The End Of A Woman's Right To Choose. How did we lose? T.R.A.P.
In state after state, women have already effectively lost the right to choose.
Sooner rather than later SCOTUS will be hearing some vital cases.
First up:
Oklahoma's effective ban on chemically induced abortions:
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But first in line at the Supreme Court has been a dispute over whether states may restrict how doctors prescribe medications that are used to induce abortions in the first weeks of pregnancy.
The legislatures in Oklahoma, Texas, Ohio and several other states have adopted laws that require doctors to follow the Food and Drug Administration's protocols for the use of "any abortion-inducing drug." These laws forbid doctors to prescribe medications for "off-label use."
Sponsors of the laws said they wanted to protect the health of women. But medical experts and supporters of abortion rights said the laws would in effect ban medication abortions because the FDA protocol is outdated and conflicts with current medical practice.
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When doctors sued to challenge the state law, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional last year in a three-paragraph opinion. The state's attorney general appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and argued that state judges had invalidated a reasonable law designed to regulate the safe practice of medicine.
In June, the justices took an unusual step. They tentatively agreed to take up the Oklahoma case, but first asked the state court to clarify whether the 2011 law "prohibits … the use of misoprostol in conjunction with mifepristone."
In Tuesday's opinion, the Oklahoma court said the law, as written, does prohibit the use of the second drug. It "effectively bans all medication abortions" under current practice, the court said. The judges explained that misoprostol was an abortion-inducing drug and noted that FDA had not approved its use for that purpose.
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http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-court-abortions-20131030,0,5448674.story#axzz2jKZy5F42
The last major abortion case in front of the SCOTUS was in 2007. We lost. The court upheld the 2003 ban on "partial birth" abortions.
More on the Oklahoma case by Linda Greenhouse in the NYT in Sept of this year- excellent article:
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, author of the 5-to-4 opinion in June that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, may well be a hero to the gay rights community, and deservedly so. But he’s also the author of the 5-to-4 opinion that upheld the federal ban on so-called partial birth abortion back in 2007, and abortion-rights advocates have viewed with something close to dread the prospect that he could play a similarly decisive role in the Supreme Court’s next abortion case.
That case has arrived.
It’s understandable if you haven’t heard of Cline v. Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice, which has received relatively little attention since the court accepted it on June 27, the day after the term ended. The lack of attention is itself understandable.
The case is an appeal by the state of Oklahoma from a ruling by its Supreme Court striking down a law that limits doctors’ ability to prescribe the pills used to terminate early pregnancies. The medical abortion regimen, often referred to as RU-486, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000 as a safe and effective alternative to surgical abortion early in the first trimester. It has been used since then by close to two million American women, currently about 200,000 a year out of some 1.2 million abortions performed annually. The Oklahoma law doesn’t ban the medical procedure. Rather, it requires doctors to follow the dosage and other instructions on the F.D.A. label. Viewed outside its context in the battle over abortion, the law looks perfectly sensible, a routine state regulation of medical practice. (Spoiler alert: it isn’t.)
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As abortion clinics are forced to close because of onerous state regulations (54 clinics in 27 states have closed in the last three years, and many women live hundreds of miles from the nearest provider) and as women entering clinics often have to run a gauntlet of protesters seeking to “counsel” them (in its new term, the Supreme Court will hear a First Amendment challenge to a Massachusetts “bubble zone” law that keeps speakers 35 feet away from the entrance to a “reproductive health care facility”), medical abortion offers an end-run around the obstacles that for years have been a core part of opposition strategy.
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http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/the-next-abortion-case-is-here/
There are a lot of potential cases in the pipeline. TX has now moved to the top of the list. Whether Roe is actually voided within the next couple of years or not, a woman's right to choose has effectively been gutted. I think the reversal of Roe is near inevitable unless one of the right wing Justices retires or croaks. Should it be reversed, the nightmare of women losing so much ground, grows exponentially worse as state after state criminalizes abortion.
Oh, T.R.A.P: Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_laws#TRAP_laws
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