In a 5-3 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled today to strike down a Texas law regulating the state’s abortion clinics. The Court found that the law would have placed an “undue burden” on abortion access. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the majority opinion.
“This is a clear-cut win for supporters of reproductive health,” said Professor Clare Huntington. “The Supreme Court held that states must be much more careful when regulating providers of reproductive health services and that states cannot simply claim to be protecting women’s health. States must prove that they are doing so and that the benefits to women’s health outweigh the burden on the constitutionally protected right of a woman to choose whether to proceed with a pregnancy. The Supreme Court’s decision makes clear that courts will scrutinize claims by legislatures. The Supreme Court underscored the independent duty of courts to collect evidence and make factual determinations. The Court’s opinion is particularly attuned to the real world effects of the Texas regulations, describing at length the challenges posed by traveling long distances and the concerns about the health care available to women in ‘crammed-to-capacity’ clinics.”
Professor Thomas Lee also offered commentary:
“In Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the Supreme Court, by a 5-3 vote, struck down Texas laws that required abortion clinics: (1) to have doctors with admitting privileges and (2) to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the opinion for the majority, in which Justice Kennedy joined; this is interesting, because Kennedy as senior justice could have taken the helm but passed it to Breyer. In a nutshell, the majority opinion puts some teeth back into the ‘undue burden’ analysis of Planned Parenthood v. Casey (co-authored by Kennedy with former Justices O’Connor and Souter 1992), which had been chipped away both by the Court and the lower courts in the past couple decades. The Hellerstedt majority resurrected the district court’s findings (since supplemented by amicus curiae briefs) that the two restrictions substantially burden the rights of women of reproductive age, particularly in west Texas. The Supreme Court’s ruling is a fairly strong rebuke of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals which overturned the district court’s invalidation of the Texas laws, and I expect there will be a lot of ‘grants, vacates, and remands’ to lawsuits against similar restrictions in other states. And it’s interesting that the Court decided that there would be an undue burden without smoking-gun evidence of actual effects but to a large part based on the credibility of predictions of dramatically diminished access to abortion. The consequence is that there will still be a lot of follow-on litigation about whether some watered-down version of each of type of restriction can stand.”
Media requests for these professors may be directed to Peter Pochna, 212-843-8007, or Eileen Sullivan, 212-843-8016.