Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt

The Texas Abortion Case Audio is Here!

My new state embarrassed itself in front of the Supreme Court last week.

Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller attempted to defend Texas’s anti-abortion law to the court, and it was a hot mess.

Audio of the oral arguments for Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt are finally live on the Supreme Court’s website, and it is worth taking a listen.

This is the court’s first abortion case in 9 years and involves a Texas regulation which dramatically reduces abortion access for Texas women.

Slate’s Amicus podcast did a really interesting episode on the case.

The Atlantic’s story on the case is also a pretty comprehensive summary, but it is worth listening to the full audio of the hearing.

The gist: there is a Texas law which requires abortions to meet the state-of-the-art standards of ambulatory surgical centers, and for abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. The restrictions will close 30 of Texas’s 40 abortion clinics.

Texas claims that it is protecting the health of women with its new rules, but the evidence indicates that the rules are medically unnecessary and actually have the effect of harming women. The questions from the female justices made it abundantly clear that the Texas’s claim that it is simply “protecting women” is bullshit pretextual.

Texas lawmakers simply want to make abortion as expensive and inconvenient as possible for women.

There is no intellectually honest way of drawing any other conclusion.

At one point Scott Keller even tried to make the argument that Texas women were not disenfranchised because they would go to New Mexico to get an abortion. Ginsburg was having none of that:

JUSTICE GINSBURG: “That’s ­­odd that you point to the New Mexico facility. New Mexico doesn’t have any surgical ASC requirement, and it doesn’t have any admitting requirement. So if your argument is right, then New Mexico is not an available way out for Texas because Texas says to ‘protect our women, we need these things.’ But send them off to New Mexico where they don’t get it either, no admitting privileges, no ASC. And that’s perfectly all right.”

Luckily the issue before the court is whether the restrictions impose an undue burden on Texas women seeking an abortion.

And there is ample evidence that the law has precisely that effect: some Texas women will have to cross state lines or drive hundreds of miles to get a legal abortion if the law is upheld. We will see what the conservative justices come up with, but things aren’t looking good for pro-lifers.