Tough Texas abortion law may head to Supreme Court

EL PASO, Texas (AP) - Abortion-rights lawyers are predicting "a showdown" at the U.S. Supreme Court after federal appellate judges allowed full implementation of a law that has closed more than 80 percent of Texas' abortion clinics.

As of Friday, abortion services for many Texas women required a round trip of more than 200 miles - or a border-crossing into Mexico or New Mexico.

Operators of some of the affected clinics and their lawyers from the Center for Reproductive Rights vowed to appeal Thursday's decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans that allows Texas to fully enforce a sweeping abortion law approved by the Republican-controlled legislature last year. They depicted the law - and similar measures proposed in other states - as an unacceptable infringement of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling establishing a nationwide right to abortion.

"This case is ultimately going to end up with the Supreme Court," said the reproductive rights center's president, Nancy Northup. "It is going to be a showdown ... on whether the promise of Roe will have meaning in the United States."

Two years ago, Texas had more than 40 abortion facilities. For now, no more than eight will be open, due to portions of the law that require abortion providers to obtain hospital admitting privileges and impose hospital-level operating standards on the clinics.

Activist justices were wrong, imo, to put on their "magic glasses" and find the so-called right to an abortion in the 9th Amendment, and then use the 14th Amendment (14A) to apply their interpolated right to an abortion to the states. This is because John Bingham, the main author of Section 1 of 14A, had officially clarified that 14A applied only rights expressly amended to the Constitution by the states to the states.

“Mr. Speaker, this House may safely follow the example of the makers of the Constitution and the builders of the Republic, by passing laws for enforcing all the privileges and immunities of the United States as guaranteed by the amended Constitution and expressly enumerated in the Constitution [emphasis added].” — Congressional Globe, House of Representatives, 42nd Congress, 1st Session. (See lower half of third column.)

So the states would have had to expressly amend the right to have an abortion to the Constitution before Roe v. Wade was decided in order fdor the Court to apply it to the states.

In fact, a relatively short time after Bingham had clarified what 14A actually does, the Supreme Court essentially indicated the same thing as evidenced by the following excerpt.

“3. The right of suffrage was not necessarily one of the privileges or immunities of citizenship before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, and that amendment does not add to these privileges and immunities. It simply furnishes additional guaranty for the protection of such as the citizen already had [emphasis added].” —Minor v. Happersett, 1874.

Regarding interpolations of the Constitution, the Supreme Court had also clarified that interpretations are not acceptable.

“3. The Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning; where the intention is clear, there is no room for construction and no excuse for interpolation or addition [emphasis added].” —United States v. Sprague, 1931.

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