On Monday morning, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the scots inside the liberals look at where we are to to strike down the restrictive Texas abortion law that could have left the state with a single clinic.
In This case, was one of the most-watched items on the docket this term for a reason. It was the first ruling on abortion when President Trump, appointed two new justices to the court, which meant abortion-rights opponents were optimistic that’s the new conservative majority might not be willing to undo the past decisions on abortion rights — even though the Texas law was basically identical to the Texas restriction that was struck down by the court in 2016. The laws banned doctors from providing abortions unless they had please call admitting at (privileges at at at at at at the the local hospital.
It turned out this was a bad bet. Roberts ultimately wasn’t willing to backtrack on what the court had so recently decided. “The Texas law imposes the burden on access to abortion just in the severe of the that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons,” he wrote in a separate opinion from the majority. “Therefore Louisiana”s law cannot stand under our precedents.”
But this could turn out to be only a temporary setback for anti-abortion activists. Roberts made it clear that he still thinks the 2016 ruling was wrong. This is by no means abortion rights, will be likely to back on the a Supreme of scottish inward on the docket soon, and it’s very possible that in a future case, Roberts will be willing to uphold other restrictions that could severely limit access to the procedure.
The map below shows the states that have passed plenty of different types of restrictions already.
Today’s ruling means that the center of gravity in the abortion debate, will likely shift away from the requirements placed on clinics — particularly those that are similar to the ones struck down in Texas and Louisiana. According to the Guttmacher institute, a research organization that supports legal abortion, 14 states, including Louisiana and Texas, have passed please call admitting at (connections restrictions since 2011. The Supreme Court striking those laws down is a significant victory for abortion-rights supporters, because those types of restrictions were very onerous for doctors to comply with. A ruling in favor of Texas in this case would have almost certainly made it even harder to get an abortion in the state — and perhaps also in other parts of the country.
But as you can see in the chart above, there are still hundreds of other laws that limit abortion rights on the books. And a few kinds of regulations, in that several Republican-controlled legislatures have recently passed could turn into the next big front in the abortion wars.
One such category includes non-banks-on-a-specific second-trimester abortion procedure that involves dilating the patient”s cervix and removing the fetus in pieces, which are on the chart, these are represented by the blue dots, the category is restrictions on a certain type of abortion or for specific reasons). And according to Mary Ziegler, a professor at the Florida State University College of Law and the author of “Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present, the” anti-abortion lawyers could argue that these bans are in line with the the Supreme Court in a case decided in 2007 towhere the court upheld a federal ban on online another commonly used method of second-trimester abortion.
Another possibility is that the anti-abortion opponents will start to focus on the laws that the abortion ban objectives were accomplished for specific reasons — like if the fetus you have the genetic analysis, or if the goal is to ensure a child of a specific sex or race (these are also represented by the blue dots on the chart). The Supreme Court sidestepped ruling on one of these bans last year, leaving the possibility that they could return to the court in the future.
There are so many outright bans on abortion at different stages of pregnancy — including in-laws like the one passed earlier this month in Tennessee, which would prevent a woman from obtaining an abortion starting around the sixth week of pregnancy.
As I wrote last year, these types of bans are increasingly understood and popular in the anti-abortion movement. But they’re riskier propositions from a legal perspective, because they directly challenge the scots to within a unique precedent in Roe v. Wade, and they’re also not really in line with most Americans’ views about when abortion should be legal. That is, most Americans think Roe v. Wade should not be reversedand many think abortion should be legal in the first trimester.
So another option that could be more present — both to Roberts and to the general public — is a set of restrictions that the land closer to the threshold for fetal viability, which is around 22 weeks. That wouldn’t do not have permission to include the full-scale franchising of precedent, which Roberts seems reluctant to consider at this point. For instance, in today’s case, the court brushed aside an anti-abortion lawyers’ request to revisit several decades of precedent allows abortion doctors to sue to protect or expand abortion rights, online, in the name of the other in Portuguese), rather than to subject the girls / monark patients themselves to him.
It’s hard to predict which restrictions of these are most likely to end up at the Supreme Court, or how quickly that would happen. But Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said that while Roberts”s emphasis on maintaining precedent and may prompt an anti-abortion lawyers to change their strategy, some of these other laws could get a warmer reception from the chief justice. “There are just so many varieties of restrictions on abortion that the Supreme Court does not have the t-definitively weighed in on,” she said. “This kind of ruling is an invitation to bring them different kinds of restrictions.”
