The Supreme Court ruled in favor of protecting abortion rights in the case June v. Russo Monday.
The court’s opinion, led by Justice Stephen Breyer, “found that conditions on admitting privileges common to hospitals throughout the State have made and will continue to make it impossible for abortion providers to obtain conforming privileges for reasons that have nothing to do with the State’s asserted interests in promoting women’s health and safety.”
The case, June Medical Services v. Russo, called into question the constitutionality of a Louisiana law that mandated abortion clinics have admitting privileges in hospitals within a 30-mile radius, which would have winnowed down the number of abortion providers in Louisiana to one.
Breyer was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by former President George W. Bush, also filed an opinion concurring with the majority.
“This case is similar to, nearly identical with, Whole Woman’s Health. And the law must consequently reach a similar conclusion. Act 620 is unconstitutional,” Breyer wrote.
The Louisiana Legislature passed the law in 2014 on the basis that requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges would protect women’s health and competent abortion providers would be able to obtain privileges. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, however, wrote in its Supreme Court brief that this was not the case, as hospitals have the authority to refuse to grant privileges to abortion providers. Complications in abortion procedures are rare, and the odds that hospitals would reap financial benefits from granting admitting privileges to abortion providers are very low.
“The process of obtaining admitting privileges is specific to a hospital-based practice and the business of operating a hospital — it has nothing to do with whether a clinician is qualified to perform abortions on an outpatient basis,” the ACOG wrote.
Similarly, Roberts wrote in his concurring opinion that “because complications requiring hospitalization are relatively rare, abortion providers were ‘unlikely to have any patients to admit’ and thus were ‘unable to maintain admitting privileges or obtain those privileges for the future.'”
Roberts had been on the dissenting side of the 2016 case Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. While the law in contention in the case June v. Gee was nearly identical to the Texas law, Roberts based his decision on court precedent rather than his own opinion of the law.
While he maintained that he still disagrees with the Texas law and the court’s 2016 ruling, he wrote Monday that “the question today” is on “whether to adhere to [the 2016 case] in deciding the present case.”
The Louisiana law in dispute was similar to a Texas law requiring abortion providers to have hospital admitting privileges that was reviewed by the Supreme Court, with a different configuration of justices, in the 2016 case Whole Woman’s Health. The Texas law then was deemed unconstitutional. The Supreme Court held that the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling meant that the restriction placed an undue burden on women’s access to abortions.
The Supreme Court, now majority-conservative after Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh were appointed by President Trump, heard oral arguments for and against the Louisiana law in March. Kavanaugh, the most junior member on the bench, said that the law would protect women from complications in abortion procedures. Complications, however, are rare.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco concluded in an expansive 2014 study that major complications during abortion procedures were rare, occurring less than a quarter of a percent of the time, about the same frequency as colonoscopies.
Proponents of the law saw the case as an opportunity to have the court revisit Roe. State legislatures have passed similar restrictions on abortions since the Supreme Court became majority-conservative in 2018. In 2019 alone, more than 375 pieces of legislation aimed at restricting access to abortions were introduced across the United States, and by the end of the year, 25 new abortion bans had been signed into law in 12 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissenting opinion that a majority of the court “perpetuates its ill-founded abortion jurisprudence by enjoining a perfectly legitimate state law and doing so without jurisdiction.”
Thomas cited the argument against third-party standing, a claim that abortion providers are not the proper parties to challenge anti-abortion laws. The argument against third-party standing maintains that a person can only file suit if he or she has personal interest in the litigation and may not challenge the constitutionality of a law because it infringes the rights of someone else.
He wrote that “[abortion providers’] sole claim before this Court is that Louisiana’s law violates the purported substantive due process right of a woman to abort her unborn child. But they concede that this right does not belong to them, and they seek to vindicate no private rights of their own.”
Anti-abortion activists and conservatives denounced Roberts’s decision to side with the liberal faction of the court. Jessica Anderson, executive director at Heritage Action, a sister organization of the conservative Heritage Foundation, accused Roberts of betraying the rule of law “and the dignity of the bench.”
“This is the latest in a series of judicial power grabs from the Chief Justice and the liberal wing of the court,” Anderson said in a statement. “Justice Roberts, a so-called ‘conservative,’ is clearly no longer running things — it’s now the Kagan Court.”
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Monday that the June ruling was “unfortunate,” adding that the Supreme Court “devalued both the health of mothers and the lives of unborn children.”
“Instead of valuing fundamental democratic principles, unelected Justices have intruded on the sovereign prerogatives of State governments by imposing their own policy preference in favor of abortion to override legitimate abortion safety regulations,” McEnany said.
More than 200 members of Congress, all Republicans except for Democrats Dan Lipinski and Collin Peterson, asked the justices in January to reconsider or overturn Roe and its 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, which allowed states to regulate abortion.
