Dispatch.com
By Jack Torry, Catherine Candisky & Lilly Maier
Posted July 8th 2016
In a major victory for abortion rights advocates, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday struck down a Texas abortion law, a decision likely to trigger lawsuits in Ohio challenging similar restrictions.
Hundreds of abortion rights supporters outside the court erupted in cheers as the justices handed down the 5-3 ruling with the majority saying the Texas law placed a “substantial obstacle” in the path of a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.
The justices brushed aside arguments that the law was medically necessary to protect a woman’s health. It required a doctor performing an abortion to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and insisted abortion clinics have hospital-like surgical standards.
Writing for the majority, Justice Stephen Breyer concluded “neither of these provisions offers medical benefits sufficient to justify the burdens upon access that each imposes,” adding “each places a substantial obstacle in the path of women seeking a pre-viability abortion, each constitutes an undue burden on abortion access.”
With its ruling, the high court reaffirmed a landmark 1992 ruling that states cannot place an “ undue burden” on a woman’s constitutional right to have an abortion.
The decision was a major setback for anti-abortion advocates. Since the Supreme Court in 1973 guaranteed a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion, opponents have attempted to devise state laws to make it more difficult for a woman to actually have the procedure. In the past six years, Ohio lawmakers have enacted 17 laws to restrict abortions.
The ruling is not expected to have an immediate impact in Ohio, but abortion rights advocates said it throws some state laws into question, particularly one requiring abortion clinics to have transfer agreements with nearby hospitals, and is likely to prompt new legal challenges.
“Going forward, Ohio will have to show that (such restrictions do not place) an undue burden” on women seeking an abortion, said Jennifer Branch, a Cincinnati attorney which represents several abortion providers.
Ohio, like Texas, requires clinics to be licensed as ambulatory care facilities.
While Ohio law does not mandate doctors who perform abortions at clinics to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, the state does require clinics to have transfer agreements with nearby hospitals. Lawmakers amended the law in 2013 to ban publicly funded hospitals from participating in such agreements, a requirement that has three of Ohio’s nine abortion clinics fighting to remain open.
The high court made clear that “medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion providers are never about protecting women. These laws are designed to limit access to abortion and undermine a woman’s dignity and ability to determine her own future,” said Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio.
But anti-abortion advocates say the ruling may have a much more limited impact on Ohio, with Michael Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life, saying he was “cautiously optimistic,” adding Ohio licensing requirements apply not only to abortion clinics, but all surgical centers, including laser eye clinics.
Dan Tierney, spokesman for Attorney General Mike DeWine, agreed. “The two Texas statutes in question” do not exist in Ohio, he said.
In Monday’s ruling, Kennedy, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined Breyer’s majority opinion. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.
With the next president likely to have a chance to nominate as many as three new justices and recent polls showing Democrat Hillary Clinton leading presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, social conservatives may have missed a chance to gain judicial approval for new restrictions.
“By striking down politically motivated restrictions that make it nearly impossible for Texas to exercise their full reproductive rights, the court upheld every woman’s right to safe, legal abortion — no matter where she lives,” Clinton, who was campaigning in Ohio Monday, said in a statement.
As soon as news of the opinion broke, abortion rights supporters outside of the court started shouting, “We have won!” Some anti-abortion activists responded by shouting, “Women have lost today,” but their chants were drowned in the much louder celebratory noise.
The Texas legislature approved the law in 2013 and since then, more than half of the 40 abortion clinics in Texas have closed. Had the justices upheld the Texas law, no more than eight of those clinics would have remained open.
“Texas seeks to force women to travel long distances to get abortions in crammed-to-capacity super-facilities,” Breyer wrote. “Patients seeking these services are less likely to get the kind of individualized attention, serious conversation, and emotional support that doctors at less taxed facilities may have offered.”
In a separate concurring opinion, Ginsburg wrote “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,” she wrote, that the Texas law “could genuinely protect the health of women.”
In his dissent, Thomas wrote a law either infringes a constitutional right, or not; there is no room for the judiciary to invent tolerable degrees of encroachment.”