Since the supreme court’s Monday ruling to strike down Texas law, calls at the state level to overturn similar restrictions have spread like wildfire, officials say

Efforts are brewing in at least eight states to repeal abortion restrictions that appear to be unconstitutional after a major supreme court victory for abortion rights advocates. That is according to Planned Parenthood officials, who vowed on Thursday to support these efforts and any others that take advantage of Monday’s monumental decision.

Planned Parenthood made the announcement the same day that Donald Trump, the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee, broke a puzzling three-day silence on the ruling, known as Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt.



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Speaking to conservative radio host Mike Gallagher, Trump echoed a promise to appoint supreme court justices who oppose abortion rights. “If we had Scalia was living or Scalia had been replaced by me, you wouldn’t have had that, OK?” he said. The decision was 5-3, suggesting the outcome would have been the same with Scalia’s vote or a conservative replacement.

The court’s ruling on Monday struck down a Texas law that closed half the state’s abortion clinics by requiring all clinics to meet expensive, hospital-like standards, and all providers to have patient-admitting privileges with a local hospital. In its ruling, the court found no evidence that the law made abortion safer, as its supporters claimed, and served only to make abortions harder to obtain. The law, said the majority, was therefore unconstitutional.

Since the ruling was announced, calls at the state level to overturn similar restrictions spread like wildfire, Planned Parenthood officials said.

Lawmakers are formulating specific plans to target similar abortion restrictions in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and they are broadly prepared to repeal laws in Florida, Michigan and Texas. In Tennessee, Planned Parenthood is looking to support litigation by the Center for Reproductive Rights against that state’s building requirement law. They will also target Missouri’s admitting privileges law. Earlier this week, officials with Planned Parenthood of Kansas and mid-Missouri signaled that they were prepared, if necessary, to mount a legal challenge.

“This list is not final,” Dawn Laguens, Planned Parenthood’s executive vice-president, said on a call with reporters.

Efforts to repeal harsh restrictions are sure to be met with solid resistance as long as the same lawmakers who passed the abortion restrictions still hold power. Republican lawmakers were overwhelmingly responsible for the abortion restrictions under fire, and in each of these states, the party still controls at least one house of the legislature, if not also the governor’s seat.

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Asked how successful a legislative campaign would be under those circumstances, officials with Planned Parenthood said they were confident that these efforts had “momentum”.

“We might not win everything on the first day,” said Laguens. “We don’t think for one minute that people who have spent the last decade trying to take away women’s access to abortion … are all of a sudden going to see the light … But ‘by all means necessary’, really, is our strategy.”

Laguens suggested that raising the profile of these statehouse battles might also energize voters around November’s elections.

“I think it’s a good idea for them to have a legislative strategy,” said Priscilla Smith, a professor at Yale Law School who has litigated abortion restrictions. Since a Republican takeover of many state legislatures kicked off a wave of abortion restrictions, she said, “The pro-choice movement has relied too heavily on litigation alone, and has not focused enough on legislation.”

Anti-abortion lawmakers will never support these efforts, Smith continued, but moderate lawmakers might be swayed. “It’s a waste of state resources to enforce these laws in court … The same argument can be made to a legislature. It’s an appeal to reason and budget-consciousness as much as it’s an appeal to pro-choice lawmakers.”

The laws being targeted have shuttered at least a dozen abortion clinics in a region already hurting for abortion access.

In Missouri, a law that requires abortion providers to have patient-admitting privileges with a local hospital has left the state with just one working abortion clinic, in St Louis. A Planned Parenthood clinic in Columbia, Missouri, is licensed to offer abortions. But it was forced to stop providing the procedure after the University of Missouri, apparently under political pressure, suspended the clinic’s privileges at the university hospital. Chris Koster, the state’s Democratic attorney general has already questioned the constitutionality of the admitting privileges law in response to Monday’s ruling.



Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Virginia all require most abortion clinics to meet hospital-like building requirements. Those laws forced seven abortion clinics in Virginia alone to shut down, said Helene Krasnoff, the Planned Parenthood’s director of public policy litigation. At least another ten have closed in Arizona and Michigan.

Some abortion restrictions have already been toppled by Monday’s ruling – no legislation required. These were states with ongoing litigation against abortion restrictions. Immediately after the ruling, Alabama attorney general Luther Strange announced that he was dropping the state’s defense of its admitting privilege law. The law would have forced four out of five Alabama abortion clinics to close. On Tuesday, the supreme court declined to hear a final appeal of Wisconsin’s admitting privilege law, effectively striking that law down for good.

The restrictions Planned Parenthood and its allies are targeting are measures that are harder to challenge in court. Some of the laws have been on the books for many years, meaning the only abortion clinics left are in compliance. It is unclear, in those cases, if the clinics would have standing to bring a legal challenge.

On Thursday, a federal judge blocked another state abortion restriction, although not as a direct result of Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt. District judge Tanya Walton Pratt blocked an Indiana law which barred abortions when the reason was “race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex; or a diagnosis or potential diagnosis” of a disability or malformation.