Our nation 18
catholicnewsherald.com | July 8, 2016 CATHOLIC NEWS HERALD
Supreme Court tie vote blocks temporary plan to stop deportations Carol Zimmermann Catholic News Service
WASHINGTON, D.C. — With a tie vote June 23, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the Obama administration’s plan to temporarily protect more than 4 million unauthorized immigrants from deportation. The court’s 4-4 vote leaves in place a lower court injunction blocking the administration’s immigration policy. Legal experts have called it an ambiguous and confusing political and legal decision that leaves many in a state of limbo. It also puts a lot of attention on the vacant Supreme Court seat that may determine how the case is decided in an appeal. Religious leaders were quick to denounce the court’s action as a setback for immigrant families and stressed the urgency of comprehensive immigration reform. Seattle Auxiliary Bishop Eusebio L. Elizondo, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Migration, said the court’s decision was a “huge disappointment” and a setback, but he said the focus now needs to be on how to fix the current immigration system. Bishop Oscar Cantu of Las Cruces, N.M., called the court’s decision “a sad ruling” and said the president’s immigration plan had been “the result of years of painstaking work and committed efforts by migrant advocates, grass-roots organizations, some legislators and the faith community.” The bishop was joined in the statement by Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Texas, and the Hope Border Institute, a community organization on the U.S.Mexico border. The statement also said the court’s decision exposes how the current immigration policy in the U.S. “criminalizes and scapegoats immigrants who fight for a better life for their children and families that contribute every day to our economy and communities.” In a news briefing, President Barack Obama said the country’s immigration system is broken and the Supreme Court’s inability to reach a decision set it back even further. House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin praised the court’s decision for making clear that “the president is not permitted to write laws – only Congress is,” which he said was a “major victory in our fight to restore the separation of powers.” At issue in the United States v. Texas case are Obama’s executive actions on immigration policy that were challenged by 26 states. The case involved Obama’s 2014 expansion of a 2012 program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, and creation of the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, known as DAPA. The programs had been put on hold last November by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, upholding a Texas-based federal judge’s injunction against the executive actions. The original DACA program is not affected by the injunction. The states suing the federal government claimed the president went too far and was not just putting a temporary block on deportations, but giving immigrants in the country without legal permission a “lawful presence” that enabled them to qualify for Social Security and Medicare benefits. U.S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who defended the government, said the “pressing human concern” was to avoid breaking up families of U.S. citizen children, something echoed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, CLINIC, and at least three Catholic colleges, which joined in a brief with more than 75 education and children’s advocacy organizations.
U.S. Supreme Court strikes down regulations on Texas abortion clinics Carol Zimmermann Catholic News Service
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a 5-3 vote June 27, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down restrictions on Texas abortion clinics that required them to comply with standards of ambulatory surgical centers and required their doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. The case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, challenged a 2013 state law, H.B. 2, placing the requirements on the state’s abortion clinics. Opponents of the law claimed the requirements were aimed at closing abortion clinics. But the state and many pro-life advocates maintained that the law protected women’s health. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other religious groups submitted a joint friend of the court brief in the case supporting the Texas law, which was similar to other state laws regulating abortion clinics across the country. Justice Stephen Breyer, who wrote the majority opinion, said the restrictions on the clinics “provide few if any health benefits for women, pose a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions and constitute an ‘undue burden’ on their constitutional right to do so.” Breyer was joined by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Reaction to the court’s ruling was immediate. Those in favor of the regulations said the court’s opinion put women at risk and those opposed to the state law called it a major victory. “The court has rejected a common-sense law protecting women from abortion facilities that put profits above patient safety,” said Deirdre McQuade, assistant director for pro-life communications at the USCCB’s Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities. She said the Texas law “simply required abortion facilities to meet the same health and safety standards as other ambulatory surgical centers.” McQuade, in a statement issued after the ruling, also said: “Abortion claims the lives of unborn children, and too often endangers their mothers as well. This ruling contradicts the consensus