- Challenging one in a wave of regulations intended to make abortion prohibitively expensive and increasingly difficult to obtain, today the Center for Reproductive Rights petitioned the United States Supreme Court to strike down medically unnecessary regulations imposed on physicians who perform abortions. The Center for Reproductive Rights argues that South Carolina's Regulation 61-12, which targets physicians who perform five or more first trimester abortions per month, harms women's health, and violates the right to privacy and the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution by imposing burdensome requirements that are more stringent than regulations governing comparable medical care.
"Under the guise of promoting maternal health, these regulations actually threaten women's health by significantly hindering access to safe, legal abortions," said Bonnie Scott Jones, Center for Reproductive Rights staff attorney. "The true intent is to make it virtually impossible for physicians to provide abortions in their office and to segregate abortion services from mainstream medicine," said Jones.
Abortion providers already comply with state and federal laws governing similar health care providers. Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers or TRAP regulations subject abortion to unique levels of government intrusion and oversight. The unjustified regulations create substantial cost increases, by as much as $370 in one location, and intrude on patient confidentiality.
South Carolina's 27-page detailed Regulation radically departs from national medical guidelines in a number of ways. For example, the Regulation permits a state agency to copy and remove patient records, violating doctor-patient confidentiality, and requires patients to undergo tests for sexually transmitted diseases even when the test is not medically indicated. The Regulation subjects abortion providers to unparalleled government supervision not imposed on providers of comparable medical procedures.
The Center for Reproductive Rights argues these TRAP regulations violate numerous Supreme Court precedents that protect physicians' ability to exercise appropriate medical judgment when providing abortion care to patients, including the Stenberg v. Carhart decision issued last Term, striking down Nebraska's abortion ban.
Challenged by the Center for Reproductive Rights in 1996, Greenville Women's Clinic v. Bryant was the first TRAP regulation challenged since the Supreme Court's 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision. In February, 1999, a federal district court struck down the Regulation, finding that it violated the right to privacy and the right to equal protection of the laws. On August 15, 2000, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed the district court by a vote of 2-1. A petition for rehearing was denied.
See here for a recent Reproductive Freedom News article on the case.
Click here to view the full cert petition.
