Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Views On Justices' Decision On Abortion: 'Major Victory'; 'Misogyny In Action'
The New York Times: A Major Victory For Abortion Rights
In the most significant victory in a generation for a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, the Supreme Court on Monday struck down Texas’s harsh and dishonest anti-abortion law by a vote of 5 to 3. The justices’ reasoning in overturning the law applies to hundreds of other attempts in recent years by Republican lawmakers around the country to restrict or destroy constitutionally protected reproductive rights. (6/27)
USA Today: A Big Win For Abortion Rights
For more than 25 years, abortion opponents unable to overturn Roe v. Wade have been building ever-higher barriers to a woman’s right to an abortion. On Thursday, in the most far-reaching abortion ruling in a generation, the Supreme Court in essence told them, “Stop, you’ve gone too far.” In its 5-3 decision, the bitterly divided court struck down parts of a Texas law that had already closed half of the state’s abortion clinics, and if allowed to go forward, would have left the nation’s second largest state with less than 10 clinics to serve 5.4 million women of reproductive age. By contrast, California, the nation’s most populous state, had 160 abortion clinics at last count. (6/27)
The Washington Post: The Supreme Court Saves Reproductive Freedom
[A]bortion has been among the most contentious legal subjects of the past half-century, and several issues have desperately required lucid guidance from the court since the last major ruling. The majority’s eagerness to clarify what the Constitution requires resulted in a ruling that, on the merits, is both sensible and clear: Politicians may not use obvious pretexts to erode a woman’s right to end a pregnancy. Forty-three years after Roe, they should stop trying. (6/27)
Los Angeles Times: Supreme Court Rejects States’ Ploy To Roll Back Abortion Rights
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down two onerous provisions in a Texas abortion law sends a clear and powerful message that medically unjustified restrictions that obstruct a woman’s access to abortion are unconstitutional. In its most sweeping decision on abortion since 1992, the court reaffirmed what it said at that time: If a law regulating abortion before the fetus is viable is more an obstacle to women than a benefit to them then it violates the Constitution. (6/27)
The Dallas Morning News: Safe, Legal Abortion Is Here To Stay
Forty-three years have passed since Roe vs. Wade was first decided. Abortion remains a sharply divisive issue for all of us, and perhaps it always will be. ... But our courts have spoken again and again across more than four decades and multiple generations. In this country, women have the right to choose whether to end their pregnancies. It is time for Texas lawmakers to end their machinations aimed at limiting that right, whether couched in concern for women's health or not. Their efforts would be better aimed at creating laws that make it easier for women to carry pregnancies to term, and to raise their children. (6/27)
The Dallas Morning News: SCOTUS Abortion Decision Is Misogyny In Action
As a pro-life feminist, I not only believe that women deserve equal human rights, but that women are strong and capable. The abortion industry tells women they can't make anything of their lives without abortion. That is the opposite of empowerment. Women were once considered property and denied basic human rights. How dare we treat our children the same way? Our liberation cannot come at their expense. (Kristen Walker, 6/27)
The Wall Street Journal: The Supreme Court’s Cultural Winners
Justice Thomas pointed out that the Court’s liberals identified new, impossible-to-meet “tests” for allowable state abortion regulation only a week after they waved through college racial preferences with little more justification than asserting “aspirational educational goals” (Fisher v. University of Texas). U.S. law, wrote Justice Thomas, is now “riddled with special exceptions for special rights.” So please, hold the crocodile tears over our “polarized politics.” What has polarized the country is not specific rights claims. Those will always emerge in a vibrant democracy. The bitter division is the result, in no small part, of a Supreme Court that picks the winners. (6/27)
The Wall Street Journal: The Texas Abortion Ruling And The Supreme Court’s New Normal
The death of Antonin Scalia, the botched GOP response to the nomination of Merrick Garland, and the increasingly probable election of Hillary Clinton have conspired to make the ideological reconfiguration of the court a growing likelihood. And while an eight-person court can still maintain the conservative status quo on occasion (such as last week’s decision on immigration), Monday’s action on abortion access in Texas represents what’s going to be the new normal for many years to come. (Dan Schnur, 6/27)
