November, 13 2015, 02:00pm EDT
Supreme Court Will Hear Case That Could Allow States to Strip Away Abortion Access
Texas Case Will Decide Whether States Can Impose Medically Unnecessary Regulations that Force Clinics to Shut Down
WASHINGTON
The U.S. Supreme Court announced today that it will hear a Texas case that will decide whether states can restrict access to safe and legal abortion by imposing unnecessary regulations on providers that force many clinics to close.
There are two laws at issue in the case. The first requires doctors who perform abortions to obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. The second requires that abortion facilities meet the same building standards as ambulatory surgical centers. Both are opposed by leading medical groups, like the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, who have filed briefs with the Supreme Court stating that the laws are unnecessary and put women's health at risk.
"When the leading medical groups like the AMA oppose these laws, you have to ask yourself what they are really about," said Jennifer Dalven, director of the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project. "They're about shutting down clinics and attempting to prevent a woman who has decided to have an abortion from getting one."
The admitting privileges requirement singles out doctors who provide abortions and requires them to obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. But doctors who provide abortions are often unable to get such privileges for reasons that have nothing to do with their ability to provide high quality medical care. For example, because abortions are one of the safest medical procedures, doctors who provide them very rarely admit a patient to the hospital. Yet most hospitals require that doctors have a minimum number of hospital admissions every year in order to obtain and maintain their privileges. In other words, abortion providers are unable to qualify for admitting privileges because the procedure is so safe.
The ambulatory surgical requirement also singles out facilities that provide abortions and requires them to comply with unnecessary building regulations that the state doesn't require for providers of other medical procedures that involve similar or, even greater, health risks.
These laws have an extraordinary impact on Texas women's ability to get an abortion if she needs one. When these laws were enacted there were more than 40 clinics in the state. These laws would leave Texas, home to 5.4 million women of reproductive age, with only 10 clinics.
"A woman's constitutional right to safe and legal abortion services was recognized more than 40 years ago, but extremists in the Texas legislature have been whittling that right away ever since," said Terri Burke, executive director of the ACLU of Texas. "Medically unnecessary restrictions on health care providers like the ASC requirement advance politicians' ideological agenda, but at the expense of women's health. I'm hopeful that the Supreme Court will put the interests of Texan women over the political interests of Texas legislators and strike down this dangerous law before any more clinics close."
The Supreme Court's decision will affect not only women's access to abortion in Texas, but in much of the rest of the country as well. Since 2010, states have enacted almost 300 restrictions on access to abortion; more than 50 have been adopted in 2015 alone.
On the specific issue of admitting privileges, similar laws are currently being challenged in at least five other states: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Wisconsin. In striking down an admitting privileges law earlier this year, a federal judge in Wisconsin rejected the state's medical evidence as unsound and concluded, "The only reasonable conclusion is that the legislation was motivated by an improper purpose, namely to restrict the availability of abortion services in Wisconsin."
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the Texas laws, on the other hand, said that the opinion of the major medical groups and the medical evidence was irrelevant to the question of whether the state could rely on health-related justifications as reasons for closing the clinic. In an earlier challenge to the Texas law, that court wrote that "rational speculation" that a law might improve women's health, even in the face of substantial medical evidence to the contrary, is enough to uphold abortion restrictions that would shut down the majority of clinics in the state.
The Supreme Court has consistently reaffirmed that the Constitution protects a woman's decision to have an abortion.
"We are hopeful that the Court will stay true to its precedent and make perfectly clear that medical evidence matters. The Constitution doesn't allow states to rely on sham justifications for shutting down clinics in an effort to stop women from getting abortions," said Dalven.
The ACLU and Planned Parenthood are counsel in Alabama and Wisconsin cases that also challenge the admitting privileges and ambulatory surgical requirements. The Texas Case, Whole Woman's Health v. Cole, was brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights.
More information about the ACLU's Wisconsin and Alabama cases are available at:
https://www.aclu.org/cases/planned-parenthood-southeast-inc-v-strange
https://www.aclu.org/cases/planned-parenthood-wisconsin-v-van-hollen
This press release is available at:
https://www.aclu.org/news/supreme-court-will-hear-case-could-allow-states-strip-away-abortion-access
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
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CPJ said the first month of Israel's assault on Gaza was the deadliest on record for journalists, and the toll has continued to grow in recent days. Over the weekend, at least six more Palestinian journalists were killed in Gaza—including Bilal Jadallah, a previous CPJ contributor.
The Palestinian Journalists' Syndicate said Israeli forces "targeted" Jadallah's car.
