New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court appeared splintered on Wednesday during arguments in a major abortion case that could affect the lives of millions of American women.

The court’s four liberal justices were adamant that restrictions imposed by a Texas law on the state’s abortion providers served no medical purpose and could not pass constitutional muster. But two of the more conservative justices said there was little evidence that abortion clinics in Texas had closed or would close because of the law.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who almost certainly holds the crucial vote, said it would help to know how many abortions could be performed in clinics if the law were allowed to become fully effective, and mused that it might be useful to return the case to the lower courts to develop more evidence.

The practical short-term consequences of Justice Kennedy’s suggestion would turn on what the Supreme Court does with a stay it issued in June, in which, by a 5-to-4 vote — with Justice Kennedy joining the court’s liberal wing — it temporarily blocked an appeals court’s ruling largely upholding the Texas law. Should the stay be lifted while the case proceeds, some 10 clinics might be forced to close in the meantime.

Although Justice Antonin Scalia’s death last month may have muted the prospect of truly bold action in the case, even a 4-to-4 tie would have enormous consequences because it would leave in place the appeals court decision, which challengers say could drive down the number of abortion clinics in Texas to about 10 from roughly 40. On the other hand, Justice Scalia’s death means the court is very unlikely to weaken constitutional standards affecting abortion in the rest of the nation, as the four liberal justices would not go along.

The case, one of the most consequential on the docket this term, concerns two parts of the Texas law, which was passed by the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature in July 2013. One part requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, while the other requires all abortion clinics in the state to meet the standards for “ambulatory surgical centers.”

Clinics challenging the law say it has already caused about half of the state’s 41 abortion clinics to close. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., arguing in support of the clinics, said the contested provisions were “much more extreme than those of any abortion law that this court has considered” since 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which held that states were not permitted to place undue burdens on the constitutional right to an abortion before the fetus was viable. Undue burdens, it said, included “unnecessary health regulations” that presented a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion.

The Texas law, Mr. Verrilli told the court, “closes most abortion facilities in the state, puts extreme stress on the few facilities that remain open, and exponentially increases the obstacles confronting women who seek abortions in the state.”

Texas’ solicitor general, Scott A. Keller, painted a different picture. “Abortion is legal and accessible in Texas,” he said, adding that “all the Texas metropolitan areas that have abortion clinics today will have open clinics” if the court upheld the law.

All of the justices agreed on Wednesday that the law had to fall if it imposed the “undue burden” established in Casey. But there was a dispute over how to apply that test.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. suggested that there were two separate questions in the case: whether Texas had presented a plausible justification for the law, and whether it had created an unconstitutional burden on women seeking abortions.

Justice Kennedy, however, said the two questions were related. “The undue burden test is weighed against what the state’s interest is,” he said. The weaker the state’s justification for the law, he suggested, the greater the burden it imposes.

Justice Kennedy helped fashion the undue burden test in the Casey decision, and his rigorous formulation of the test on Wednesday, even as part of his questioning, pleased abortion rights groups. The groups, as well as major medical associations, say the Texas law, which lawmakers said they had passed to protect women’s health, does no such thing.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said there was no way to tell that the law had caused the clinics to close. “There is very little specific evidence in the record in this case with respect to why any particular clinic closed,” he told Stephanie Toti, a lawyer for the clinics. By way of example, he said that one clinic might have closed because of funding cuts unrelated to the 2013 law.

Ms. Toti responded that the timing of the closings was telling because the number of clinics had been stable in the five years before the law came into force. Around the time of its enactment, she said, “more than 20 clinics closed within a very short period of time.”

Justice Elena Kagan said it was clear that the part of the law requiring clinics to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers would force some clinics to close, because it had briefly been in place.

“It’s almost like the perfect controlled experiment as to the effect of the law, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s like you put the law into effect, 12 clinics closed. You take the law out of effect, they reopen.”

Some justices wanted to know the answer to a more general question: Would the remaining Texas clinics, whatever their number, have the capacity to handle the 65,000 to 70,000 abortions performed annually in the state in recent years?

Mr. Verrilli said the clinics that would remain open under the law performed about 14,000 abortions annually.

Justice Kennedy did the math. “About 20 percent,” he said.

But Mr. Keller, the lawyer for Texas, said a single Houston clinic could perform 9,000 abortions a year. Using that number, he said, “it does not stretch credulity to believe that those remaining facilities would suffice to meet the demand for abortions.”

Justice Kennedy also asked whether the law encouraged women to seek surgical abortions rather than ones induced by drugs.

“Because my reading indicated that medical abortions are up nationwide, but down significantly in Texas,” he said, in a tone that suggested that this was a problem. “This may not be medically wise.”

Justice Kagan asked a series of questions about how far women had to travel to obtain an abortion, rattling off data. She said 900,000 Texas women now lived farther than 150 miles from an abortion provider, and 750,000 lived farther than 200 miles. In 2012, she said, fewer than 100,000 Texas women lived over 150 miles from a provider, and only 10,000 lived more than 200 miles away.

“So we’re going from, like, 10,000 to three-quarters of a million living more than 200 miles away,” she said.

That has consequences, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said, arguing that more women would now die of complications from self-induced abortions.

Justice Clarence Thomas, reverting to form, said nothing.

The Supreme Court’s decision will probably arrive in late June, as the presidential campaign enters its final stretch, thrusting the divisive issue of abortion to the forefront of public debate.