For U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, the moment of truth on abortion is coming.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear its first abortion case since Roberts became the pivotal vote on the issue. Four years after invalidating a Texas law requiring clinic doctors to have hospital admitting privileges, the court will consider whether to switch directions and uphold a similar law in Louisiana.
The argument will test Roberts’s appetite for rolling back abortion-rights precedents and could foreshadow a fight over the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. The justices will rule by the end of June, potentially making abortion and the court itself central issues in the November election. President Donald Trump’s administration is supporting the Louisiana law.
Opponents say the law would leave the state with only one clinic, in New Orleans, and just one abortion doctor to serve the 10,000 women who seek to end a pregnancy every year in the state.
“Roe becomes meaningless if there is no access to abortion,” said Kathaleen Pittman, director of the Hope Medical Group for Women, a Shreveport clinic that says it would have to close if the measure took effect. “These women that we work with now do not have the means to travel, to fly out of state, to go to other places for their care.”
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