The Supreme Court’s decision to rule on the constitutionality of a Texas abortion law, seen by some as an obstacle to a woman’s right to choose, will potentially impact millions of women and families across the country, Fordham Law Professor Clare Huntington said last week.
Petitioners in Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, No. 15-274 allege that the Texas Omnibus Abortion Bill, passed into law in 2013, would place an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions, in part by imposing unnecessary requirements on clinics and doctors that would lead to clinic closures across the state.
Clare Huntington
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton maintains that these requirements are meant to protect both the fetus and health of the woman, in keeping with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.
While it’s highly unlikely the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade’s landmark ruling on abortion rights, legal “workarounds” at the state level have sought and, in some cases, achieved similar results, putting women’s health and rights in jeopardy, Huntington said. A ruling in favor of restrictive abortion laws in Texas, where an average of 60,000 abortions are performed each year, could lead other states to pursue more stringent requirements in the name of a woman’s health.
“If the Court upholds the Texas law, the implications are tremendous. It would send a message to states that they can enact laws that purportedly protect women’s health but in practice limit access to safe and legal abortions,” said Huntington, an expert on family law and poverty law and author of Failure to Flourish: How Law Undermines Family Relationships. It remains to be seen, Huntington added, how much the Court will scrutinize the state’s given justifications for the laws when it issues its ruling, which is expected to come by late June.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to uphold the Texas law. The impact of the law, had it taken effect as scheduled on July 1, would have stretched into the Fifth Circuit’s other states, Louisiana and Mississippi, Huntington said.
Texas’s law requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and for abortion clinics to meet the requirement for “ambulatory surgical centers.” Opponents say these requirements, if enacted, would reduce the number of abortion clinics statewide from 19 to around 10 for a state with an estimated 5.4 million women of reproductive age. The state once had 42 abortion clinics.
At present, women living in Texas must travel on average 111 miles to have an abortion, according to the New York Times. The remaining clinics would be clustered in metropolitan areas, further increasing the travel distance for abortions, the law’s opponents warn.
There are also challenges for women living closer to metropolitan areas. Texas law requires women living within 100 miles of a clinic to receive a sonogram at least 24 hours before having an abortion. In many cases, this means missed workdays, babysitter costs, and assorted meal and gas expenses.
Distance- and waiting-related obstacles factored together impose “enormous financial burdens” on low-income women and women living in rural areas, Huntington said. “Without classifying some abortions as justified and others as not, it is important to remember that many women make the decision not to carry a pregnancy to term because of their sense of responsibility to existing children,” she added. An estimated 61 percent of women who have abortions already have children, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
When faced with considerable obstacles, “will some women desperate not to have the pregnancy turn to unsafe means?” Huntington asked. She noted that “historically, when states banned abortion, that’s absolutely what happened.”
This week, researchers from Texas Policy Evaluation Project released a study estimating between 100,000 to 240,000 women have attempted to self-induce abortions at some point in their lives. Lack of money and resources to pay for travel, as well as lack of money to pay for the procedure, were cited among the reasons women gave for attempting to self-induce abortions, according to researchers.
–Ray Legendre
