On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments for Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, the most significant reproductive rights case to reach the Supreme Court in a generation. The outcome of the case will, to put it plainly, determine whether a woman's constitutional right to access safe and legal abortion is merely theoretical, or means anything in the real world.
At issue is a controversial Texas law enacted in 2013 that critics say has diminished abortion access throughout the state. The law mirrors a national trend; since 2011, state legislators have passed an onslaught of abortion restrictions that have made it increasingly difficult for women to safely terminate unwanted pregnancies.
Attorneys representing Texas abortion providers are challenging two main provisions of the Texas law, known as HB2-requirements that every abortion provider obtain admitting privileges at a local hospital, and that all abortion clinics meet ambulatory surgical center building standards.
The GOP state legislature argues that the law's mandates are there to protect women's health. But critics say the real objective of HB2 is to make accessing abortion services more difficult, something that has certainly turned out to be the case.
Across the state, facilities have been forced to shut down, unable to afford the costs of complying with the new regulations. Though Texas has 5.4 million women of childbearing age living within its borders, the number of facilities that provide abortion services has dropped by more than half, from 40 to 19, in less than three years. If the Supreme Court upholds HB2, that number is expected to drop even further-to ten clinics or fewer.
The salutatory health claims made by the law's authors have not been substantiated by evidence. Abortion is an unusually safe medical procedure-researchers have found that complications following abortions in the first trimester are less frequent than after tonsillectomies or wisdom tooth extractions, among other procedures. (More than 90 percent of abortions occur during the first trimester.) The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association have also said that there is "simply no medical basis to impose a local admitting privilege on abortion providers." Moreover, the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, a reproductive health research organization housed at the University of Texas at Austin, found no evidence to suggest that surgical abortion complications following first-trimester abortions are less frequent in facilities that meet ambulatory surgical center building standards.
Since HB2's enactment, Texas women face longer waiting periods to access abortion care. There is also evidence to suggest that more women are attempting to self-induce their own abortions. In November, the Texas Policy Evaluation Project published a study which estimated that between 100,000 and 240,000 Texas women ages 18 to 49 have attempted in their lifetimes to end their pregnancies without medical help. The researchers say they expect those numbers to rise further if Texas continues to erect barriers to safe and legal abortion.
Dr. Willie Parker, a medical doctor and abortion provider in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, told the Associated Press that if Texas's law stands, "it won't mean fewer unintended pregnancies. It won't mean fewer fatally flawed pregnancies. It will mean women will be left without a safe and legal means of ending pregnancy."
The Supreme Court case has galvanized advocates around the country. Over a dozen buses from cities across the country, including Atlanta, Cleveland, and New York City-among others, will be transporting reproductive rights supporters to the nation's capital to unite around the banner of #StopTheSham. Upwards of 1,000 reproductive rights activists are expected to rally outside the Supreme Court for safe and legal abortion access, from 8 a.m. until 12 p.m. on Wednesday. At the rally, women will be publicly sharing their own abortion stories, abortion providers will give speeches about their work, and members of Congress, local elected officials, faith leaders, and civil-rights activists will also be making public remarks.
The stakes of today's case couldn't be higher, and the Court's decision will have reverberations for women across America-even in blue states and liberal cities.
