Judge Tosses Two Provisions Of Texas' Anti-Abortion Law

(The cartoon image above is by Bill Day at cagle.com.)

It took two special sessions of the legislature to do it (because Wendy Davis filibustered it to death in the first session), but the Republicans finally got their onerous anti-abortion law passed. They claimed the law was to protect the health of Texas women, but that was a lie since it did nothing to protect women's heal -- in fact, it hurt women's health in the state by closing down many heal clinics (the ones offering women the option of an abortion). And that is exactly what the Republicans wanted -- to make it much harder for any Texas women to choose to have an abortion (which is their constitutional right).

The two worst provisions of the law made it mandatory for any doctor performing an abortion to have hospital privileges within a certain small area, and required the health clinics offering the procedure to meet the stringent requirements of an ambulatory surgical center. These requirements have already caused 21 clinics to close (from 41 in June 2013 to 20 in June 2014), and when it went into effect next month would cause the closing of another 15 clinics -- leaving only 5 clinics open in the entire state (and posing a terrible burden on women who do not live near a huge urban area (like Dallas or Houston). This would require some women to travel 300 to 500 miles to exercise their constitutional right to choice.

Fortunately, the women of Texas got a reprieve from this onerous law. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel struck down both of these provisions of the law as unconstitutional. The judge said in his opinion:

The clinic closings attributable to the act’s two requirements will undeniably reduce meaningful access to abortion care for women throughout Texas…House Bill 2’s ambulatory-surgical-center requirement burdens Texas women in a way incompatible with the principles of personal freedom and privacy protected by the United State Constitution of the 40 years since Roe v. Wade. 

When viewed in the context of the other state-imposed obstacles a woman faces when seeking an abortion in Texas—including a sonogram requirement, a waiting period, the reduced number of abortion-performing physicians resulting from the admitting privilege requirement—the court is firmly convinced that the State has placed unreasonable obstacles in the path of woman’s ability to obtain a previability abortion. These substantial obstacles have reached a tipping point that threatens to “chip away at the private choice shielded by Roe”... 

This is only a reprieve though, and I'm sure the Republican-dominated state government of Texas will appeal the ruling. The good news is that since this is the decision of a federal judge, it can't be appealed to the Texas Supreme Court (made up entirely of right-wing Republicans). The bad news is that a federal appeals court and the U.S. Supreme Court could go either way on the matter. Both the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court have small conservative majorities, and have drawn a very nebulous line regarding a woman's right to choice.