PRO-CHOICE WIN
Roberts joins libs to nix La. abort law
The Supreme Court on Monday struck down a Louisiana law regulating abortion clinics, reasserting a commitment to abortion rights in the first big reproductive-rights case of President Trump’s administration.
Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts joined four liberal colleagues in ruling that the law requiring that doctors who perform abortions have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals violates the abortion right the court first established in the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.
The Louisiana law is virtually identical to one in Texas that the court struck down — with Roberts voting against it — in 2016.
“The result in this case is controlled by our decision four years ago invalidating a nearly identical Texas law,” Roberts wrote, although he did not join in the majority opinion that was written by Justice Stephen Breyer.
And Roberts, who has generally sided against abortions, also gave some hope to opponents of the practice, writing in his own opinion that the “validity of admitting-privileges law depends on numerous factors that may differ from state to state.”
Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a stinging dissent.
“Today a majority of the Court perpetuates its ill-founded abortion jurisprudence by enjoining a perfectly legitimate state law and doing so without jurisdiction,” he wrote.
Trump’s two appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, dissented, along with Justice Samuel Alito.
The presence of the new justices had fueled hopes among abortion opponents, and fears among prochoicers that the high court would be more likely to uphold restrictions.
The ruling represented a victory for Shreveport-based abortion provider Hope Medical Group for Women in its challenge to the 2014 law.
The measure had required doctors who perform abortions to have sometimes difficult-to-obtain admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic.
Two of the three clinics that perform abortions in Louisiana, a state of about 4.6 million people, would have been forced to close if the law had taken effect, according to lawyers for Hope Medical Group.
A trial judge had said the law would not provide health benefits to women and would leave only one clinic open in Louisiana, in New Orleans. That would make it too hard for women to get an abortion, in violation of the Constitution, the judge ruled.
The White House ripped the ruling in a statement from Trump spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany, who also blasted the “unelected judges” who ruled against the state law.
“In an unfortunate ruling today, the Supreme Court devalued both the health of mothers and the lives of unborn children by gutting Louisiana’s policy that required all abortion procedures be performed by individuals with admitting privileges at a nearby hospital,” she said.
“Instead of valuing fundamental democratic principles, unelected justices have intruded on the sovereign prerogatives of state governments by imposing their own policy preference in favor of abortion to override legitimate abortion-safety regulations.”