Supreme Court Strikes Down Texas Abortion Retrictions

The Supreme Court affirmed the right to abortion under Roe v. Wade and struck down a Texas law that effectively shut down half of the state's abortion clinics and required many women to travel hundreds of miles to reach a clinic. The law required abortion clinics to have facilities that were almost equivalent to a hospital and abortion doctors would have to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. The cover that abortion opponents used for creating these laws was that they protected the health and safety of women seeking abortion. Unfortunately, the state had to admit during oral arguments that they could not produce one credible instance where these regulations actually helped a woman's health and safety. The Court ruled 5-3 that these rules created on undue burden on those seeking abortions and struck them down. The four liberals, Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor, were joined by Kennedy in the ruling. This decision will invalidate similar restrictive abortion laws that have been passed in other states under the guise of protecting a woman's health. This is yet another example of how the power on the Court has swung definitively in the liberal's favor.