Whole Women’s Health, First Take: On the Major Victories and On Technocratic vs. Kulturkampf Approaches to Abortion Litigation at the Supreme Court

I have just made my way through all 107 pages of Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt,  the Supreme Court’s decision this morning to invalidate Texas’ H.B. 2 admitting privileges and surgical center regulations as undue burdens on the abortion right. Full disclosure I filed an amicus brief arguing for this result.  The case was 5-3 with Justices Thomas, Alito, and Chief Justice Roberts in dissent.  I am sure I’ll have a lot more to say after I’ve read through the opinion 3 or 4 more times. Here’s what’s clear to me though even on a quick read.

First, this is a major victory for opponents of Targeted Regulation of Abortion Provider (TRAP) laws. Armed with this opinion they will have a much easier time in the lower courts challenging such laws. Among other things,  (1) the Court signals much less deference to legislatures than in Gonzales and prior cases (see p. 21 of Opinion); (2) the Court instructs that “The rule announced in Casey, however, requires that courts consider the burdens a law imposes on abortion access together with the benefits” conferred (p. 19) ; (3) the Court clarifies the “large fraction” language from Casey as to what is an undue burden in a way favorable to opponents of these regulations. Let me quote the majority here:

Casey used the language “large fraction” to refer to “a large fraction of cases in which [the provision at issue] is relevant,” a class narrower than “all women,” “pregnant women,” or even “the class of women seeking abortions identified by the State.” 505 U. S., at 894–895 (opinion of the Court) (emphasis added). Here, as in Casey, the rele- vant denominator is “those [women] for whom [the provi- sion] is an actual rather than an irrelevant restriction.” Id., at 895. (p.39)

Contrast that with Justice Alito’s long discussion in his dissent as to his understanding (with the pizzaz that shows why he is such a good writer) in a footnote:

The Court, by contrast, applies the “large fraction” standard without even acknowledging the open question. Ante, at 39. In a similar vein, it holds that the fraction’s “relevant denominator is ‘those [women] for whom [the provision] is an actual rather than an irrelevant re­ striction.’ ” Ibid. (quoting Casey, 505 U. S., at 895). I must confess that I do not understand this holding. The purpose of the large-fraction analysis, presumably, is to compare the number of women actually burdened with the number potentially burdened. Under the Court’s holding, we are supposed to use the same figure (women actually burdened) as both the numerator and the denominator. By my math, that fraction is always “1,” which is pretty large as fractions go.

Second, it is remarkable how differently these sets of opinions read from, let’s say, the gay marriage cases or even Gonzales v. Carhart. All the opinions, except perhaps Justice Ginsburg’s very short concurrence, are decidedly in the “technocratic” mode of writing as opposed to what we might call the “kulturkampf” mode that characterized much of Justice Scalia’s dissents on these kinds of issues. These opinion are written for lawyers not the public. I would have to do a proper count to be sure but it seems to me that something like 2/3 to 3/4 of the total pages of these set of opinions are devoted to issues that only lawyers will be able to engage in — res judicata/claim preclusion, severability, third-party standing, as-applied versus facial challenges, and the cogency of tiers of scrutiny.

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pregnant belly with "surrogacy" written on it

Surrogacy Contracts, Abortion Conditions, and Parenting Licenses

By Dov Fox

Everything went fine the last time for Melissa Cook, when the 48-year old mother of four carried a child for a family back in 2013 to supplement her office job salary. This time was different. First were the triplets. She had been impregnated with three embryos, created using eggs from a 20-something donor and sperm from the intended father who paid for everything. Then, it was that the man, Chester Moore, turned out to be a deaf 50-year-old postal worker who lived with his parents. Finally, was that Moore asked Cook to abort one of the fetuses. He said that he had run out of money to support a third child and worried the high-risk multiple pregnancy would endanger the health of any resulting children.

Cook, who is pro-life, refused. A battle over parental rights of the triplets, all boys, began even before they were born (prematurely, at 28 weeks). Moore argued that his surrogacy contract with Cook, explicitly enforceable under California law, made clear that he was the sole legal parent. Cook sued for custody, notwithstanding her prior agreement that any children resulting from the pregnancy would be his to raise. She argued that the statute, by authorizing private contracts for gestation of a human being, reduces children to “commodities” for sale, and a surrogate like her to a “breeding animal or incubator.” Read More

SCOTUS and More Surprises on Zubik

After the 2014 SCOTUS decision in Hobby Lobby, in which a closely-held for-profit employer won the argument that the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act protected it against enforcement of the government’s contraceptives coverage mandate, all eyes have been on what SCOTUS would do in response to a challenge to the very same accommodation it toyed with as a less restrictive alternative in that case.  The Court agreed to hear a consolidated set of challenges to the accommodation brought by several religious non-profit employers who seek outright exemption from the mandate (under the case name Zubik et al.) – but then Justice Scalia passed away, leaving the Court with the unpalatable prospect of a 4-4 decision.

