The Republican legislature in Texas declared war on women’s health a long time ago, but the war escalated in 2013 when the legislators passed House Bill 2. Under that law Texas
can require all abortion clinics in the state to meet the same building, equipment and staffing standards that hospital-style surgical centers must meet, which could force numerous clinics to close, abortion rights advocates said. In addition, Texas can require that doctors performing abortions obtain admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of a clinic.
Today the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that law. What’s the practical effect of that? Well, if no stay is granted while the decision is appealed to the US Supreme Court, there will be fewer than a dozen clinics left open in the state, a state which brags about its great size. Somehow the judges on that court persuaded themselves that requiring doctors to gain admitting privileges to hospitals within 30 miles of the clinics was feasible, even in a state where there might only be 12 clinics in 267,000 square miles. By my arithmetic that seems impossible.
It seems pretty obvious that this court wanted to limit abortions as much as possible. In its opinion it cited the language in the legislation as evidence enough for it. Then there’s this:
Lawyers for the Texas clinics that sued the state said about 900,000 reproductive-age women will live more than 150 miles from the nearest open facility in the state when the surgical-center requirement and admitting-privileges rule take effect.
The Fifth Circuit panel found that the percentage of affected women who would face travel distances of 150 miles or more amounted to 17 percent, a figure that it said was not a “large fraction.” An abortion regulation cannot be invalidated unless it imposes an undue burden on what the Supreme Court has termed “a large fraction of relevant cases.”
I don’t know about you, but nearly a fifth of a population seems like a pretty large fraction to me.
When this gets to the Supreme Court it could give Roberts and his fellow conservatives the best chance they’ll have to limit or destroy Roe v. Wade in a long time. Any woman, any Democrat, any Republican with daughters should bear that in mind when going to the polls in November of 2016.