What Happened in the Latest SCOTUS Abortion Arguments?

On March 4, 2020, both pro-life advocates and abortion supporters gathered outside the United States Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., where the Justices heard arguments in June Medical Services v. Russo, a challenge to a Louisiana law requiring abortion providers to have hospital admitting privileges to protect women who would be in medical distress as a result of an abortion.  Regent Law’s Dean Chief Justice Mark Martin addressed political events surrounding the oral arguments on CBN recently.

The precedent that the High Court was reviewing is their own 2016 decision in Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, which struck down a similar Texas admitting privileges law to protect abortive women. Arguments against Russo’s validity focused on the constitutional right to abortion of future patients, rather than on the protections women deserve now as abortion patients.  Abortion has had myriad negative effects on women and their families. (For more on that see my article Roe’s Effect on Family Law, 71 Washington & Lee L. Rev. 1339 (2014)).

During the arguments Justice Alito was concerned with the apparent conflict between the abortion providers’ interests in not being regulated and their patients’ interests in being treated by competent physicians. Justices Ginsberg, Sotomayor, and Breyer all intervened with questions pointing out that the Court has for decades allowed abortion providers to bring challenges to abortion restrictions. Chief Justice Roberts steered the questioning to the merits of the case, focusing on the question of the benefits to women’s health of admitting privilege laws, and of any burdens in the form of clinic closures leading to more difficult access for some women in the state.  Justice Kavanaugh pressed the question by focusing on what efforts Louisiana abortion doctors had made to obtain admitting privileges before suing, while Justice Ginsberg asked why it was necessary for doctors to have admitting privileges within 30 miles of where the abortion is performed, in light of the small number of women reported to have in-clinic abortion complications. 

The attorney for the State of Louisiana noted that abortion clinics in the state have not taken adequate steps to ensure the doctors are competent to perform abortions, noting that one abortion provider hired a radiologist and an ophthalmologist to perform abortions.  Also pointed out was the fact that abortion clinics do not track women’s complications and thus cannot speak to their own safety record.  These would be extremely valid concerns for any women considering treatment in an abortion clinic.  The United States Department of Justice joined Louisiana and pointed out some of the risky positions that abortion defenders take generally which do not serve the health and welfare interests of women seeking an abortion, such as extreme resistance of clinic oversight, a concern which lines up directly against the women they purport to serve.   

The Court will issue an opinion in this case by the end of the term, most likely in late June. You can read the transcript from the oral arguments here.

Women deserve better treatment than settling for doctors who are not prepared to adequately treat them.  When complications arise in any procedure women deserve no lesser medical services than any other patient in any medical facility. My recent piece, The Vulnerability of Young Women to Late Term Abortion, addresses how women can be taken advantage of by abortion providers because they are afraid and desperate in their choice for abortion – even though that reluctant-last-resort choice is against their better judgment.  Family restoration demands that women be better cared for in all medical decisions.