Supreme Court Rejects North Carolina’s Appeal on Pre-Abortion Ultrasounds/NYT

Yay! Good news for a change.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/us/politics/supreme-court-rejects-north-carolinas-appeal-on-pre-abortion-ultrasounds.html?_r=0


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. “This compelled speech, even though it is a regulation of the medical profession, is ideological in intent and in kind.”

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