The Abortion Case Making Its Way To The Supreme Court Is A Stealth Attack On Your Reproductive Rights

Oklahoma’s highest court has set the stage for a potential Supreme Court showdown over abortion; specifically, over the abortion pill, which allows women to terminate an early pregnancy without having a surgical procedure. The complicated case, Cline v. Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice, could come before the Roberts court this term. But you’ve probably never heard of it — and that’s exactly how the anti-choice community wants to keep it.

Ultimately, no matter what happens with the Supreme Court, this case illustrates a major prong in the anti-choice community’s state-level strategy. Abortion opponents aren’t necessarily attacking abortion directly anymore. Instead, they’re slipping their restrictions under the radar, quietly imposing sweeping bans on abortion without explicitly outlawing the procedure.

In order to understand this complex legal challenge, it’s important to back up a little. The case in question concerns a 2011 Oklahoma state law restricting the way that doctors are allowed to administer abortion-inducing medication. That law forces doctors to follow the FDA’s outdated protocol for the abortion pill, ignoring the fact that medical standards have evolved and doctors don’t think that’s the best practice for their patients anymore. After reproductive rights groups sued to overturn the medically unnecessary policy, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court ruled in their favor, deciding that the restriction on medication abortion was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court asked Oklahoma’s court to provide more details about why exactly it chose to strike down the law.

This week, the state complied. And the information that Oklahoma provided gives some insight into one of the most successful tactics that the anti-choice community currently has.

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Full article here: http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/10/30/2858291/supreme-court-abortion-pill-stealth/