Share
Supreme Court Refuses To Review Kentucky Anti-Abortion Law That Was Upheld by Trump Judge
The Supreme Court refused to review a Kentucky law that compels abortion providers to insert a transvaginal probe, describe the fetus, point out its organs, and play the sound of its heartbeat. So the law stands.
Kentucky physicians are now legally obligated to penetrate many women seeking abortions with a transvaginal ultrasound and describe the fetus in extreme detail while playing its heartbeat.
This is how women’s reproductive rights will be whittled away - not in one fell swoop, but little by little and piece by piece.
The Kentucky law at issue is extraordinarily invasive. It requires abortion providers to perform an ultrasound, generally using a transvaginal probe for pregnancies of less than nine weeks, on all patients seeking to terminate their pregnancies. The provider must then describe the fetus in detailed terms, pointing out its organs, and play the sound of its heartbeat. Patients can only avoid this sound and description if they cover their ears and make noises to drown it out.
An abortion clinic sued to block the law, known as H.B. 2, alleging a violation of its doctors’ constitutional rights.
A federal district court agreed, but [in April 2019], a panel of judges upheld H.B. 2 by a 2–1 vote. [Judge] Bush essentially praised the law as an effort to “provide patients with information about the development of unborn life and alternatives to abortion.” (In fact, Bush refused to use the word “fetus”—outside of quotations from statutes and precedents—instead using the phrase “unborn life” every time.)
You will not be surprised to learn that this judge John Bush who upheld Kentucky's anti-abortion transvaginal probe law was appointed by Trump.
Before Trump nominated him to the federal bench, John K. Bush was perhaps best known as an anti-gay blogger who spread birther conspiracies. Now he is a judge on the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Bush was selected, in part, because of his conservative views on reproductive rights, including a belief that abortion is a tragedy on par with slavery. [In April 2019], he transformed those views into law, upholding Kentucky’s “informed consent” law in an opinion overflowing with charged anti-abortion rhetoric.
The plantiffs attempted to take the case to the Supreme Court who rejected hearing it. This is key: it takes only four justices to hear a case, so the four liberal ones could have put this case on the docket. But without Justice Kennedy, they apparently saw no chance of winning over a fifth justice to join them in striking down this onerous abortion regulation. So those four chose not to bring the case to the Supreme Court and give anti-women, anti-choice, hate movement an eventual 5-4 victory.
As Judge Bernice B. Donald pointed out in her furious dissent....
Multiple doctors and medical professionals testified that this requirement does nothing at all to help patients make any kind of decision. Instead, it subjects them to agony in their most vulnerable moments. Thus, Donald wrote, H.B. 2 does not regulate speech “as part of the practice of medicine.”
Instead, it coerces doctors to perform a gratuitous procedure while describing the fetus, “harm[ing] their patients” for “no medical purpose.”
And because Kentucky put forth “no evidence demonstrating that mandating the procedure set forth in H.B. 2” provides any medical benefit....
Again, Kentucky physicians are now legally obligated to penetrate many women seeking abortions with a transvaginal ultrasound and describe the fetus in extreme detail while playing its heartbeat.