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CPJ has documented several assaults on journalists, including by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Earlier this month, top Israeli officials—including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—amplified an Israeli media watchdog's false suggestion that Palestinian journalists were somehow complicit in the October 7 attack, an allegation that further heightened the dangers of reporting on the conflict.
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The Oregon Democrat's move, which he explained in a lengthy post on Medium, follows a cease-fire call from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the number two Senate Democrat, earlier this month, and demands from a couple dozen Democratic House members.
Merkley, who first visited Israel in 1978, wrote that by his fifth visit earlier this year, "far-right extremists were now helping to drive Israeli government policy," with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu having "formed a government with Bezalel Smotrich as minister of finance and Itamar Ben-Gvir as minister of national security."
"Israel has unleashed a bombing campaign on Gaza of phenomenal ferocity... The impression the world has been left with is one of indiscriminate bombing."
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Merkley also highlighted that "Israel has unleashed a bombing campaign on Gaza of phenomenal ferocity. Israel defends this campaign as necessary to strike Hamas wherever necessary. But the impression the world has been left with is one of indiscriminate bombing. Airstrikes have leveled much of Gaza City and hit crowded refugee camps, schools, hospitals, and even shelters operated by the United Nations."
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The senator previously called for humanitarian pauses, the position also held by the White House and various other senators. He wrote Monday that "after grimly witnessing accelerating body counts, many Americans, including thousands of Oregonians, have raised their voices to say more must be done to stop the carnage. I agree. So today I am calling for a cease-fire."
"The cease-fire requires an immediate cessation of military hostilities by both sides. But the cease-fire and the negotiations that follow must accomplish a number of objectives or it will not endure," he stressed. "Most importantly, the Israeli people and the Palestinian people must find leaders determined to partner with each other and the world to replace the cycle of hate and violence with both a long-term vision for security, peace and prosperity featuring two states for two peoples, and immediate, concrete steps toward that goal."
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Privacy advocates on Monday renewed demands for swift congressional action on government surveillance in response to new WIREDreporting on a federally funded program through which law enforcement obtains phone records from AT&T.
"This is a long-running dragnet surveillance program in which the White House pays AT&T to provide all federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies the ability to request often-warrantless searches of trillions of domestic phone records," U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote Sunday in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, which WIRED obtained and published in full.
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Now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS), the program was initially revealed to the public as the Hemisphere Project by The New York Times in 2013. Information collected includes caller and recipient names, phone numbers, and dates and times of calls.
Based on what officials told Wyden's staff, "all Hemisphere requests are sent to a single AT&T analyst located in Atlanta, Georgia, and... any law enforcement officer working for one of the federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies in the U.S. can contact the AT&T Hemisphere analyst directly to request they run a query, with varying authorization requirements," the letter says.
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"ONDCP funding for this surveillance program was quietly resumed by the Trump administration in 2017, paused again in 2021, the first year of the Biden administration, and then quietly restarted again in 2022," according to the senator.
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"I have serious concerns about the legality of this surveillance program, and the materials provided by the DOJ contain troubling information that would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress," he wrote, referencing materials the department gave his office. "While I have long defended the government's need to protect classified sources and methods, this surveillance program is not classified and its existence has already been acknowledged by the DOJ in federal court. The public interest in an informed debate about government surveillance far outweighs the need to keep this information secret."
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Responding in a statement Monday, Demand Progress policy director Sean Vitka noted that the reporting comes as members of Congress are considering whether to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows warrantless surveillance targeting foreigners located outside the United States and will expire at the end of 2023.
"Hemisphere appears to be Exhibit A for mass domestic surveillance, the data broker loophole, and even parallel construction," said Vitka. "These new details add up to a horrifying picture that proves the need for Congress to close the data broker loophole and enact comprehensive privacy protections for Americans before reauthorizing any spying powers, most notably Section 702 of FISA. The fact that a White House office—one that is actively fighting FISA reform—restarted funding for Hemisphere in 2022, in spite of recent Supreme Court precedent, is scandalous."
Demand Progress is among the groups backing Wyden's recently unveiled legislation—which, as WIRED reported, would close various loopholes, "effectively rendering the DAS program, in its current form, explicitly illegal."
Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, which also endorsed the GSRA, said of the reporting: "This is exactly why Congress must pass comprehensive surveillance reform as a precondition for ANY reauthorization of FISA Section 702. The Government Surveillance Reform Act would put an end to the abuses revealed in this latest bombshell story."
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