Sunday marks Brett Kavanaugh’s one-year anniversary as a Supreme Court justice.
The U.S. Supreme Court Friday morning announced it will review a 2014 Louisiana anti-abortion law. Experts say it will be the end – or at least it will “be the beginning of the end“– of Roe v. Wade, the 46-year old SCOTUS ruling that found women have a constitutional right to have an abortion.
Louisiana’s law is controversial and clearly designed to make it as difficult as possible for women to obtain an abortion – as most abortion laws that have passed through conservative-controlled state legislatures over the past few years have been. The law mandates that any doctor performing an abortion of any type have admitting privileges at a hospital.
Admitting privileges are controlled by hospitals, and can be very expensive for physicians. And hospitals increasingly are being taken over by religious organizations, meaning they can refuse to grant privileges to doctors who specialize in abortions.
There is no medical reason for a doctor performing abortions to have admitting privileges. What the stipulation achieves is limiting the number of doctors who can perform abortions. And in some states it can mean women have to travel further, possibly hundreds of miles, to a doctor that meets this needless state requirement.
In Louisiana, that means there is just one doctor in the entire state who can perform abortions, legally.
Experts oppose these restrictions, but they also note that the U.S. Supreme Court now has a strong conservative majority.
And that means the well-funded anti-abortion movement’s long-term strategy is coming to fruition.
Vox’s Ian Millhiser and Anna North, both experts, sum up today’s Supreme Court news: “Roe v. Wade had a good run.”
“The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will hear June Medical Services v. Gee, a case that could well be the vehicle the Court’s conservatives use to gut the right to an abortion,” they write.
With the addition of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court bench, replacing Justice Anthony Kennedy, Roe v. Wade is in big trouble. At least, what Roe intended is certainly about the be perverted and dismantled.
Attorney and Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern weighed in on Friday’s news, tweeting, “with Kavanaugh’s vote, the Supreme Court is going to overrule Whole Woman’s Health, gut Roe v. Wade, and allow states to regulate abortion clinics out of existence.”
NPR’s famed Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg: “Assault on Roe begins.”
Justice Kavanaugh, Millhiser and North write, “is overwhelmingly likely to vote with his conservative colleagues to uphold the abortion restriction at issue in Gee. The Gee decision may not be the final straw for Roe v. Wade — indeed, it is fairly likely that the Court will prefer to dismantle the right to an abortion in incremental steps. But it is likely to, at the very least, be the beginning of the end.”
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