Members of the pro-life movement standing outside the Supreme Court on Monday were visibly discouraged by the 5-3 decision striking down a Texas law that imposed health and safety regulations on abortion clinics. “In too many states, access to abortion is still a right in name only for many women”.
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Under the contentious Texas law, doctors who perform abortions were required to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and their clinics needed to meet the standards of an ambulatory surgical center.
“The decision affirms that a deceptive Texas law with the express goal of gutting access to safe, legal abortions is not only harmful to women and families, but is clearly unconstitutional”.
Texas is among 10 states with similar admitting privileges requirements, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights.
President Barack Obama said he was pleased with the decision Monday, noting “every woman has a constitutional right to make her own reproductive choices”.
Unlike the USA 5th District Court of Appeals in New Orleans, which upheld the laws, the high court clearly saw through the Texas masquerade.
“Today women lost”, Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America, said outside the court after the ruling.
Attorney General Ken Paxton, who represented the state in the appeals process, said, “It is exceedingly unfortunate that the court has taken the ability to protect women’s health out of the hands of Texas citizens and their duly-elected representatives”.
Attorneys for Whole Woman’s Health countered that the Texas law imposed an undue burden because it “would close more than 75 per cent of Texas abortion facilities and deter new ones from opening”. Trump had no immediate reaction.
The Supreme Court heard the arguments in early March.
While opponents of the Texas law see it as part of a nationwide drive to restrict access to legal abortion, its defenders insist it aimed to protect women’s health. It was the court’s first controversial case without Justice Antonin Scalia, who passed away in February. Scalia, a stalwart conservative on the court for almost 30 years, was an ardent abortion foe. The closing of clinics in one part of the state shouldn’t mean that clinics in another area should be free from the law, Justice Samuel Alito argued. Kennedy had suggested at the March hearing on the dispute that lower courts might need to hear more evidence in the case.
“Here in Florida, women’s access to care is still very much under threat”, she added in a statement. If the court had deadlocked 4-4, the Texas law would have been upheld, although no national precedent would have been set.
“While we can’t say anything definitively, the high ruling, the court’s ruling today gives us some indication that it’s highly unlikely that they’ll review the Wisconsin case”, Tanya Atkinson, executive director of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin, said. “The state has a legitimate interest in ensuring the maximum level of safety for the woman subjected to the procedure and that viable emergency care is available if complications such as hemorrhage, infection, uterine perforation, blood clots, cervical tears, or allergic reactions occur”.
Monday’s decision is likely to affect other states with similar laws regulating health and safety standards for abortions. “Clearly the Texas law in question was not only morally wrong but was legally an undue burden”.
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With better birth control measures, the number of abortions in the US has been falling in recent years, now down to below a million a year. The bill propelled Davis, at the time a state senator who ran for governor in 2014, to national stardom when her filibuster packed the Texas Capitol with raucous protesters whose shouts deafened the Senate floor as time ran out on the measure. Whole Woman’s Health is a abortion provider that stayed open despite the restrictions as many other providers closed over the past two years.
