A divided Supreme Court on Monday ruled against a Texas law that placed restrictions on how women can gain access to abortions at clinics.
In a 5-3 decision, Justice Stephen Breyer said that “both the admitting privileges and surgical center requirements place a substantial obstacle in the path of women seeking a previability abortion, constitute an undue burden on abortion access, and thus violate the Constitution.”
Link: Read The Full Opinion
The dissenters included Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, with Alito and Thomas writing dissents.
“Today the Court strikes down two state statutory provisions in all of their applications, at the behest of abortion clinics and doctors. That decision exemplifies the Court’s troubling tendency to bend the rules when any effort to limit abortion, or even to speak in opposition to abortion, is at issue,’” said Justice Thomas.
The petitioners in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt claimed a Texas law enacted in 2013 would force about 75 percent of the state’s abortion services to close. Two provisions in the law require that doctors at clinics have hospital admitting privileges within 30 miles of the clinics, and that clinics have facilities equal to those of an outpatient surgical center.
Today’s Supreme Court ruling effectively eliminates those provisions.
Texas officials believed the laws protected the health of the women seeking abortions by guaranteeing better care. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit sided with the state of Texas, but the Supreme Court stopped the law from going into effect until it could decide if it would accept an appeal.
