New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from North Carolina officials seeking to revive a state law that had required doctors to perform ultrasounds, display the resulting sonograms and describe the fetuses to women seeking abortions.

The Supreme Court’s one-sentence order, as is the custom, gave no reasons. Justice Antonin Scalia noted a dissent, also without saying why.

The order left in place an appeals court ruling that had held the law unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment.

“The state cannot commandeer the doctor-patient relationship to compel a physician to express its preference to the patient,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote in December for a unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va.

Other federal appeals courts upheld similar laws from Texas and South Dakota. Such disagreements among appeals courts often lead to Supreme Court review.

In urging the Supreme Court to hear the North Carolina case, Walker-McGill v. Stuart, No. 14-1172, the state’s attorney general, Roy Cooper, told the justices that the law is “perfectly consistent with the First Amendment, as a reasonable regulation of medical practice.”

According to Mr. Cooper, 24 states require an ultrasound to be performed or offered before the performance of an abortion. “Five states have enacted essentially the same display-and-describe requirement at issue in this case,” he wrote, “and an additional four states require a physician to provide a simultaneous explanation of anultrasound image upon a woman’s request.”

Monday’s development, which set no precedent, did not affect the validity of any law aside from North Carolina’s.

The health care providers who challenged the North Carolina law urged the justices to turn down the state’s appeal. “The state requires physicians to recite the state’s message even when the patient physically avoids seeing or hearing it,” their brief said. “That is farce, not informed consent, and it demonstrates beyond any doubt that the requirement is an impermissible attempt to use physicians to spread the state’s ideological message.”

Abortion rights groups welcomed the Supreme Court’s action. “This misguided law would have inserted politics and bad medicine into every exam room in North Carolina,” Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Cooper declined to comment. Tami Fitzgerald, the executive director of the North Carolina Values Coalition, said in a statement that the law was modest and valuable. “In any other medical procedure,” she said, “doctors would have a duty to disclose all of the relevant information.”

The Supreme Court is expected to act soon in cases concerning more sweeping challenges to abortion regulations in cases from Mississippi andTexas.