The Ohio Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a state order to close Toledo’s only abortion clinic for failing to follow state law, and rejected a challenge from Cleveland’s Preterm clinic over the same law.
The court ruled 5-2 to overturn lower court rulings that said state restrictions on abortion clinics were unconstitutional, but the court did not rule on the constitutionality of the law.
The Department of Health revoked Capital Care Network’s license in 2014 because its hospital transfer agreement with the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor did not comply with the department’s 30-minute transport time standard.
Capital Care Network sued the state, arguing a 2013 law barring clinics from obtaining transfer agreements with a public hospital created an undue burden on women seeking abortions.
Two lower courts sided with Capital Care Network, concluding the regulation was an undue burden on a woman’s right to abortion access. Those courts also found the transfer agreement law, which was inserted into a wide-ranging state budget bill, violated the state constitution’s single-subject rule.
The state’s highest court did not examine the constitutional issues.
“Because [the department] had authority to revoke Capital Care’s license based on the failure to comply with the administrative rule requiring a written transfer agreement with a nearby hospital, it is not necessary to reach those constitutional issues,” Justice Terrence O’Donnell wrote in a majority opinion.
In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor wrote that Capital Care Network’s transfer agreement was rejected for violating the 2013 law, not the department’s administrative rules, and the court should therefore weigh the constitutional issues. Justice William O’Neill, the court’s sole Democrat who resigned Jan. 26, joined the dissent.
O’Connor wrote that there is no benefit to requiring transfer agreements because hospitals would accept emergency patients transferred regardless of whether there is an agreement in place.
In a separate case, the court found Preterm did not have standing to challenge the 2013 law because it did not prove it suffered or was threatened with a “direct and concrete injury” from the law.
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