WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear a challenge to a Louisiana law that requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, its first abortion case since President Donald Trump's appointments of two justices shifted the court further to the right.
The court's ruling, expected in June as the 2020 presidential campaign enters its final stretch, could reshape the constitutional principles governing abortion rights.
In the coming months, the court will examine whether the state's 2014 law requiring doctors at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals unduly burdens women's access to abortion.
Practitioners have said the law would force most of Louisiana's abortion clinics to close, leaving only one doctor eligible to perform the procedure.
The law is almost identical to a Texas law struck down by the Supreme Court in 2016.
The vote in the 2016 decision was 5-3, with Justice Anthony Kennedy joining the court's four liberal-leaning justices to form a majority. It was decided by an eight-member court after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia that February. Since then, Justice Neil Gorsuch has replaced Scalia and Justice Brett Kavanaugh has replaced Kennedy.
The federal appeals court in New Orleans upheld the Louisiana law last year notwithstanding the 2016 decision. In November, the Supreme Court granted a last-minute request from abortion providers to block it while they pursued an appeal in the case, Gee v. June Medical Services, No. 18-1460.
[Video not showing up above? Click here to watch » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCP-qA6GeIM]
That interim ruling featured an unusual 5-4 coalition, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the court's liberal-leaning justices. He had dissented in the 2016 decision.
Other abortion cases are likely to follow the one from Louisiana, as several state legislatures have enacted laws that seem calculated to try to force the Supreme Court to consider overruling Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion. Trump has vowed to appoint justices who will vote to overrule the decision.
The Louisiana law was struck down in 2017 by Judge John deGravelles of U.S. District Court in Baton Rouge, who said that doctors willing to perform abortions were often unable to obtain admitting privileges for reasons unrelated to their competence and that the law created an undue burden on women's constitutional right to abortion.
The law, deGravelles ruled, was essentially identical to one from Texas that the Supreme Court struck down in the 2016 decision, Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt.
A divided three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed deGravelles's decision and upheld the Louisiana law, saying its benefits outweighed the burdens it imposed.
Both sides in the Louisiana case had requested the high court's intervention.
"Louisiana has tried everything under the sun to decimate access to abortion care," said Kathaleen Pittman, clinic administrator at Hope Medical Group, one of the plaintiffs. "The situation here is already dire and this law would be the last straw for most of the remaining clinics. We're hopeful that the court will recognize how devastating this law would be for women in our state."
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican, had also asked the court to review the decision. He wants the justices to decide that abortion providers don't have the legal standing to challenge laws such as the one the Louisiana Legislature passed.
"The evidence of Louisiana abortion clinics' poor safety records, inadequate credentialing practices, and questionable efforts to undermine health and safety regulations shows that the abortion clinics' interests are directly adverse to the interests of Louisiana women," Landry said in a statement. "Incompetent and unsafe providers should not be allowed to challenge health and safety standards designed to protect women from those very providers."
Leaders on both sides of the issue considered Friday's news of the Supreme Court's action as momentous.
"The Supreme Court now has a chance in this case to reconsider, reverse, and return Roe v. Wade and the issue of abortion to the American people, which is long overdue," Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins said in a statement. "States should absolutely have the right to pass their own health and safety standards designed to protect women inside abortion vendors."
Alexis McGill Johnson, acting president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement that "access to abortion is hanging by a thread in this country, and this case is what could snap that thread."
"There's only one reason the court would not strike down the Louisiana law and that is because Justice Kennedy, who voted to protect abortion access just three years ago, has been replaced with Justice Kavanaugh," the statement said. "This is what we've warned about."
ARKANSAS CASE
In Arkansas, a 2015 federal lawsuit challenging a requirement that doctors performing medication abortions contract with another doctor who has hospital admitting privileges is in a holding position.
In early November, a qualifying doctor came forward and agreed to serve as the contract physician for Planned Parenthood, mooting the provider's claim that it couldn't find a willing qualifying doctor. At the time, a preliminary injunction blocking the state from enforcing the law was on appeal to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis.
The pending appeal was dropped at the request of both Planned Parenthood and the state, and the case was returned to U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker in Little Rock, who had granted the injunction in the summer of 2018.
Baker imposed a 60-day "stay" on the case in late March, to see whether the newly formed contract physician agreement would be maintained. In late May, Planned Parenthood filed a notice that the arrangement was working, and asked Baker to dismiss the case under a provision that would allow the provider to refile it later if the need arises.
The case remained open on Friday, with the last activity being a July order blocking the state's effort to conduct further discovery by deposing a corporate representative of Planned Parenthood.
Baker said the additional information being sought was the same information she had earlier prevented the state from seeking. She again noted that state attorneys had an opportunity to obtain the testimony in an earlier hearing, and that the requests were overly broad and unduly burdensome.
She also cited the fact that the discovery request was filed while the unopposed motion to dismiss was still pending.
Information for this article was contributed by Adam Liptak of The New York Times, by Robert Barnes of The Washington Post and by Linda Satter of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
A Section on 10/05/2019