SCOTUS has pulled a few tricks out of its hat to avoid that possibility.  First, it surprised us by seeking supplemental briefs on a possible compromise solution, which would ostensibly allow women to access contraceptives (as the government desires) while not burdening the religious employers (as they desire).  The parties basically responded, as politely as would be expected, that some compromise was indeed possible – but not on terms the other could or would actually accept.  Nonetheless, today, SCOTUS surprised us again – seeing enough glimmer of a possible compromise to decline to decide the cases on the merits, instead returning them to the lower courts to work something out.

So what does that mean?  In my view, count it as a win for the government.  Eight out of nine circuit courts ruled in the government’s favor below, holding that the accommodation it had already offered did not substantially burden employers’ religious beliefs – which means that RFRA’s further protection, demanding a compelling government interest satisfied in the least restrictive way, does not even get triggered. These courts have no reason to change that determination now.  Even if there is a compromise that would be less burdensome on religious employers (which I don’t think there is), such a compromise is not required under RFRA unless there is a substantial burden.  And SCOTUS hasn’t said there is.

What we have here is, ironically, precisely the same result we’d have had if SCOTUS had issued a 4-4 decision.  The lower court opinions will almost certainly stand, and we’ll likely still have a bit of a circuit split. So now, we wait on a new president.  The Donald would presumably destroy the ACA/mandate entirely, whereas Hillary would hopefully be able to deliver a ninth justice that will recognize RFRA’s reasonable limits.  Religious freedom is critically important, but so too is accepting the government’s dramatic efforts to be accommodating, short of letting every religious believer be an island unto himself.

From Chance to Choice to Court

[Cross-posted from the Huffington Post Blog]

By Dov Fox

It used to be that whether you got the child you wanted — or one you hadn’t planned on — was left to cosmic fate or the randomness of reproductive biology. Now, new powers of reproductive medicine and technology promise to deliver us from the vagaries of the natural lottery.

The likes of voluntary sterilization and embryo screening give people who can afford them greater measures of control over procreation. Except, that is, when reproductive professionals make mistakes that frustrate efforts to pursue or avoid pregnancy or parenthood.

When, for example — just a few recent cases — a pharmacist fills a woman’s birth control prescription with prenatal vitamins. Or when a fertility clinic implants embryos carrying the hereditary disease that a couple underwent in vitro fertilization (IVF) to screen out. Just this week comes another report of losing IVF embryos.

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Planned Parenthood And Fetal Tissue Sale: Manufactured Controversy And The Real Ethical Debate

This new post by I. Glenn Cohen appears on the Health Affairs Blog as part of a series stemming from the Fourth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Friday, January 29, 2016.

In 2013 the Center for Medical Progress appeared to have secured tax-exempt status for a fake company it set up called Biomax Procurement Services. The company’s “representatives” contacted the non-profit women’s health provider Planned Parenthood staffers and led them into conversations that were secretly recorded. The result, according to their website (as reported by CNN), was “a 30-month-long investigative journalism study by The Center for Medical Progress, documenting how Planned Parenthood sells the body parts of aborted babies.”

The videos were edited down and released slowly in a way designed to paint Planned Parenthood in the worst light. While some have called it a “hoax,” that’s not a word I would use in this case. When I think of great journalistic hoaxes I think of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds (though more recent historical work suggests that the panic it caused may have been mythological). Instead what happened here, I want to suggest, is what I will call a “manufactured controversy.” [..]

Read the full post here.

10 Observations About the Supreme Court Argument in Whole Woman’s Health

Supreme Court
Flickr Creative Commons—Andrew Raff

By Gregory M. Lipper

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, a constitutional challenge to a pair of Texas restrictions on abortion providers. The first provision requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges from a hospital no more than 30 miles from their clinic; for a variety of reasons, these privileges are very difficult for abortion providers to obtain. The second provision requires abortion clinics to meet the rigorous—and often prohibitively expensive—requirements governing ambulatory surgical centers (this was referred to as the ASC law). If allowed to take effect, these requirements would cause 3/4 of Texas abortion clinics to close and leave just 10 clinics to serve over 5 million women.

The requirements were struck down by the district court, reinstated by the Fifth Circuit, and temporarily blocked by the Supreme Court, which is now hearing the merits of the challenge.

Based on my review of the transcript, here are ten observations about the argument:

1. Justice Ginsburg opened the argument with a procedural curveball.

With the law’s challengers going first, most people presumably expected the argument to start with sharp questioning from, say, Justice Alito. Instead, the Center for Reproductive Rights’s Stephanie Toti got just two sentences out before she was interrupted by Justice Ginsburg. The former civil-procedure professor wanted to know about claim preclusion: in particular, whether the challenges, in this case, to the admitting-privileges requirement were foreclosed by the plaintiffs’ unsuccesful facial challenge, in an earlier case, to those same requirements. This and other procedural inquiries dominated Toti’s argument.

