The Supreme Court, now short one Justice Antonin Scalia, heard arguments Wednesday in the biggest abortion case since Gonzales v. Carhart, which upheld states’ power to impose modest restrictions on abortion.
This case, Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, affects health and safety regulations that Texas and other states imposed on abortion clinics in recent years. The appellant is an abortion provider that has failed inspections and been fined. It is challenging the Texas law which requires providers to meet basic standards with which other outpatient surgical centers must comply.
One sticking point is that corridors must be wide enough for emergency personnel to carry patients out if they are hurt. Another is that abortionists are required to obtain admitting privileges in nearby hospitals, in case (as happens on regularly but with small incidence) patients suddenly require emergency care.
Dozens of abortion clinics in Texas have made the decision that it is easier to close their doors, or threaten to, than it is to keep a facility where their patients’ health and safety comes first. They are suing to overturn the laws as abridgments of the bogus constitutional right to abortion created by the Supreme Court in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
Here is one of the strange and unintended consequences to making abortion an inviolable constitutional right. Were some new justice to invent a constitutional right to another outpatient surgical procedure, say, liposuction, for example, or lasik, would this constitutional protection make it impermissable for a state to apply safety regulations to practitioners?
It seems unlikely. Yet this has largely been the result of Roe.
In their report from the 2013 murder trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell, grand jurors made note of how weak regulations on his clinic were, and how poorly they were enforced.
“We discovered that Pennsylvania’s Department of Health has deliberately chosen not to enforce laws that should afford patients at abortion clinics the same safeguards and assurances of quality healthcare as patients of other medical service providers,” they wrote. “Even nail salons in Pennsylvania are monitored more closely for client safety.”
The unsafe and unsanitary condition of Gosnell’s abortion clinic was horrific, helping explain numerous incidents in which he harmed women. The narrow and obstructed corridors of his facility obstructed emergency personnel when they arrived to try and save the life of a patient who died in his care. Yet state inspectors gave him a nearly free pass.
These reasonable observations about Gosnell’s horrific case played a role in demonstrating the need for laws like the ones now before the justices. Several state legislatures passed them specifically because of this case.
Health and safety are appropriate topics for state governments to regulate. And especially other forms of healthcare are regulated, and abortion is a form of healthcare, as its advocates claim.
It makes no sense that sloppy doctors get special exemptions only when the patients’ care is a constitutional right.
