A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that Texas hospitals and doctors are not obligated to perform abortions under a longstanding national emergency-care law, dealing a blow to the White House’s strategy to ensure access to the procedure after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022.
The courts don’t routinely invent entirely new rights whole cloth. It’s much, much more common to make rulings on exactly how already established rights apply in new or untested scenarios. Roe is one of those exceptions. Roe was weak legally, even if it was good from a policy standpoint.