This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
A warning to the Utah Legislature: The U.S. Supreme Court is on the lookout for politicians playing doctor. And it is ready, willing and able to strike down phony anti-choice legislation masquerading as medicine.
That mattered in Texas, where the Legislature in 2013 passed a bill that purported to protect pregnant women seeking abortion from medical complications but was, clearly, a smokescreen for lawmakers' attempts to place abortion services out of reach for large numbers of Texas women.
The court Monday struck down those limits, by a 5-3 majority that included the key swing justice, Anthony Kennedy.
That should matter in Utah, where the Legislature in 2016 passed Senate Bill 234, which claims to protect a fetus from suffering pain during a legal abortion but is clearly designed to make it all but impossible for women to exercise their constitutional rights after a pregnancy has reached 20 weeks.
A legal challenge would be a long, expensive and, for some individuals, emotionally wrenching. But the writing on the wall strongly suggests that the Utah law would, and should, fall as well because it, too, creates what the courts rightly call an "undue burden" for women seeking an abortion.
Texas pretended that it wasn't out to limit abortion at all when it passed a series of regulations for abortion providers, including a rule that they be up to the much more stringent — and expensive — standards of ambulatory surgical centers.
Such rules, the court found, meant that the number of abortion clinics in a state of 27 million people fell from more than 40 to less than 10. The court, citing a long list of expert witnesses and briefs, held that the rules were not medically necessary or even beneficial. That targeting abortion providers while ignoring more dangerous procedures that include childbirth, colonoscopies and dental surgery was a bald-faced attempt to stop abortion, not protect women.
The Utah law, if anything, is a much more egregious example of politicians making up a flimsy medical excuse as cover for an unconstitutional anti-choice action.
Not only is the notion that fetuses at that stage of development feel pain an unsupported claim, the fact is that medical science doesn't know how to administer an anesthetic to a fetus without also drugging — and endangering — the mother.
Sponsors of the bill ignored objections from real doctors, making no secret of the fact that their preference would be to ban abortion but that the courts would never allow it.
After this week's ruling, it should be clear that the judiciary should soon be blocking Utah's anti-abortion ploy. It's just a matter of how many taxpayers dollars will be used up in the process.