Opening the door
Imagine a man who decides to have a vasectomy but is told he must first go for “counselling” on the risk of getting prostate cancer. Or finds that his health insurance won’t cover the procedure. Or has to travel for hours because no nearby hospitals will perform the operation.
Punitive and irrational impediments like these are the fate of thousands of women who seek an abortion in the United States. Although the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, and subsequent decisions, decriminalize the termination of pregnancy, individual states have chipped away at a woman’s right to choose. They have made it expensive, emotionally stressful and sometimes impossible for women experiencing an unplanned pregnancy — including those impregnated against their will — to undergo an abortion under professional care.
But a recent Supreme Court decision that struck down a Texas abortion law has opened the door to major changes.
By a 5-3 margin, the court ruled that doctors who perform abortions need no longer have “admitting,” or staff, privileges at a nearby hospital, and abortion clinics will not have to make costly upgrades to meet the hospital-like building and equipment standards of outpatient surgical centres that perform more complicated procedures. The court’s majority made it clear that Texas’s claim to be “protecting women’s health” was unjustified and violates the Constitution by placing an undue burden on abortion access.
Since the “admitting privileges” rule came into effect in 2013, the number of abortion clinics in Texas has dropped from 41to18. If the rule for upgraded standards were applied, that number would plummet to nine.
In a state with a female population of more than 12 million, and containing the three poorest metropolitan regions in America, that would be a hardship for women, most severely affecting the poor. According to the Washington-based Guttmacher Institute, 49 per cent of U.S. abortion patients in 2014 had incomes below the federal poverty level.
The Texas decision should be a turning point for abortion rights in the U.S., which have been steadily eroded with the support of Republican state lawmakers who have passed dozens of punitive laws. Thirty have been passed in 14 states this year alone. As in Texas, their advocates argue that they are meant to make abortions “safer.” Some are the result of “model bills,” anti-choice blueprints that are replicated across states as they score successes.
It was to guard against a rollback of such laws, and others, by liberal judges, that Republicans in Congress refused to endorse a new candidate to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court until President Barack Obama leaves office. They wrongly believed that the smaller court would be more likely to support their agenda.
The gamble has not paid off. For thousands, if not millions, of American women, it has shown that justice, although hobbled, is not entirely blind.