U S S C Abortion Ruling

Yesterday, the US Supreme Court issued the most important abortion ruling in the last 20 years, according to legal analysts. Frustrated with their inability to outlaw abortion or limit it to an extreme degree, several morally conservative states have spent the last ten years coming up with various tricks to indirectly make abortions harder to get and therefore less common by placing random restrictions on abortion clinics that they couldn't meet, forcing them to close down. Some of these bogus regulations were as obvious and pointless as requiring all the hallways to be wide enough for two two rolling hospital beds to meet going in opposite directions, regardless of the fact that there was no need for that to ever happen at a smaller abortion clinic. The clinics would have had to tear down their buildings and build new ones. The SC looked at new regulations in Texas, and concluded that they were nothing but poorly disguised efforts to reject the 1973 SC decision that makes abortion legal in all 50 states. Lower federal courts may now begin applying this ruling (conceptually) to similar situations in other states.

The vote was 5-3, much to the frustration of Republicans who thought that holding a Supreme Court vacancy for a full year was going to protect them from liberal rulings.

 

Another reproductive freedom case, decision announced today... The SC ruled against pharmacists who wanted to refuse to sell birth control pills, due to their personal religious beliefs.

After the death of Scalia, all such cases were predicted by experts to end up with 4-4 tie votes.

 

To be fair they didn't actually rule against it. They just refused to hear the case involved is all. This could easily be heard if there is a circuit split though.