by Amy Howe
Four years ago, by a vote of 5-3, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that (among other things) required doctors who perform abortions to have the right to admit patients at a nearby hospital. In that case, Justice Anthony Kennedy joined his four more liberal colleagues in holding that, although Texas has a genuine interest in protecting the health of pregnant women, there was no evidence that the law actually did anything to promote that interest – but it did make it more difficult for women to get an abortion. Kennedy is no longer on the court, but today it was Chief Justice John Roberts who joined the court’s four liberals in ruling that a similar law from Louisiana is unconstitutional – even as he maintained that he continues to believe that the Texas case was wrongly decided.
The law at the center of today’s decision is the Louisiana Unsafe Abortion Protection Act, enacted in 2014, which requires doctors who perform abortions in Louisiana to have the right to admit patients to a hospital within 30 miles of the place where the abortion is performed. After the Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt striking down the similar Texas law, a federal court in Louisiana barred the state from implementing the admitting-privileges requirement. It ruled that the law was unconstitutional because it would impose an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to an abortion. Specifically, the district court concluded, if the law went into effect, there would be only one doctor in the entire state left performing abortions in the early stages of pregnancy, and none at all performing abortions between 17 and 21 weeks of pregnancy. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed that ruling, clearing the way for the state to enforce the admitting-privileges requirement.
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