VIDEO: Pro-Lifers Regroup After SCOTUS 5-3 Abortion Decision
By Paige Winfield Cunningham // July 2, 2016
abortion access trumps patient safety
ABOVE VIDEO: This Daily Signal video provides what you need to know to understand the 5-3 Texas abortion decision the Supreme Court made in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt on June 27.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In the first major abortion case in nearly a decade, the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) recently ruled 5-3 to reverse Texas’ law requiring that abortion clinics meet safety standards regularly followed by facilities that perform invasive outpatient surgeries and requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital to ensure continuity of care if the procedure results in an emergent complication requiring a higher level of care.
The ruling in effect allows substandard abortion clinics to stay open, threatens critical continuity of care when complications arise and has significantly hindered states’ ability to put women’s health and safety first.
As reported in the Washington Examiner article below, this ruling will have significant consequences related to similar laws in up to a dozen other states.
With the Supreme Court inserting itself into what has been the legislative realm of the states, Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the dissenting opinion, pointed out that the Court has now become “the country’s ex officio medical board with powers to disapprove medical and operative practices and standards throughout the United States.”
In my opinion, despite what the Pro-Choice community says, this ruling is no victory for women’s health. Women deserve better.
— Dr. Jim Palermo, Editor-in-Chief
WASHINGTON EXAMINER — The Supreme Court’s abortion ruling has renewed a key strategic question for the anti-abortion movement: How much to focus on women versus the unborn.
In a broad 5-3 ruling Monday that stunned and deflated abortion opponents, the justices wiped out years of work by Americans United for Life, National Right to Life and other groups who carefully crafted abortion provider regulations, prompted dozens of Republican-led states to pass them and then watched their strategy blossom as clinics shuttered around the country.
The court slammed the brakes on that technique by deeming unconstitutional Texas’ law requiring abortion clinics to meet higher facility standards and doctors to have hospital admitting privileges, saying that by shuttering clinics, such laws make it too hard for women to obtain an abortion.
Now that the clinic-safety-women’s-health approach has backfired, some anti-abortion activists are urging a renewed focus on the unborn.
“I think a sincere commitment on women’s health — there’s always room for that,” Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser told the Washington Examiner. “But the pro-life movement can never lose sight of its aim, and that is to protect the life of the unborn.”
Dannenfelser and others say the ruling may do at least one thing to unite them, by reinforcing the importance of electing lawmakers who oppose abortion and a president who would appoint conservative justices.
CLICK HERE to read the complete story on WashingtonExaminer.com>>>
