Pro-lifers, don’t fret yet: Chief Justice John Roberts did not necessarily indicate yesterday that he is comfortable with the Supreme Court’s existing pro-choice jurisprudence. Instead, he showed he was unwilling to overturn precedent on what amounts to a procedural ruling.

Headline writers yesterday focused on Roberts’ role in joining the court’s four liberal justices in issuing a stay, or temporary halt, to a Louisiana law imposing new regulations on abortion providers. The law would have forbidden doctors from performing abortions unless they held “admitting” privileges at a nearby hospital. Because only four abortionists currently practice in Louisiana, and only one has such admitting privileges, those challenging the law said it would place an “undue burden” on the ability of women to procure abortions.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that the “undue burden” test, as most recently explicated under the 2016 case from Texas called Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, or WWH, does not apply in the Louisiana situation. The state argues the hospital access is needed in case serious medical complications occur during surgery, and that the three abortionists now without admitting privileges can apply and receive that authority during a 45-day regulatory grace period before the law takes effect. In sum, the “burden” is not undue, but readily surmountable.

Enter Roberts, in the Louisiana case known as June Medical Services v. Gee. The court’s four liberal justices were expected to issue the stay, because, in effect, they see any new restriction on abortion as illegitimate. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito consistently have indicated they think the entire abortion regime under the Roe and Casey cases is constitutionally suspect, and Justice Neil Gorsuch had been expected to join them. The two unknowns were Roberts and new Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Roberts had joined Thomas and Alito in dissenting from WWH and thus rejecting such an application of the undue burden test. Still, Roberts has a long history of trying to keep the high court away from controversial new precedents. Any court action seeming to undermine such a recent precedent as WWH, involving a subject as contentious as abortion, would be seen as a major quake.

Kavanaugh seemed to offer Roberts a middle ground. In dissenting from the stay, he made clear that he was not (for now) trying to ignore or overturn WWH, but to distinguish this Louisiana case from it. There’s no need, he wrote, for the court to predict whether the three abortionists could gain hospital privileges during the 45-day grace period. Instead, he reasoned, the court should wait to see — and, if they can’t , then issue an injunction halting the law’s implementation until and unless the Supreme Court can hear the full case on its merits.

The other three conservatives also dissented, but without comment, rather than joining Kavanaugh’s Solomonic reasoning.

That left Roberts. True to form, he sided with those who would stay the law now, clearly recognizing WWH as precedent rather than trying to distinguish this case from it. Again, if the Supreme Court agrees to hear June Medical Services on the full merits, that would be a time to revisit WWH and perhaps even Casey and Roe as well.

The full court is expected to agree to hear WWH either way; the only practical difference between the approaches of Kavanaugh and Roberts, therefore, is whether to let the Louisiana law take effect in the meantime.

The reason pro-lifers should not overly fret is that Roberts really has given no hint that his prior views on the merits have changed. Even a high court that can overturn its own precedent is often loath to do so on an intermediate ruling such as an injunction. The chief justice, as an institutionalist, is not the type to even appear to be undermining such a recent court precedent without full review of the case at hand.

One might hope that his disgust at WWH and Casey would make him eager to take the first opportunity to overturn them. But that’s not Roberts’ style. He punts when he can. Eventually, though, this ball will be put back in his hands, and he will then have to run with it, in one direction or another.