Planned Parenthood of Greater Tex. Surgical Health Servs. v. Abbott
The Supreme Court refused to lift a federal appeals court's stay that let Texas immediately enforce a new law requiring abortion doctors to hold admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, even though a trial judge had found the law unconstitutional.
Four justices dissented, warning that the law would force clinics to close and women to travel far for abortions while the case was still being litigated, but the majority found no clear legal error in the appeals court's decision to let the law take effect.
How it got here: A federal trial court struck down the admitting-privileges law; the Fifth Circuit stayed that ruling pending appeal; the clinics asked the Supreme Court to vacate the stay.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Texas passed a law requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic. Abortion providers sued, arguing the requirement violated the constitutional right to an abortion by creating an undue burden with no medical benefit. A federal trial judge agreed and permanently blocked the requirement the day before it was set to take effect.
The question before the Court
Should the Supreme Court have blocked a Texas law requiring abortion doctors to have hospital admitting privileges while an appeal was pending?
Why it matters
Texas abortion clinics whose doctors lacked nearby hospital admitting privileges had to stop performing abortions immediately, and women in some areas had to travel 100 miles or more, or forgo the procedure, while the underlying constitutional challenge continued in the courts.
What changes now
The Fifth Circuit's stay remains in place, so Texas's admitting-privileges requirement stays in effect while the appeal proceeds. The Fifth Circuit had already scheduled expedited oral argument for January 2014 and was expected to rule on the merits soon after. This order is not a final ruling on the law's constitutionality -- it only decides whether enforcement should pause during the appeal.
What this does not decide
This order does not decide whether the admitting-privileges requirement is actually constitutional. It only addresses whether the Fifth Circuit clearly erred in letting the law take effect while the appeal continues; the merits question remained for the Fifth Circuit to resolve.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Breyer
“I would maintain the status quo while the lower courts consider this difficult, sensitive, and controversial legal matter.”Breyer's closing explanation for why he would have blocked the law from taking effect.
Justice Breyer argued the Fifth Circuit's stay seriously disrupted the pre-existing status quo by immediately closing clinics in areas like the Rio Grande Valley, potentially cutting off abortion access for thousands of women. He found the balance of harms favored keeping the trial court's injunction in place, since the harm to women from losing access could not be undone even if the law were later upheld, while the state's harm from a short delay was comparatively minor. He would have vacated the stay to preserve the status quo pending the Fifth Circuit's merits decision.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied the standard for deciding whether to disturb a court of appeals' stay: the applicants had to show the appeals court was demonstrably wrong in applying the accepted four-factor test for stays, which asks about likely success on the merits, irreparable injury to the state, injury to other parties, and the public interest.
- The concurrence emphasized that the two most important factors -- likelihood of success and irreparable injury to the state -- were not seriously disputed by the dissent, since the dissent only called the underlying constitutional question 'difficult' rather than showing the appeals court's merits assessment was clearly wrong.
- On the harm-to-others and public-interest factors, the concurrence found no accepted legal standard requiring a court to delay enforcement of a likely-constitutional law simply because it might harm third parties or disrupt the existing state of affairs.
- Because the dissent never identified a specific, clear error in the appeals court's application of the four-factor test, the heavy burden required to override the appeals court's stay was not met.