Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Different Takes: Lying Gets A Thumbs Up Instead Of Women's Right To Abortion; Free Speech Wins
San Francisco Chronicle: Supreme Court Protects Lying To Women
If you want to understand the real-world effect of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning a California law requiring faith-based crisis pregnancy centers to fully inform patients, just look at how each justice voted. The three women on the high bench — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — all joined Justice Stephen Breyer in the dissent. The ruling is another step toward overturning legal abortion, which the court established a generation ago with its ruling in Roe vs. Wade that the constitutional right to privacy extends to a woman’s right to make her own medical decisions. The highest court in the land blocked enforcement of California’s 3-year-old Reproductive FACT Act that required patients be fully informed that the state offers subsidized medical care, including prenatal care, family planning and abortions. The court’s majority ruled that the California law violated First Amendment rights to free speech. (6/26)
Los Angeles Times: Tuesday Was A Bad Day For Getting Truthful Information Out To Pregnant Women In Crisis
It’s troubling that a divided Supreme Court ruled against a California law requiring licensed pregnancy counseling centers — which typically exist to steer women away from abortions — to hand out information telling women that there are state-funded clinics offering them various options for pregnancy, family planning and abortion. The point of the disclosure requirement in the Reproductive FACT Act was to give women factual, straightforward information about their options, which most of these so-called pregnancy counseling centers are not in the business of doing. ...Abortion, after all, is a woman’s constitutionally protected right. (6/27)
USA Today: Patronizing Abortion Case Ruling Perverts First Amendment
In NIFLA v. Becerra, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has, once again, perverted the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. The Roberts court is infamous for rulings such as Citizens United v. FEC, which gave corporations a right to spend unlimited sums of money and gutted campaign-finance law. What Citizens United did to finance law, NIFLA threatens to do to disclosure law. The court’s 5-4 ruling blocks a California law requiring clinics to inform women of their right to state-funded reproductive health care, a common-sense measure ensuring that women know such care is available. It also invalidates a requirement that unlicensed clinics disclose that they do not offer medical services. These modest rules should have been upheld. (David H. Gans, 6/26)
USA Today: Abortion Case Ruling Boosts Free Speech
Many people hailed a Supreme Court ruling, which dealt a decisive blow Tuesday to a California law requiring anti-abortion pregnancy centers to post signs about low-cost birth control and abortions, as a huge victory for abortion opponents. Actually, it's a victory for freedom of speech, with implications that abortion foes might end up not liking. The majority's 5-4 decision made clear that the government cannot regulate your speech just because it disapproves of what you say and compel you to make statements that go against your beliefs. That is as it should be. (6/26)
USA Today: Don't Harm Women With Abortion Laws That Ignore The Evidence We Found
Policymakers tout women’s health and safety when creating restrictive abortion laws, but new research from me and my colleagues unequivocally shows that restricting abortions to one type of facility makes no public health sense. Our work, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, finds that abortion is no safer in an ambulatory surgical center than it is in a clinic or doctor’s office. (Sarah Roberts, 6/26)
