WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned away an emergency application asking it to block a Texas law that requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.
The decision was effectively 5 to 4 and split along ideological lines.
The effect of the ruling, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote for the four dissenters, was to leave 24 counties in the Rio Grande Valley without abortion clinics. “It may,” he added, “substantially reduce access to safe abortions elsewhere in Texas.”
Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., wrote that the challengers to the law had not met a heavy procedural burden in asking the Supreme Court to alter an appeals court’s provisional decision to let the law go into effect while it considers an appeal.
“Reasonable minds can perhaps disagree about whether the court of appeals should have granted a stay in this case,” Justice Scalia wrote. “But there is no doubt that the applicants have not carried their heavy burden of showing that doing so was a clear violation of accepted legal standards — which do not include a special ‘status quo’ standard for laws affecting abortion.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy also presumably voted to reject the application and allow the law to go into effect but did not join Justice Scalia’s opinion.
Abortion rights groups and clinics said the law served no medical purpose and was forcing a third of the state’s 36 abortion clinics to stop performing the procedure, preventing some 20,000 women a year from access to safe abortions.
State officials told the court that the law, which requires that doctors have hospital admitting privileges within 30 miles of where they perform abortions, protects public health by “fostering a woman’s ability to seek consultation and treatment for complications directly from her physician.”
The officials added that the impact of the law was modest, saying that more than 90 percent of women seeking abortions in the state will still live within 100 miles of an abortion clinic.
The law had been temporarily stalled when Wendy Davis, a Democratic state senator, mounted an 11-hour filibuster in the Republican-controlled Legislature. Ms. Davis is now running for governor.
The case may yet reach the justices. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, provisionally allowed the law to go into effect last month. The appeals court will hear arguments in the case in January, and either side may appeal its decision to the Supreme Court.
Justice Breyer wrote that the validity of the Texas law “is a difficult question.” He added that he expected the Supreme Court to agree to hear an appeal regardless of how the appeals court rules.
The appeals court’s ruling stayed one from Judge Lee Yeakel, a federal district judge in Austin, who had blocked the law. Judge Yeakel said the law’s “admitting-privileges provision is without a rational basis and places a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus.”
Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, said Judge Yeakel’s ruling should have been allowed to stand while the appeal was considered.
At bottom, the two sides in Tuesday’s ruling differed about what it means to maintain the status quo while a case proceeds through the courts. Justice Scalia said that the status quo is upheld and federalism principles are vindicated when validly enacted state laws are allowed to stand while their constitutionality is definitively resolved.
Justice Breyer focused on the practical consequences for women in Texas seeking abortions.
“I would maintain the status quo” of allowing clinics in Texas to provide abortions, he wrote, “while the lower courts consider this difficult, sensitive and controversial legal matter.”
“The longer a given facility remains closed,” Justice Breyer wrote, “the less likely it is ever to reopen even if the admitting privileges requirement is ultimately held unconstitutional.”