The Supreme Court announced Friday that it will take on its first major abortion case since 2007. It’s a Texas case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, and how the Court decides could have an impact on millions of women seeking to terminate their pregnancies:
The case concerns two parts of a state law that imposes strict requirements on abortion providers. It was passed by the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature and signed into law in July 2013 by Rick Perry, the governor at the time.
One part of the law requires all clinics in the state to meet the standards for “ambulatory surgical centers,” including regulations concerning buildings, equipment and staffing. The other requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.
Other parts of the law have already caused about half of the state’s 41 abortion clinics to close. If the contested provisions take effect, the brief said, the number of clinics would again be halved.
We’ve extensively explored these kinds of regulations imposed byTexas and other states. They are medically unnecessary, but their purpose is not women’s health. Instead, they are meant to shut down as many abortion clinics as possible. Ian Millihiser writes at Think Progress:
As the Texas Hospital Association explains, for example, “thousands of physicians operate clinics and provide services in those clinics but do not have hospital admitting privileges.” Hospitals provide care to women who experience complications during an abortion — complications, it should be noted, that are extraordinarily rare—regardless of whether the physician who performed the abortion has admitting privileges or not. Similarly, the ambulatory surgical center requirement applies even in abortion clinics that do not perform surgeries — many abortions are induced by medication alone. The laws, in other words, impose burdensome and expensive restrictions on abortion clinics even when those restrictions bear no relationship whatsoever to advancing women’s health.
There are two major elements in the Cole case, according to the SCOTUSblog. Under the “undue burden” standard of the Supreme Court’s 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey ruling, lower courts must determine whether an abortion-restricting regulation actually relates to the government’s interest in promoting health. It cannot impose an undue burden on women seeking an abortion. The second matter is whether the Fifth Circuit Court wrongly decided that Texas can impose standards that greatly reduce the availability of abortion.
If this decision upholds the Fifth Circuit’s ruling without qualifications, it could mark the de facto end of abortion services in those states where forced-birther lawmakers keep coming up with clever ways to make the procedure ever more difficult and expensive for women to obtain even while it remains technically legal.