Bloomberg: Court Restores Balance To Abortion Debate
The pro-lifers thought they had found a way around their inability to get Roe v. Wade overturned even with Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Their strategy was to whimper about “women’s health and safety,” as if either were jeopardized or as if the pro-lifers cared; get GOP-controlled legislatures to pass hard-to-meet regulations; and then cheer as abortion clinics and doctors couldn’t meet those rules. Texas shut down half its clinics, and the other half were threatened by regulations that would require operating rooms to be capable of performing brain surgery, and hospital-admitting privileges for doctors who worked there. That all ended today. (Margaret Carlson, 6/27)
Los Angeles Times: Abortion Isn't An Outlier Medical Procedure, It's A Constitutional Right
On Monday, the Supreme Court responded to a prime example of the dishonest “health and safety” scam with a 5-3 decision striking down an alarmingly effective pair of restrictions in Texas. The court’s ruling in Whole Woman’s Health vs. Hellerstedt, and the implicit reinforcement of the judiciary’s essential role in safeguarding abortion rights, marks a turning point in the still-raging battle to preserve women’s reproductive freedom, not just in Texas but nationwide. (Dorothy Samuels, 6/28)
WBUR: Opinion: Supreme Court Ruling Suggests Public Health Data Matters In Abortion Cases
In Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the Supreme Court ruled that such restrictions "vastly increase the obstacles confronting women seeking abortions in Texas without providing any benefit to women's health capable of withstanding any meaningful scrutiny." ...A critical and worrying concern for many abortion rights researchers and advocates in anticipation of the ruling was whether and to what extent the court could be relied on to base its decision on sound public health data. They had good reason to be. (Emily Maistrellis, 6/27)
The New York Times: The Facts Win Out On Abortion
Someone landing from Mars on Monday and coming upon Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s majority Supreme Court opinion in the Texas abortion case would have had no hint of the decades-long battle over women’s right to abortion and the dogged efforts by states to put obstacles in their way. There is no poetry in the 40-page opinion, which strikes down a Texas law that would have closed most abortion clinics in the state in the name of protecting women’s health. The dry, almost clinical tone could scarcely be more different from the meditative mood the Supreme Court struck the last time it stood up for abortion rights, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 24 years ago this week. “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt” was Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s mysterious opening line in that opinion. (Linda Greenhouse, 6/27)
The Texas Tribune: Supreme Court's Abortion Decision Is A Win For Texas Women
As an abortion provider, as a Latina, as a mother, as an immigrant from Latin America, I'm relieved that these barriers can at last be lifted. I join my colleagues, our patients, and women and families across the country in celebrating the historic U.S. Supreme Court decision in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. (Andrea Ferrigno, 6/27)
Philadelphia Daily News: Supreme Court Saw Through The Texas Bull
Hence, the court gutted the Texas bill called H.B. 2, which, in the guise of protecting a woman's health, instead impinged on her right to have an abortion. (Ronnie Polaneczky, 6/27)
The Baltimore Sun: Abortion Rights Affirmed
The Supreme Court's Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt decision striking down key provisions of a Texas anti-abortion law — an effort to shutter abortion clinics in the name of "safety" and "women's health" — is a victory for reproductive rights with broad implications. One can only hope the first is to dissuade states from adopting (or perhaps even prompt them to voluntarily roll back) similarly targeted regulations of abortion providers, or TRAP laws. (6/27)
The Boston Globe: Beating Back An Undue Burden On Legal Abortions
The US Supreme Court’s vote Monday that voided Texas’ oppressive restrictions on abortion clinics is rightly being hailed as the most significant abortion rights ruling in a quarter century. Supporters of the Texas law, known as H.B. 2, had insisted that its intent was to protect women’s safety, but five of the Supreme Court’s eight justices recognized the legislation’s true purpose: to make it as difficult as possible for women to exercise their right to abortion. (6/28)
The Des Moines Register: Supreme Court, Not Texas, Protects Women
Texas has the highest rate of uninsured residents in the country. State officials have refused to expand Medicaid under the health reform law to insure more low-income people. Access to health care is not exactly a priority in the Lone Star State. (6/27)
