A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that Texas hospitals and doctors are not obligated to perform abortions under a longstanding national emergency-care law, dealing a blow to the White House’s strategy to ensure access to the procedure after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022.
No, it wasn’t. It was always just one bad decision away from crumbling, one that was always imminent because while it might be good policy, it was a bad decision from a legal standpoint. Any decision built on implied rights drawn from the shadows cast by other legal rights is inherently going to be on shaky ground, because determining what exactly those implied rights are is like reading tea leaves.
It doesn’t help that a lot of the arguments, positions and implied rights surrounding abortion seem to only apply in that context.