How The Supreme Court Could Destroy Reproductive Rights In One Term

[Valin]

Think Progress:

Ian Millhiser

Sep 22, 2015

 

Less than a year from now, Roe v. Wade could be all-but-dead. Employers, health providers, and pharmacists could gain sweeping new power to impose their religious views on women who use birth control. And elected lawmakers could even be stripped of their power to correct Supreme Court decisions that read religious objectors’ rights too expansively. Simply put, the Supreme Court term that begins next month is likely to do more to determine how much control women have over their own bodies than any term since the justices decided Roe v. Wade.

 

Abortion

 

The justices have not decided a major abortion case since 2007’s Gonzales v. Carhart, a decision reproductive health advocates frequently quote with disgust for its pronouncement that restrictions on the right to choose can be justified, at least in part, because “some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.” Even more significantly, however, Carhart offered a way forward to state lawmakers eager to shut down abortion clinics in their state.

 

State and federal lawmakers, according to Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion for the Court in Carhart, enjoy “wide discretion to pass legislation in areas where there is medical and scientific uncertainty,” a holding that placed Kennedy wildly at odds with the Court’s original decision in Roe v. Wade. That opinion held, at least in early stages of the pregnancy, that “the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman’s attending physician.” Now, however, much of this judgment has been transferred to state lawmakers.

 

It’s an open question just how much discretion the Supreme Court is prepared to transfer to state lawmakers, but legislators in many states have pushed the limits to see how far they can go. One of the most common tactics is sham health laws that, at least on the surface, appear to be efforts to protect women’s health — but that do little to advance such health concerns while simultaneously imposing strict limits on abortion access. In Texas, for example, a 2013 law requires doctors to have admitting privileges in a nearby hospital before they can perform abortions, and it also imposes expensive architectural and other requirements on clinics that they must comply with in order to operate.

 

(Snip)

 

 

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