Roberts Joins Liberals to Strike Down Louisiana’s Abortion Law, Saving Roe

The U.S. Supreme Court just delivered a major victory to abortion rights defenders in Louisiana and beyond, ruling 5–4 against the state’s controversial law requiring that abortion providers have admitting privileges at hospitals — an impossibility for many clinics — or shut down.

Louisiana abortion rights defenders cheer the surprising defeat of their state’s admitting privileges law

The legislation at the heart of the case was Louisiana’s Act 260, which passed in 2014 and was blocked by the courts before it could go into effect. If the measure sounds familiar, it’s because a nearly identical law in Texas was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt just four years ago on the basis it placed an undue burden on patients seeking abortion care.

The June ruling was the first major abortion rights case of the Trump era, giving pro-abortion rights advocates some hope that perhaps the court’s conservative majority wouldn’t mean the effective end of Roe v. Wade, which made abortion services legal in all 50 states in 1973. A ruling upholding the Louisiana law would have carved out large geographic districts — possibly even entire states — where abortion services could no longer be provided by clinics.

This is the third time Chief Justice John Roberts had sided with the liberal wing of the court in just a few weeks, having previously ruled in favor of transgender rights in the workplace and to preserve DACA, the Obama-era program protecting undocumented people who came to the U.S. as children.

“The chief justice agreed that abortion providers in this case have … standing to assert the constitutional rights of their patients and concluded that because Louisiana’s Act 620 imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the nearly identical Texas law invalidated four years ago in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt,” the majority opinion reads.

GEN spoke with Steffani Bangel, executive director of the New Orleans Abortion Fund, about the case and what this decision means for patients in Louisiana and beyond.

GEN: What was your reaction when you heard about the ruling?

Steffani Bangel: I know the other organizers and activists that I stand in coalition with here in Louisiana, we’ll all pop some champagne and get on a phone call and celebrate for a day.

We’re in New Orleans, we know how to party — safely with social distance, of course — and we deserve it cause we’ve been working our asses off for years on this case. Then after we celebrate and take a deep breath and hopefully a vacation, we’re going to come back together and we’re going to fight harder to not only defeat anti-abortion policies, but to pass policies that enshrine and support reproductive justice and our community. We are tired of accepting these status quo wins and accepting the status quo as enough, because it’s not. People in Louisiana don’t deserve what they’ve been dealt.

How difficult is it, right now, to get an abortion in Louisiana?

Abortion access in Louisiana is already limited, already restrictive, and already insufficient for the 8,000 to 10,000 people who seek abortion care in our state every year. Oftentimes when folks talk about the Supreme Court case, what gets lost is that, in many ways, Louisiana has been an abortion desert. In 2001 we had 11 clinics across the state. Today we have three.

This year was going to be huge for abortion access in Louisiana one way or another, because this case is not the only battle that we’re fighting in our state. In November, Louisiana voters will weigh in on a proposed amendment to our state constitution, that if passed would add language saying that there is no right to abortion. This amendment was introduced by the same legislator who introduced the admitting privileges bill.

What are some of the other restrictions that exist around abortion in Louisiana?

Louisiana has been treated as a test kitchen for most of the restrictive policies that we see playing out in states across the country: a 20-week gestational limit, a parental or guardian consent law for minors, and a mandatory ultrasound and counseling law.

What made admitting privileges different from other restrictions?

In our universe, we call admitting privileges a TRAP law — a targeted regulation of abortion providers. TRAP laws specifically single out and focus on abortion providers as somehow unique or different from other outpatient medical care. They add burdensome and medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion providers with the express purpose of trying to close down clinics.

It’s a particularly insidious law because on its face, it kind of sounds good, right? Like why wouldn’t you want your physician to have a relationship with the hospital? In reality, what admitting privileges laws do is they close clinics because hospitals are unable or unwilling to grant admitting privileges to abortion providers.

Why won’t hospitals grant these admitting privileges to physicians who perform abortions?

The reason for that is twofold. First, abortion providers don’t use admitting privileges. Abortion is among the safest outpatient procedures available. Admitting privileges are — from what I understand as not a physician — a kind of a use-it-or-lose-it situation. If you’re not admitting patients to the hospital, you will lose those admitting privileges and that will have an impact over your ability to secure them again in the future. This came up in the case itself. In the filings, June Medical Services, the clinic in Shreveport that is the plaintiff in this case, had I believe four or five complications that required hospitalizations in the 40 years they’ve been in operation.

The other reason that admitting privileges are hard to obtain for abortion providers is because a lot of hospitals just won’t grant them. Many hospital systems, both here in Louisiana and nationwide, are Catholic-run and they explicitly do not engage with abortion access at all. Hospitals also don’t want to bring that additional attention. Each of the three clinics here in Louisiana have anti-choice activists protesting outside every day; we’ve had providers followed home who have had to take out restraining orders against anti-abortion activists. I kind of don’t blame hospitals for not wanting to bring that additional attention to their doorstep.

What are the ripple effects of anti-abortion legislation in places like Louisiana?

Something that folks miss a lot when they look at this case and other cases is they think, “Oh, that’s Louisiana, boy they hate abortion there.” But it’s not happening in Louisiana just by dint of who our legislators are. It’s happening in Louisiana because national entities are looking at our state and seeing opportunities to try out policies here and then scale them elsewhere. The admitting privileges law started in Texas and then the next year it was introduced here in Louisiana. Policies are introduced in Texas or in Louisiana or in Mississippi, they’re successfully passed, and then they’re introduced in 15 other states later that year.

In 2018, Louisiana and Mississippi passed the 15-week ban. They were testing the waters. They wanted to see how far they could push their colleagues. We also saw last year, the notorious ban that basically outlawed abortion in Alabama. Now they passed a similar bill in Tennessee a week ago. The more that we can recognize that these bad actors at a national level are using our bodies as pawns and as test kitchens and the more that we can call that out, the stronger we will be as a movement.

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