Monday’s monumental Supreme Court decision, blocking an oppressive Texas anti-abortion law and setting the precedent for the rest of the country, sent a ripple of relief through the country’s pro-choice community. Suddenly, the steadily rising tide of laws limiting women’s access to a legal abortion has reversed — and pro-choice advocates finally have the legal support to shred legislation based on lies.
And it’s already begun.
Just days after the court’s decision, the Supreme Court rejected cases similar to Texas’ in Mississippi, Alabama, and Wisconsin — bringing an end to major state abortion restrictions. Now, pro-choice organizations are continuing the attacks on state-level laws.
“The decision is so strong, it gives us the momentum we needed,” said Julie Rikelman, litigation director for the Center of Reproductive Rights (CRR). “The court set a very powerful standard by reaffirming the constitutional right to an abortion.”
CRR is responsible for bringing Monday’s case (Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt) in front of the Supreme Court in the first place, making their next steps especially satisfying. The court ultimately found two main provisions of Texas’ HB2 law unconstitutional for placing an “undue burden” on women seeking an abortion. The two provisions required all state abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospitals and forced abortion clinics to make unnecessary and expensive building tweaks to their facilities. These types of restrictions are often called “Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers,” or TRAP laws, by abortion advocates.
CRR was also behind the Mississippi case that the Supreme Court dropped a day after its Texas decision. The law, which mandated hospital admitting privileges for abortion doctors in the state, would have shuttered the last remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi. And on Friday morning, the center filed a new lawsuit that challenged every abortion restriction law passed in Louisiana in 2016. Rikelman said the organization is now working to immediately quash laws held up in pending litigation in at least five more states. Many of these cases, she added, are “almost identical” to Texas’ law. http://archive.thinkprogress.org/health/2016/05/09/3776058/de-ban-state-trend/Planned Parenthood also announced its intention to strip now-unconstitutional anti-abortion laws from eight states. In a Thursday press call, representatives from the organization’s policy arm said their “repeal campaign” would not be restricted to TRAP laws. While this was the focus of the Monday decision, the court’s ultimate ruling could be used to repeal a slew of restrictive laws — from banning abortion after 20 weeks gestation or forcing women to wait 72 hours after seeing a doctor to discuss having an abortion to actually have the procedure — simply on the basis that they place a “substantial obstacle in the path of women seeking an abortion.”
“We will use this ruling to go state by state, legislature by legislature, court by court, and law by law, until every single one of these dangerous restrictions is repealed,” said Dawn Laguens, vice president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, on the call. “We will not stop until women’s health and lives come first.” Laguens said that the organization will soon reopen Texas clinics that were shuttered due to the restrictions of HB2.
This major victory, however, does not mean the fight for abortion access is over. These advocacy groups expect anti-abortion organizations to return with a new strategy to legally make abortions difficult for women to obtain. CRR’s Rikelman said that she’s already seen the beginnings of this political pivot.
“Groups were already starting to shift away from TRAP laws, since they had been losing a lot of cases,” she said. “They’re turning away from the women’s health angle, and back to fetal life.”
Instead of marketing the “women’s health” angle that the court debunked, Rikelman said she thinks anti-abortion groups will put new fire behind laws targeting “fetal life.” This focus has taken center stage in many new state laws. Pitched as attempts to stop abortion doctors who “rip babies apart limb by limb,” these laws effectively ban the safest way to obtain a second-trimester abortion. And past efforts to humanize unborn fetuses, relying on the disproved belief that fetuses can feel pain at 20 weeks gestation, have received considerable support in the past years.
And Capitol Hill isn’t immune to this heartstring-pulling rhetoric. A Senate panel on “infant lives” continues to threaten fetal tissue researchers with investigations based on a 2015 video campaign alleging that Planned Parenthood profited off fetal tissue. However, these videos have long been disproved — and their creators indited.