among medical groups that such measures protect women’s lives.” The Texas bishops similarly said the ruling “puts women at grave risk” and said the purpose of the state regulations was to ensure women’s safety, noting: “their lives are just as precious as those of their children.” Dissenting votes in the case were from Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito Jr. Thomas wrote that the court’s decision “simultaneously transformed judicially created rights like the right to abortion into preferred constitutional rights, while disfavoring many of the rights actually enumerated in the Constitution.” He added that the Constitution “renounces the notion that some constitutional rights are more equal than others. ... A law either infringes a constitutional right, or not; there is no room for the judiciary to invent tolerable degrees of encroachment.” The U.S. Supreme Court’s use of the words “undue burden” echoes a phrase used in 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which it upheld provisions in Pennsylvania law requiring parental consent for minors, a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion, filing of detailed reports about each abortion and distribution of information about alternatives to abortion. It struck down a requirement that married women need to notify their husbands before having an abortion. In essence, the court said a state may enact abortion regulations that do not pose an “undue burden’’ on pregnant women. In the March 2 oral arguments in the Texas abortion clinics case the phrase was used to promote women’s access to available clinics. Opponents of the state regulations said the restrictions were aimed at stopping abortions, because they forced clinics to close, which in turn, they said, would put an undue burden on women seeking abortions who would have
to travel farther to find an available clinic. In the years since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, the court has shown “extreme hostility to regulation of abortion as a medical procedure,” said Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life committee, which submitted a friend of the court brief in the Texas case. She said the court turned a corner with its 1992 Casey decision by rejecting the idea of being “the country’s ex officio medical board” but it “reversed course” with the Texas decision by deciding it knew “better than representatives duly elected by the people of the United States.” Jocelyn Floyd, an attorney with the Thomas More Society, a national public interest law firm based in Chicago that also filed a friend of the court brief in this case, disagreed with the court’s view that the clinic regulations were “unnecessary.” Here in Illinois, she said: “We’ve seen all too well what disastrous consequences come from holding abortion providers to lower standards than other medical providers – contamination, dirty facilities, patient injury, and even death.” Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., a co-chairman of the congressional Pro-Life Caucus, similarly said the court’s decision “shields the abortion industry from accountability and minimal medical standards.” He said abortion providers “should not get a free pass on commonsense safety standards.” The Texas law requiring compliance by clinics and abortion providers had forced many of the state’s abortion clinics to close leaving seven clinics opened, primarily in major cities. After the June 27 ruling many of them are expected to reopen. American Life League president Judie Brown said: “This Supreme Court decision serves as a blaring wake-up call to the ‘mainstream’ pro-life movement that dinking and dithering over regulating the killing can never serve as a replacement for the fundamental battle that is not being fought -- the battle for the recognition that every innocent pre-born human being is a unique person from the moment of his biological beginning. “This case was about sensible laws designed to protect women in the wake of the Gosnell horrors; it should have been common ground for both sides of the issue,” said Maureen Ferguson, senior policy adviser for the Catholic Association Dr. Kermit Gosnell in May 2013 was found guilty of murder in the deaths of three babies born alive during abortions in his Philadelphia clinic. “This ruling won’t stop us from continuing to work to protect all American lives, and we won’t stop until we’ve won,” Ferguson said. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports legal abortion, 25 states have laws or policies that regulate abortion providers and clinics that perform surgical abortions that it claims “go beyond what is necessary to ensure patients’ safety.” Five states currently require providers of either medication-induced abortion or surgical abortion to have admitting privileges at a local hospital and another 10 require the provider to have either admitting privileges or another type of relationship with a hospital. In 2015, Arkansas adopted a new restriction that requires only providers of medication-induced abortions to have an agreement with a physician who has admitting privileges at a hospital; the law does not include a similar requirement for providers whose doctors do surgical abortions. The day after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling, it rejected an appeal to reinstate laws in Mississippi and Wisconsin that would place similar requirements on abortion doctors. Federal appeals courts in Chicago and New Orleans had previously ruled against the states. The court also denied an appeal of a Washington state rule requiring pharmacists to dispense Plan B or other emergency contraceptives despite their religious objections to doing so.