The glorious news—and yes, it is glorious—for reproductive rights issued by the U.S. Supreme Court Monday won’t just affect the Texas law that the 5-3 majority shot down. Twenty-three other states have similar requirements to those the Court objected to in its ruling.
The two parts of HB2, the Texas law that the highest court overturned, required that abortion clinics essentially be mini-hospitals and that physicians performing abortions must have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic they serve. Both these provisions have been part of the decades-long campaign by forced-birthers to reduce the number of clinics that perform abortions by making it too expensive for some of them to continue operating. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg got to the crux of the matter in her concurring opinion, stating:
Texas argues that H. B. 2’s restrictions are constitutional because they protect the health of women who experience complications from abortions. In truth, “complications from an abortion are both rare and rarely dangerous.” [...]
Many medical procedures, including childbirth, are far more dangerous to patients, yet are not subject to ambulatory surgical-center or hospital admitting-privileges requirements. [...]
Given those realities, it is beyond rational belief that H. B. 2 could genuinely protect the health of women, and certain that the law “would simply make it more difficult for them to obtain abortions.” [...]
So long as this Court adheres to Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833 (1992), Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers laws like H. B. 2 that “do little or nothing for health, but rather strew impediments to abortion,” Planned Parenthood of Wis., 806 F. 3d, at 921, cannot survive judicial inspection.
That’s what forced-birthers in Texas and those other states have sought to do all along—make safe, legal abortions more difficult to obtain. Rather than protect women, these laws endanger women’s health and their lives as they seek out what Ginsburg labels “unlicensed rogue practitioners.”
The following states have also imposed laws requiring that abortion clinics meet hospital standards, according to the Guttmacher Institute. States with asterisks also require admitting privileges for clinic physicians at nearby hospitals:
Alabama*, Arizona*, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida*, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana*, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi*, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma*, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina*, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin*.
Arkansas’ law on hospital admitting privileges has been previously stayed by the courts. Indiana requires admitting privileges.
The Court’s ruling means that at least nine of the remaining 19 abortion clinics in Texas that would have closed due to imposition of HB2 will remain open. Whether this means some new clinics might open to replace the ones shuttered in other states with laws similar to HB2 remains to be seen. But the ruling definitely gives the reproductive rights movement the grounds it needs to push the forced-birthers into retreat for the first time in years.
Perhaps a point of attack going forward for the reproductive rights movement would be to target the 27 states that have laws that require women to wait before being allowed to get an abortion. Of those states, Indiana has the shortest time, 18 hours. Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Utah all make women wait 72 hours after they have received pre-abortion “counseling,” much of it filled with inaccuracies or outright lies. In South Dakota, with its single abortion clinic in the southeast corner of the state, weekends and official holidays can’t be included in the waiting period, which means working women are put at an even greater disadvantage.
There’s no way to tell at this juncture why those waiting periods could not also fall to the same reasoning seen in the Court’s ruling today. But it’s certainly worth considering a lawsuit to find out.