IT CAN be hazardous to read too much into the tenor of Supreme Court oral arguments: the justices often seem to lean one way and then end up ruling the other way. But in Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt, the most significant abortion ruling the justices have handed down in a generation, there were no great surprises. Anyone who watched the Texas solicitor-general struggle to defend his state’s restrictive abortion law before the justices on March 2nd would have been hard-pressed to predict a win for the Lone Star state. Sure enough, by a 5-3 vote, the court ruled on June 27th, the final day of its fraught term, that a Texas law that would have reduced the number of abortion clinics in the state from over 40 to the single digits ran afoul of a woman’s constitutional right to end her pregnancy.
The 2013 law that the justices gutted today was disingenuously framed by Texas Republicans as a measure to protect women’s health. By requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and mandating that clinics be retrofitted as “ambulatory surgical centres” (renovations that are prohibitively...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/28ZC6Di
EmoticonEmoticon