2. All roads lead to the record.

Several of the conservative Justices interrogated Toti about the proof that the law’s requirements would cause clinics to close. Toti provided some infromation about how laws would affect clinics, but also repeatedly alluded to more detailed information that she would supply during her rebuttal. This approach may have prolonged the questioning on this point:

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Some Very Preliminary Thoughts on Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt (Texas Abortion Case) Argument

By I. Glenn Cohen

It is always dangerous to try to glean too much from oral argument, and I have only read the transcript (no recording yet) of today’s argument in Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, and finally I filed a brief in this case on the side of the law’s challengers so I may be suffering from some motivated reasoning. But with all those caveats, here goes:

Justice Scalia’s passing seems to have radically transformed this oral argument and likely this case. The 3 firm anti-abortion votes on the court (Alito and Roberts from their questions and earlier positions, Thomas we can infer from his earlier positions) left over after Justice Scalia’s passing seemed very much to be playing a defensive game. Many of their questions were aimed at convincing others on the Court (especially Justice Kennedy, the swing voter on these matters) to remand the case back to the lower court, much more so than focusing on giving Texas an outright win.

Appellant’s Counsel Toti’s argument barely was able to get to the merits questions in the case. Instead Justices Roberts, Alito, sometimes joined by Kennedy in these questions, repeatedly asked about evidence in the record on when various clinics closed, re-opened, and what evidence there was for the reason behind it. Toti tried to make use of the timing to her advantage as did the Justices more supportive of her side, but there was a lot of push on why this element of the record was not better developed. She was also repeatedly asked questions regarding the evidence on the capacity of remaining clinics to absorb extra patients needing abortions and what was developed in the record.

The same was true to a lesser extent in Appellee’s Counsel Keller’s argument. Justice Kennedy in particular focused on a line of questioning at page 44 of the argument that may also be significant in terms of remanding the case without resolving it:

“But I thought an underlying theme, or at least an underlying factual demonstration, is that this law has really increased the number of surgical procedures as opposed to medical procedures, and that this may not be medically wise?” Read More

Abortion Is Way More Common Than Most Voters Think

By Gregory M. Lipper

A new Vox survey reveals that a majority of registered voters underestimate the rate of abortion, and that the abortion rate is most likely to be understimated by men, college graduates, and those with higher salaries:

More educated and higher-income Americans are especially likely to believe that abortion is rare.

For example, 54 percent of Americans without a college degree underestimate abortion rates, compared with 70 percent of those with graduate degrees. And 51 percent of those earning less than $50,000 underestimate the frequency of abortion, compared with 69 percent of those earning more than $175,000.

The split happens when you look at gender, too. Women would near certainly have more experience with abortion than men. Our poll shows that 67 percent of men underestimate the frequency of abortion, compared with 57 percent of women.

Fortunately for those who support abortion rights, no Supreme Court Justices are wealthy, well-educated men…

Greg Lipper (@theglipper) is Senior Litigation Counsel at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Zika Messes with Texas

Photo: Texas + Fence
Flickr Creative Commons—Adam Simmons

By Gregory M. Lipper

For an ambitious, aggressive disease like Zika, Texas is an ideal home. Earlier this week we learned that Zika—a nasty virus that has spread to over 25 countries—was transmitted by sex to a resident of Dallas. Six more cases of Zika have also been confirmed in Harris County, Texas. The appearance of Zika in Texas may be happenstance, but Texas’s health policies will make it easier for Zika to spread. Among other problems, Texas (1) fails to teach students about safe sex and reduces access to affordable, effective contraceptives; (2) has blocked access to Medicaid for up to 2 million low-income residents; and (3) is trying to restrict if not eliminate access to safe abortion. Not a bad place for a communicable disease that can spread through sex and cause birth defects.

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Female Viagra: Discrimination or Medicalization or Something Else?

Earlier this year, the flibanserin pill, aka “,” was introduced to the market, generating tons of headlines. After many years in which the plain old (male) Viagra was the sole sexual stimulator in the market, flibanserin was finally approved last August, following an 18-6 vote by the FDA advisory committee.

Before approval, flibanserin was rejected twice, and reports say that even members on the advisory board who voted in favor still had misgivings despite their final decision. Their concerns were driven by doubts regarding flibanserin’s effectiveness to treat low sexual drives. Trials showed that women who took the pill ‘earned’ only 0.7 “sexually satisfying events” in a month, whereas the drop-out rate due to negative side effects was relatively high – 14%. The side effects associated with flibanserin are low blood pressure, dizziness and such.

So what made this low cost-benefit ratio get the advisory committee’s approval the third time around? Some credit mass political campaigns promoted by women’s organizations claiming to advocate women’s interests. One position advocated by the organizations presented the pill as a treatment for a legit medical problem called HSDD (hypoactive sexual desire disorder), and it was said to be a step towards realization of women’s sexuality. The other side of the debate pushed back against what they perceive as medicalizing another realm of women’s sexuality and subjecting it (again) to the gaze of the male expert.

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