×

How the Supreme Court Enabled the Philadelphia House of Horror to Go Unregulated

Clarke Forsythe—author of the excellent book Politics for the Greatest Good: The Case for Prudence in the Public Square, and whom I interviewed here about Roe v. Wade—has a good article in The Weekly Standard explaining how the actions of the Supreme Court severely discouraged regulating abortion clinics.

An excerpt:

Philadelphia’s clinic conditions and lackadaisical approach to regulating clinics are the direct result of the “fine print” in Roe.

Because the Justices who decided Roe foolishly believed that abortion had few risks and that doctors should have complete discretion to decide how to do abortions in the first trimester, they basically said that state and local officials can’t regulate in the first trimester, when 90 percent of abortions are done, and that they can try in the second trimester—if they dare.

But the Justices then empowered the federal courts and attorneys for abortion providers to thwart every effort by public health officials to regulate.

Here’s his conclusion about the inevitable cycle that we’ll continue to see:

The problem is that the Court is a passive institution. It dictated this public health vacuum and now can’t do anything about it.  It can’t regulate. It can’t fill the vacuum it created.  It can only wait on lengthy and expensive cases to get appealed to the Court, and it has imposed conditions that inhibit any case from getting to the Court.

If the history of the past 38 years is replayed in Philadelphia, as it has been in Chicago and other major cities, the current furor will die down, some legislative body might pass new regulations, the ACLU or the Center for Reproductive Rights will file suit, the federal courts will strike down the regulations, the state will use tax dollars to pay attorneys fees to the clinics, the papers will turn a blind eye, and the case will never get to the Justices.

You can read the whole thing here.

LOAD MORE
Loading