Abortion-rights supporters, foes weigh in on Supreme Court decision

Planned Parenthood said it would look for ways to expand access to abortion in Kansas and surrounding states following Monday’s Supreme Court ruling striking down some restrictions on abortion clinics.

Kansas had placed some of the same restrictions on abortion providers as Texas, whose widely-copied requirements were ruled unconstitutional. In all, 21 states have adopted at least one of the two regulations requiring that clinics meet hospital standards or that doctors obtain admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.

Texas clinics had protested that the 2013 regulations were a thinly veiled attempt to make it harder for women to get an abortion in the nation’s second-most-populous state.

The Supreme Court voted 5-3 in support of Texas clinics. Justice Stephen Breyer’s majority opinion for the court held that the regulations are medically unnecessary and unconstitutionally limit a woman’s right to an abortion.

Groups opposed to abortion expressed disappointment.

Mark Gietzen, chairman of Kansas Coalition for Life, was outside of Wichita’s only surgical abortion clinic when the decision was announced Monday. He says the decision shows anti-abortion activists’ need to focus on the judicial branch in the upcoming election. The next president will likely appoint the next Supreme Court Justice, filling the vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the court’s leading conservative voice.

“The legislators in Texas did the right thing,” Gietzen said of the Texas restrictions. “It’s the most logical thing you could pass.”

Gov. Sam Brownback’s spokeswoman also expressed disappointment.

“The Governor will continue the fight to make Kansas a pro-life state,” Eileen Hawley, Brownback’s spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.

Abortion-rights supporters described the day as historic.

“This is easily the most important decision facing reproductive health access in more than 20 years,” said Laura McQuade, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, which offers the abortion pill at its Wichita clinic.

Julie Burkhart, CEO and president of Trust Women, which operates Trust Women South Wind Women’s Center, the only surgical abortion clinic in Wichita, said, “This has been a long, drawn-out fight.”

“This is a great day for women’s rights and equality,” Burkhart continued. “This decision has a direct impact on the lives of women and their families.”

2 Kansas laws like those in court decision

In Texas, 10 abortion clinics that had been at risk of being forced to close can remain open. But the immediate local impact of Monday’s Supreme Court decision striking down Texas’ widely replicated regulations is unknown.

Kansas had adopted two of the requirements at the heart of the decision: that abortion providers have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and that the clinics meet the requirements of an ambulatory surgery center. But both of those laws were temporarily enjoined pending a final decision in court, meaning the abortion clinics and providers did not have to comply with those laws, pending the final decision.

South Wind is already certified as an ambulatory surgery center, according to Burkhart, who founded Trust Women, the foundation that opened the clinic in 2013.

Burkhart said not all providers at South Wind have local hospital admitting privileges.

McQuade, of Planned Parenthood, said its Wichita clinic does not meet ambulatory surgery center standards and said its providers do not have hospital admitting privileges. McQuade said the organization’s Overland Park location is designed as an ambulatory surgery center.

Lawyers for Trust Women and Planned Parenthood will review the 107-page court decision to determine the possible impacts in Kansas, according to the two groups.

McQuade said Planned Parenthood’s legal counsel would start planning how the organization could maintain and expand abortion access in Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri.

Trust Women already has plans to open a clinic in Oklahoma City this summer. Trust Women’s expansion to Oklahoma comes after a bill last month that would have banned abortions passed the Oklahoma Legislature and was vetoed by the state’s governor.

‘Undue burden’

The outcome of the Texas case turned on an interpretation of the high court’s ruling nearly 25 years ago in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That ruling said that states had a legitimate interest in regulating abortion procedures but could not impose an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy before fetal viability.

Included in the description of such a burden was “unnecessary health regulations that have the purpose or effect of presenting a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court’s pivotal justice on abortion rights, assigned the opinion to Justice Breyer. The court’s female justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, joined it.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

Alito read parts of his dissent from the bench to emphasize his disagreement.

“This is an abuse of our authority,” Alito said, holding up the thick packet of regulations. The court had “no authority to strike down perfectly legal provisions.”

Anti-abortion disappointment

Kansans for Life, an affiliate of national anti-abortion group the National Right to Life Committee, called the court’s decision ridiculous. The group referred to some Kansas City clinics as “disgusting, filthy hole-in the-wall clinics that won’t upgrade their facilities.”

Mary Kay Culp, executive director of Kansans for Life, said in a written statement that the decision “shows in the starkest terms the so-called ‘safe and legal’ fantasy for what it always has been: a cover for abortion at all costs.”

Members of the local group called Kansas Coalition for Life demonstrate daily outside the clinic.

Gietzen, of the coalition, said the Texas laws were appropriate.

“I’m disappointed because I think it’s reasonable,” Gietzen said. “Because I think abortion, in as much that it’s a surgery, should be held to reasonable surgical standards.”

“This just goes to show we need to pay more attention to the judiciary,” Gietzen said. “People are realizing that the most important thing that a new president is going to do is nominate Supreme Court justices. We’ve let this slide too long.”

Gietzen said he is setting up a website he plans to use as a platform to explain why he believes several judges – in Sedgwick County District Court, on the Kansas Appellate Court and the Kansas Supreme Court – need to be replaced.

U.S. Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kansas, also denounced the court’s decision in a written statement.

“It is unconscionable that the Court today protected Big Abortion profits, not women’s safety,” he wrote. “With this ruling, these five justices enable substandard, filthy conditions to persist within abortion mills across America. As we all saw in the wretched, inhumane conditions of the abortion mill operated by the monster Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia, abortionists profit off women and the innocent unborn. Protecting the Big Abortion industry from common sense health and safety standards has nothing to do with the Constitution – and everything to do with greed and a systematic hatred of the unborn and their mothers.”

Contributing: Associated Press; Washington Post

This story was originally published June 27, 2016 at 11:17 AM with the headline "Abortion-rights supporters, foes weigh in on Supreme Court decision."