Surgical abortion is an out-patient procedure. Accordingly, why shouldn’t fetal-killing clinics be required to comply with the same rules as other non-hospital surgical centers?
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals apparently couldn’t think of one, and so, unanimously upheld the law. From the NYT story:
A federal appellate court upheld some of the toughest provisions of a Texas abortion law on Tuesday, putting about half of the state’s remaining abortion clinics at risk of permanently shutting their doors and leaving the nation’s second-most populous state with fewer than a dozen clinics across its more than 267,000 square miles. There were 41 when the law was passed.
The pro-abortion media and advocacy groups are furious.
Curious that: I mean, Planned Parenthood bleats all the time that abortion only amounts to 3% of its services. But if that was really true, surely such a minor restriction would not cause the organization to close dozens of its Texas clinics.
I mean, what about the all those breast exams PP always goes on about? Simple: PP’s reasons for existence are abortion, and abortion, and more abortion. The rest is a thin veneer.
Pro-lifers are cheering their victory. But I hope they understand that their successful strategy of chipping away at Roe could result in a ruling upholding abortion rights based on an absolute standard of equal protection for women as opposed to the current right to privacy approach that is balanced by other considerations. As I wrote last year in “A Pro-Abortion Reversal of Roe v. Wade?“
[Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader] Ginsburg believes adamantly that women are denied “equal citizen stature” by boundaries placed around access to abortion.
Not only that, but in an angry dissent to the 2007 Supreme Court ruling upholding the federal ban on partial birth abortion, she (joined by Justice Breyer among the current justices) railed against the majority allowing “moral concerns” to “override fundamental rights.”
That sounded to me as advocacy for an unfettered right to abortion at any time and for any reason. So, I asked expert anti-abortion attorney Clarke D. Forsythe”the senior counsel for Americans United for Life”whether Ginsburg’s view would abolish all abortion regulation.
Yes, he told me: If the right to an abortion were based on “equal protection of the law,” as opposed to other constitutional standards, it would “permit no regulations at any time,” perhaps even, “requiring [government] abortion funding.”
In other words, even though the most well-known anti- Roe efforts are aimed at overturning the case to permit greater state regulation, a significant”if quieter”counter-push seeks to (essentially) overturn Roe by making the abortion right virtually absolute. At the very least, it would repair those cracks in the protective wall.
If the Texas case sticks, look for intensified pro-abortion advocacy seeking to replace Roe with a ruling accomplishing what that case was supposed to do: End the possibility of all anti-abortion political advocacy.
Think it can’t happen? I have four words for you: President Hillary Rodham Clinton.