On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision held unconstitutional a Louisiana law that required abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles from where they perform the procedure, which is a requirement Louisiana applies to physicians performing procedures at ambulatory surgical centers. Justice Stephen Breyer’s opinion, speaking for a plurality of the Court, noted that the Louisiana statute was “almost word for word identical” to a Texas statute it had held unconstitutional in 2016.

The case was closely watched as it was the Court’s first abortion since the confirmation of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. However, it was Chief Justice John Roberts who provided the fifth vote. Roberts did not join with Breyer’s reasoning, but wrote a concurring opinion stating that the law before them was not “sufficiently different” from the Texas case to “warrant a different outcome.”

In his dissenting opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas clearly laid out the problem with the Court’s abortion decisions, “The Constitution does not constrain the States’ ability to regulate or even prohibit abortion. This Court created the right to abortion based on an amorphous, unwritten right to privacy, which it grounded in the ‘legal fiction’ of substantive due process.”

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council said, “Keeping women safe isn't a question of abortion. It's a matter of humanity. And yet, as they've done with marriage, gender, abortion, and health care, five unelected people are making it impossible for leaders to run their states the way voters see fit.”