The Supreme Court is adding an abortion case to its busy election-year docket. The justices have agreed to take up a Louisiana law that could leave the state with just one clinic.
The justices won’t hear arguments until the winter. A decision is likely to come by the end of June.
The high court indicated last February it would take a thorough look at the case when it agreed to block a law requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.
The Louisiana law is virtually identical to a Texas law that the Supreme Court struck down in 2016. That decision came when Justice Anthony Kennedy was on the bench and before President Donald Trump’s two high court picks, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, joined the court.
The Supreme Court decision comes three days after Planned Parenthood announced the building of a mega-clinic in southern Illinois — just 13 miles away from Missouri’s last remaining abortion clinic, a facility in St. Louis that is fighting to keep its license.
With a newly conservative Supreme Court, access to abortion has come under fire across the South and Midwest, where state lawmakers have raced to pass laws that ban the procedure in hopes of overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that effectively legalized the procedure nationwide.
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