“Catholic” Kennedy Strikes Again as Supreme Court Overturns Texas Abortion Restrictions

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court struck down Texas’ widely replicated regulation of abortion clinics Monday in the court’s biggest abortion case in nearly a quarter century.

The justices voted 5-3 in favor of Texas clinics that had argued the regulations were only a veiled attempt to make it harder for women to get abortions in the nation’s second-most populous state.

Justice Stephen Breyer’s majority opinion for the court held that the regulations are medically unnecessary and unconstitutionally limit a woman’s right to an abortion. [thanks for letting us know they are medically unnecessary, Doctor Breyer]

Texas had argued that its 2013 law and subsequent regulations were needed to protect women’s health. The rules required doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and forced clinics to meet hospital-like standards for outpatient surgery.

Breyer wrote that “the surgical-center requirement, like the admitting privileges requirement, provides few, if any, health benefits for women, poses a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions and constitutes an ‘undue burden’ on their constitutional right to do so.” [So the entire bill has pretty much been struck down, which had been doing so much good. You think Breyer based his judgment on real medical evidence, or liberal medical opinion?]

Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined Breyer. [Because of course they did. It’s only ever a question which way a “conservative” justice will approach, it’s never, ever a question how a leftist democrat-appointed one will]

……..Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. [For all the good in the world it did them]

………Abortion providers said the rules would have cut the number of abortion clinics in Texas by three-fourths if they had been allowed to take full effect.

When then-Gov. Rick Perry signed the law in 2013, there were about 40 clinics throughout the state. That number dropped to under 20 and would have been cut in half again if the law had taken full effect, the clinics said.

Texas passed a broad bill  imposing several abortion restrictions in 2013 [because this was the plain will of the people]. Texas clinics sued immediately to block it, contending it impermissibly interfered with a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. [See – You have no constitutional right to a firearm, in spite of what the 2nd Amendment plainly says, but women have a “constitutional right” to murder their children, because it’s absolutely nowhere in the document, but “emanating from the penumbras”] The clinics won several favorable rulings in a federal district court [in front of a leftist judge in Austin] Texas. But each time, the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the state, at first allowing challenged provisions to take effect and then upholding the law with only slight exceptions.