Forty-two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled, in a 7-2 decision, that blanket bans on abortion violated the implied right to privacy guaranteed in the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause in the landmark case of Roe v. Wade (1972). The Court reaffirmed the constitutional right to abortion in its 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey ruling, although a plurality of the judges also ruled that some “common-sense” limits, like 24-hour waiting periods and informed consent, did not violate the right to abortion.

On Friday, Nov. 13, the Supreme Court announced that it will hear arguments Whole Women’s Health v. Cole this year. A decision is expected in June 2016. Whole Women’s Health deals with Texas’s contentious House Bill 2, which first came to prominence in June 2013, when then State Senator Wendy Davis filibustered legislation for 11 hours to temporarily block the legislation from passing. HB2, which passed during an emergency session called only to debate the bill, would require abortion clinics to have the same building regulations as ambulatory surgical centers, and that any doctor who may perform abortions have admitting privileges to at least one hospital in a thirty-mile radius. Any clinics that did not comply would be shut down. Prior to HB2’s passage, there were 40 abortion clinics in Texas; if the restrictions are allowed to go fully into effect, there will only be 7 clinics in a nearly 300,000 square mile state, about the same size as Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, Switzerland and Austria combined. There would be no clinics west of San Antonio, a city smack in the state’s center, nothing north of Dallas or south of Houston.

On first glance, these restrictions — waiting periods, informed and parental consent laws, mandatory counseling, strict building regulations and admitting privileges — seem reasonable. However, upon further examination, these regulations do not actually do anything to further protect women’s safety but are just burdensome impositions that make it harder for women, especially low-income and rural women — 42 percent of women who receive abortions live below the poverty line, according to the Guttmacher Institute — to receive the medical care that they might need. Over two million Texans can be classified as “rural” according to a 2014 Texas Monthly article about demographic shifts in the state.

In reality, states that have passed mandatory counseling and waiting period laws often present women with biased information from religious-affiliated and non-medically regulated crisis pregnancy centers — or even information that is medically inaccurate. Arizona, despite unified protest from the medical community, recently passed a law that would require doctors to tell women that medical abortions can be reversed, something that is patently false. 

There is not even evidence to show that women, whether they receive mandated counseling or not, regret their decision to end a pregnancy. A study carried out by the University of San Francisco’s School of Medicine found that in a group of nearly 700 women from all ethnic groups, education levels and income brackets, many of whom did have strong emotions in the process of deciding to get an abortion, over 95 percent of those surveyed did not ultimately regret the decision to have an abortion.

The new onerous restrictions from Texas are not in the interest of women’s safety but an excuse to shut down as many clinics as possible without having the courts rule against them. This desire to prevent women from accessing a constitutional right to abortion is purely ideological, with no basis in medical facts. But some judges have already seen the law for what it is: an attempt to end abortion access in the state of Texas. Federal judge Lee Yeakel, who struck down parts of HB 2 in August, pointed out that “there is no rational relationship between improved patient outcomes and hospital admitting privileges” and that in a large state like Texas, some clinics simply do not have a hospital within a 30-mile radius of them. 

Judge Yeakel effectively ruled that Texas cannot make abortion inaccessible to large geographical areas in the state and that doing so would violate Roe, which ruled that states cannot prevent women from accessing abortion.

Requiring abortion clinics to meet the same architecture standards as ambulatory surgical centers is equally ridiculous. In Texas, before HB2 went into effect, around a quarter of clinics offered surgical abortions, according to Fund Texas Choice, but any clinics, even the ones that did not even offer surgery as an option, would be required to meet surgical standards that did not even apply to them. Yerkel pointed out that closing down clinics that only offer medical abortions simply because they do not have full surgical facilities — which they would have no use for — would actually be more detrimental to women’s health, because women would have to wait longer to receive the care that they need.

If the Supreme Court does rule to uphold HB2, it will set a dangerous precedent. It would become acceptable to pass stringent and medically unnecessary laws that make abortion out of reach for women who are poor, women who live in rural areas, women who cannot afford to travel for hours or take enough time off work to abide by strict waiting periods. When questioned about most of western and southern Texas not having any available clinics, the state pointed out that women could just travel to New Mexico or Arizona to obtain abortions. 

Upholding HB2 would create a new precedent where it is acceptable for states to make it next to impossible for a woman to receive abortion care in her home state without banning the practice outright, a precedent that would penalize women based simply on where they might live.

I believe in protecting women’s safety. I also believe that abortion should be accessible to anyone who may need it, no questions asked, no justification needed. I do not believe that laws like HB2 keep women safe; after all, if they did, the medical community would be in support of them, which is not the case — no good doctor would be excited to be required to tell patients things that are not true — like that medical abortions are reversible or that abortion can cause cancer, something that is simply not true. 

Rather, I see these laws, laws that the Supreme Court will most likely uphold, as nothing more than thinly-veiled attempts to return back to the pre-Roe era, and I do not want to go back to that.