The Facts Win Out on Abortion by Linda Greenhouse
'SOMEONE landing from Mars on Monday and coming upon Justice Stephen G. Breyers majority Supreme Court opinion in the Texas abortion case would have had no hint of the decades-long battle over womens 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 womens 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. Kennedys mysterious opening line in that opinion.
There was no mystery in what the five justices in the majority, crucially including Justice Kennedy, accomplished this time, nor in the decisions impact. By holding the states asserted rationale for its clinic-decimating regulations up to the light and finding it specious and counterproductive, the court has shut down one of abortion opponents main recent strategies: enacting targeted regulation of abortion providers laws that impose on doctors who perform abortions special restrictions not placed on doctors who do procedures of equal or greater risk.
Specious is my word, not the courts. Justice Breyer was careful not to call out the Texas Legislature for placing a health-related veneer on laws whose true intent is to make access to abortion more difficult. Judges are extremely reluctant to accuse legislatures of acting in bad faith, and Justice Breyer didnt have to do that. He simply had to show, carefully and methodically, the virtual absence of any health benefit from requiring doctors who provide abortions to obtain admitting privileges at local hospitals or requiring abortion clinics to retrofit themselves as mini-hospitals at huge cost.
Why does the absence of a health benefit matter?'>>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/opinion/the-facts-win-out-on-abortion.html?