In a 5-4 decision Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana abortion law requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges in a nearby hospital.
In keeping with a string of other unconstitutional maneuvers, Chief Justice John Roberts joined once again with the bench’s leftists in June Medical Services v. Russo, authoring his own concurring opinion that cut against the Constitution, life, and women.
Abortion advocates said the Louisiana law placed an “undue burden” on women seeking the barbaric procedure. The law, however, simply held abortionists to the same standard as other medical practitioners, protecting women by requiring abortionists to have an agreement with a nearby hospital where they could admit patients in case of emergency.
This is a reincarnation of the "abortion distortion": applying a different set of rules to abortion than to other issues. This was a common sense regulation mean to protect women and avoid Kermit Gosnell nightmares. (2/x)
— Carrie Severino (@JCNSeverino) June 29, 2020
Roberts appealed to precedent or “stare decisis” in his opinion, drawing from Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, a Supreme Court case that struck down a similar law requiring admitting privileges in Texas because it allegedly created too great an obstacle to women’s contrived “right” to obtain an abortion.
“I joined the dissent in Whole Woman’s Health and continue to believe that the case was wrongly decided. The question today however is not whether Whole Woman’s Health was right or wrong, but whether to adhere to it in deciding the present case,” Roberts wrote. “The legal doctrine of stare decisis requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases alike. The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons. Therefore Louisiana’s law cannot stand under our precedents.”
June Medical Differed from Hellerstedt
Pro-life leaders maintain not only that am abortionist’s lack of admitting privileges actively harms women, but that the Louisiana case differs from Texas.
“One of the differences between June Medical and Hellerstedt is that the record out of Louisiana is full of instances where women suffered greatly because doctors did not have admitting privileges,” Denise Harle, legal counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, told The Federalist in an interview at the March for Life.
“There was a woman, for example, whose uterus was perforated, and she ended up sitting in the ER for three days hemorrhaging, and they ultimately had to do a hysterectomy and she lost her ability to have children just because the abortion doctor didn’t have admitting privileges,” Harle said. “So that was just one example of several on the record.”
The Louisiana law also differs from the Texas law in practice, resulting in no substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions. Texas hospitals, for example, require doctors to admit a minimum number of patients each year to keep their admitting privileges, resulting in more abortion facilities closing, but few Louisiana hospitals require such minimums.
In fact, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said there is no evidence the Louisiana law would result in any abortion facility closures, since only one doctor at a single facility in Louisiana was unable to obtain admitting privileges. While the Texas law resulted in a 350 percent increase in women having to drive more than 150 miles to get abortions, the Louisiana law did not cause driving distances to increase.
Supreme Court Leftists Ignore ‘Third-Party Standing’
Another question at issue in the June Medical Services case was whether abortionists, as an unharmed third party, had legal grounds to challenge the Louisiana law on behalf of their female patients. In his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said the majority “all but ignore[d] the question.”
“For most of its history, this Court maintained that private parties could not bring suit to vindicate the constitutional rights of individuals who are not before the Court,” Thomas said, implicating Roberts’ blind adherence to precedent when it is politically expedient. Thomas continued:
The plurality and THE CHIEF JUSTICE ultimately cast aside this jurisdictional barrier to conclude that Louisiana’s law is unconstitutional under our precedents. But those decisions created the right to abortion out of whole cloth, without a shred of support from the Constitution’s text. Our abortion precedents are grievously wrong and should be overruled. Because we have neither jurisdiction nor constitutional authority to declare Louisiana’s duly enacted law unconstitutional, I respectfully dissent.
Pro-life advocates have maintained that the question of “third-party standing” is a crucial issue of women’s rights, as the abortion lobby, a behemoth profiting off murder of the innocent and the exploitation of women, is purporting to represent women’s interests before the law.
“It’s wrong for the abortion industry to be bringing these cases,” Harle told The Federalist. “Abortion clinics are bringing a lawsuit to avoid complying with a standard of care that applies to all doctors at ambulatory surgical centers throughout Louisiana, so the abortion industry is coming in and asking for a special exemption so they don’t have to abide by health and safety standards.”
Justice Samuel Alito agreed, noting in his dissent that precedent cannot justify the majority’s decision, “which clashes with our general rule on third-party standing. And the idea that a regulated party can invoke the right of a third party for the purpose of attacking legislation enacted to protect the third party is stunning.”
Planned Parenthood and the abortion lobby have long sold women the lie that being pro-woman is incompatible with being pro-life. The Supreme Court, with Roberts at the helm, just affirmed that falsehood by refusing to acknowledge the fallacy inherent within third-party standing, choosing to side with abortion profiteers rather than the Constitution and vulnerable women.
As Louisiana state Sen. Katrina Jackson, a pro-life Democrat, said, this “tragic decision” continues the Supreme Court’s “practice of putting the interests of for-profit abortion businesses ahead of the health and safety of women.” She’s right. The radical left is peddling today’s Supreme Court decision as a victory for women’s rights, when really it denies them an adequate standard of care, placing them in harm’s way.
BREAKING: #SCOTUS just ruled that the law in 𝘑𝘶𝘯𝘦 𝘔𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 is unconstitutional. This is huge, but anti-choice extremists are already trying to undermine this win. Help us ensure that reproductive freedom is for 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 body, everywhere: https://t.co/B6tXyonPwc pic.twitter.com/BXF6z83mFg
— Reproductive Freedom for All (@reproforall) June 29, 2020
Many patients seeking abortion in Louisiana can breath a sigh of relief. Your ability to access abortion shouldn’t be determined by where you live, how much money you make, and the color of your skin — and we’ll keep working to make that a reality for ALL people. https://t.co/HdSTnFbUsv
— Planned Parenthood (@PPFA) June 29, 2020
“Women can speak for themselves,” Harle said. “Women deserve to be protected and have the same standard of care. It’s wrong for doctors who are profiting off of women to come in with this conflict of interest and pretend they speak for women when they’re really asking for an exemption that jeopardizes women’s health.”