion or even making the procedure unavailable within a state’s borders. When the court provisionally blocked the Texas law from taking effect in June, Kennedy broke from the conservative wing to provide the necessary fifth vote. More than half of those closed when the admitting privileges requirement was allowed to take effect. At the time, the compromise was seen as a great victory for abortion-rights advocates because it rejected a bid by conservatives to overturn 1973’s Roe v. Wade, which recognized a woman’s right to abortion.
Keep up with the latest pro-life news and information on Twitter. The Supreme Court intervened 20 days later, provisionally blocking the law from going into effect.
That procedural reprieve has given opponents of the law an opportunity to file a formal appeal, in hopes that the justices will review the case and determine whether the Texas law violates prior court precedents governing the right to an abortion.
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The court has not heard a major abortion case since 2007, and its decision will likely come down sometime next spring or early summer in the heat of the presidential campaign.
