The Supreme Court decided in a 5-3 vote on Monday to strike down a Texas law that imposed strict regulations on abortion clinics.
Justice Breyer, writing for the majority, said the 2013 legislation, HB2, violated the Bill of Rights by failing the “undue burden” test. The precedent had been delivered in an opinion written in 1992 by Justice Anthony Kennedy.
Kennedy, a Reagan-appointee, again voted on Monday to uphold access to abortion. The other conservative justices on the bench dissented in unison.
“We conclude that neither of these provisions offers medical benefits sufficient to justify the burdens upon access that each imposes,” Breyer wrote.
The two provisions he referred to had placed a rash of new requirements on Texas abortion clinics. One forced providers to have “admitting privileges at a hospital” within 30 miles of their clinic. Another would have forced abortion clinics to adhere to the same standards as “ambulatory surgical centers.” The latter had been enjoined while judicial review was underway.
HB2 had been upheld last year by a federal appeals court in New Orleans, after being ruled unconstitutional by a district judge. Breyer said the appellate panel made a flawed decision that eschewed empirical analysis by design.
“The statement that legislatures, and not courts, must resolve questions of medical uncertainty is also inconsistent with this Court’s case law,” he wrote. “Instead, the Court, when determining the constitutionality of laws regulating abortion procedures, has placed considerable weight upon evidence and argument presented in judicial proceedings.”
Supporters of the law had argued, without offering much by way of proof, that abortion is an abnormally dangerous procedure. Women are ten times more likely to die in childbirth, as The Washington Post noted, and the rate of mortality in childbirth is already extremely low, at 0.009 percent (1 fatality for every 11,000 births).
The LA Times noted, meanwhile, that roughly half of Texas’ 40 abortion clinics had closed down after the law was passed, while it was being challenged.
The precedent set on Monday means that restrictive anti-abortion laws in other states are vulnerable to litigation. As the Dallas Morning News noted, five states have abortion clinic building standards laws on the books, while 11 states have laws on hospital admission requirements for providers.
