N.C. law deserves fate court gave Oklahoma’s

Editorial by Charlotte Observer, November 18, 2013.

North Carolina lawmakers arrogantly turned a deaf ear this summer to thousands of women and others protesting abortion laws severely limiting access to clinics and invading women’s privacy. Maybe the U.S. Supreme Court can get their attention.

Last week, the high court let stand a lower court's ruling in Oklahoma striking down a major abortion regulation in that state. The law is very similar to one North Carolina passed in 2011 and that a federal judge temporarily blocked soon after.

Both the Oklahoma and N.C. laws require women seeking an abortion to first undergo an ultrasound. They also require that doctors show the ultrasound image to the patient and describe in detail what it shows. And, as in N.C., women could look away and not listen to the spiel but the doctor was required to give it.

Experts say last week’s ruling and another pro-choice ruling a week earlier signal that high court justices are skeptical of state actions that severely limit access to a legal procedure, put an unfair burden on women and infringe on their rights.

The nine justices made no comment on their decisions, but we think they should be warnings to this state and others. Such laws are inappropriate and dangerous intrusions into the relationship between women and their physicians. They serve no useful purpose other than to shame the women and attempt to manipulate them into foregoing the procedure.

That was in essence what Center for Reproductive Rights Stephanie Toti told the high court justices in her brief: “This is no garden-variety ‘informed consent’ law. It compels women to undergo an invasive medical examination and listen to a state-scripted narrative even if they object.” Added Nancy Northrup, president of the Center: “A woman’s personal, private medical decisions should be made in consultation with the health care professionals she trusts, without interference from politicians who presume to know better.”

This editorial board has said the same in reference to the N.C. law.

The Oklahoma law, it should be noted, went a step further than N.C.’s by requiring that physicians use a vaginally inserted transducer for the ultrasound to display the fetus more clearly. N.C. doesn’t explicitly require that. But observers say to conform with the law’s mandate that women be shown an image of the fetus and be able to hear the fetal heartbeat would require using a trans-vaginal probe in many if not most procedures.

The Supreme Court isn’t likely done with abortion laws that are similar to North Carolina’s. The justices are expected to take up an Arizona case where lawmakers reduced the time frame for getting an abortion from 24 weeks to 20 weeks. North Carolina and 10 other states have done the same. The 24 weeks was established following the Roe v. Wade case.

Before that will likely be a federal court ruling on N.C.’s misguided ultrasound law. In August, U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagles heard arguments for and against it. We don’t know whether Eagles will make her injunction permanent or not. But we think she was headed in the right direction when she suspended the law in 2011. She said then that N.C. officials hadn’t provided evidence to support their assertions that the law would promote childbirth, and she rightly ridiculed the notion that the provision would protect pregnant women from distress, saying that forcing an ultrasound on them would “harm the psychological health of the very group the state purports to protect.”

That’s still true. We hope she gives this bad law the death Oklahoma’s got.