Substandard care for women is now a Constitutional right - Granite Grok

Substandard care for women is now a Constitutional right

Remember Gosnell? (If you don’t, let Skip remind you.) Among the laws passed in some states in the wake of Kermit Gosnell’s conviction was Texas’s H.B. 2, which included requirements that abortion providers have hospital admitting privileges and that abortion facilities meet the same standards as ambulatory surgical facilities.

Five Supreme Court Justices have tossed out those two requirements, via Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. Take a bow, Mr. Justice Breyer, along with your colleagues Justices Ginsburg, Kennedy, Sotomayor and Kagan. It’s your world – a world in which women’s health takes a back seat to abortion providers’ bottom lines – and we’re just living in it.

Kevin D. Williamson took an interesting view of the case.

Sports can be entertaining to watch because the contests have rules. Calvinball, the make-it-up-as-you-go game from Bill Watterson’s beloved comic, would be boring to watch, because there are no rules. Today’s Supreme Court decision on Texas’s abortion regulations is pure Calvinball. The day before yesterday, All the Best People were mindlessly, beard-strokingly repeating that when it comes to the Second Amendment, constitutional rights are not “absolute.” You hear that a lot, because people think it makes them sound smart, nuanced, and reasonable. The right to keep and bear arms — which is actually right there in the Bill of Rights — is, in their view, almost limitlessly limitable. But Texas’s requirement that surgeries be performed in surgery centers is plainly unconstitutional. At least, according to the same people.

The Gosnell grand jury, writing in 2011, made the blunt recommendation that prompted the Texas law and others like it.

The regulations for Pennsylvania [Gosnell’s state]’s ambulatory surgical facilities – which run over 30 pages – provide a comprehensive set of rules and procedures to assure overall quality of care at such facilities. The effect of the Department of Health’s reluctance to treat abortion clinics as ASFs was to accord patients of those facilities far less protection than patients seeking, for example, liposuction or a colonoscopy…There is no justification for denying abortion patients the protections available to every other patient of an ambulatory surgical facility, and no reason to exempt abortion clinics from meeting these standards.

It only took five years to move from the Gosnell grand jury to Whole Woman’s Health.

The late Justice Scalia died after hearing the case but before the decision was written, but his name still found its way into the proceedings. Justice Clarence Thomas wrapped up his dissenting opinion thus:

Today’s decision will prompt some to claim victory, just as it will stiffen opponents’ will to object.

(Ya think? But I digress. Back to Justice Thomas.)

But the entire Nation has lost something essential. The majority’s embrace of a jurisprudence of rights-specific exceptions and balancing tests is ‘a regrettable concession of defeat – an acknowledgement that we have passed the point where “law,” properly speaking, has any further application.’ Scalia, The Rule of Law as a Law of Rules, 56 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1175, 1182 (1989).

 

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