Texas’ omnibus anti-abortion law made a stop Monday in a New Orleans federal appeals court, where a three-judge panel heard arguments on whether the state can require abortion-providing doctors to secure admitting privileges at local hospitals and severely restrict the prescription of medication abortions. The law is expected, eventually, to make its way to the Supreme Court.

Onlookers filled the wood-paneled courtroom for the hearing, wherein Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges Catharina Haynes, Jennifer Elrod, and Edith Jones questioned attorneys representing the State of Texas and, on the plaintiff’s side, the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), which has filed suit against the state along with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, Planned Parenthood, and a group of Texas abortion providers. Two of the judges, Haynes and Elrod, have already overturned a lower court’s injunction against parts of the law, allowing HB 2 to go into effect in November 2013.

“I think given that two of these judges were on the stay opinion, and let the admitting privileges requirement go into effect, we definitely have our work cut out for us,” CRR senior counsel Janet Crepps told Rewire after the hearing. Because arguments have already been made at length in briefs filed previously with the court, proceedings lasted about an hour, typical of federal appeals court hearings.

Plaintiffs argue that abortion providers, particularly in conservative areas of the state, will have great difficulty obtaining admitting privileges at hospitals within 30 miles of where they perform abortions, if they are able to at all. They also argue that the medication abortion restrictions, which require doctors to prescribe medication abortion pills according to 13-year-old Food and Drug Administration (FDA) protocols, ask doctors to ignore evidence-based improvements in the regimen, developed since the FDA labels were written.

In October, federal judge Lee Yeakel ruled that the admitting privileges provision did constitute an undue burden on abortion in Texas, but his injunction against the law was swiftly overruled by the Fifth Circuit, which stayed his injunction against the implementation of the law.

During the proceedings Monday morning, judges questioned the veracity of the work of the Texas Policy Evaluation Project (TxPEP), a University of Texas group studying the impact of abortion regulations in the state, which found that about 22,000 Texans will be denied access to abortions as a result of the admitting privileges mandate. State attorneys argued, however, that the court need not believe TxPEP’s findings in order to declare HB 2 constitutional, and that past precedent allows states to regulate abortion without regard to whether regulations are medically necessary.

Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell, arguing on behalf of the state, called TxPEP’s findings “untenable assumptions that have already been proven false,” and noted that some abortion providers have been able to secure admitting privileges. Mitchell said that the case is about “whether the obstacle [to abortion access] is proposed is substantial.”

Judge Edith Jones appeared to agree, noting that legal precedent decrees that “states may regulate the practice of medicine. This is the regulation of the practice of medicine.”

While four abortion providers in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Austin have been able to secure admitting privileges since November, both clinics in the state’s vast and rural Rio Grande Valley remain closed, and providers say demand has increased significantly at clinics that have remained open as many abortion-seeking Texans now travel hundreds of miles round-trip to urban areas for safe, legal procedures. Texans seeking abortions in the Valley face a ten-hour round-trip drive to San Antonio or a six-hour round-trip drive to Corpus Christi to obtain the procedure legally.

But the judges appeared largely unconcerned about HB 2’s effect on Valley residents, who are among the poorest in the country. Judge Edith Jones, who in 2012 upheld the state’s mandatory pre-abortion sonogram law and repeatedly referred to Texans who seek abortions as “mothers,” said during the hearing that the highway connecting the Rio Grande Valley to San Antonio is a “peculiarly flat and not congested highway.” And while judge Catharina Haynes conceded that while “HB 2 may be a problem in the Rio Grande Valley,” that didn’t necessarily apply to other areas of the state or to the wider constitutionality of the law.

Haynes also questioned the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ (ACOG) statement calling HB 2 medically unnecessary and burdensome, asking why, if ACOG’s group of thousands of OB-GYNs in Texas felt abortion was an essential procedure, more of them didn’t perform abortions themselves. If more of them didn’t sign on to perform the procedure, thereby reducing access to abortion, she said, “that is not a creature of HB 2’s making.”

CRR counsel Crepps noted during the hearing that many doctors are “rightfully afraid of violence and harassment that has been visited on doctors who provide abortion,” citing the assassination of Dr. George Tiller as an example. Jones replied, unconvinced, “And what did Dr. Gosnell do?” referencing the Philadelphia abortion provider convicted of first-degree murder in May 2013.

Judge Jones also took the opportunity to question the reliability of the New York Times‘ reporting on HB 2, saying that the newspaper had printed “patently false” information when it reported that about a third of Texas abortion providers had stopped providing procedures. In fact, at least 12 of about 30 existing providers have been forced to cease providing the procedures, even accounting for the four that have reopened after doctors obtained privileges.

Despite the tough questioning, Crepps told Rewire after the hearing that judges were “asking the right questions,” and said she’s “hoping that they are asking them because they truly have concerns about them and really want to know what the answer is, but you never know.”

Crepps said that she anticipates the court will issue an official ruling in a matter of weeks, at which point the parties will have the option to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Last week’s decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt was remarkable not just for what it did say—that two provisions in Texas’s omnibus anti-abortion law were unconstitutional—but for what it didn’t say, and who didn’t say it.

In the lead-up to the decision, many court watchers were deeply concerned that Justice Anthony Kennedy would side with the conservative wing of the court, and that his word about targeted restrictions of abortion providers would signal the death knell of reproductive rights. Although Kennedy came down on the winning side, his notable silence on the “dignity” of those affected by the law still speaks volumes about his apparent feelings on women’s autonomy. That’s because Kennedy’s obsession with human dignity, and where along the fault line of that human dignity various rights fall, has become a hallmark of his jurisprudence—except where reproductive rights are concerned.

His opinion on marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges, along with his prior opinions striking down sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas and the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor, assured us that he recognizes the fundamental human rights and dignity of LGBTQ persons.

On the other hand, as my colleague Jessica Mason Pieklo noted, his concern in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action about the dignity of the state, specifically the ballot initiative process, assured us that he is willing to sweep aside the dignity of those affected by Michigan’s affirmative action ban in favor of the “‘dignity’ of a ballot process steeped in racism.”

Meanwhile, in his majority opinion in June’s Fisher v. University of Texas, Kennedy upheld the constitutionality of the University of Texas’ affirmative action program, noting that it remained a challenge to this country’s education system “to reconcile the pursuit of diversity with the constitutional promise of equal treatment and dignity.”

It is apparent that where Kennedy is concerned, dignity is the alpha and the omega. But when it came to one of the most important reproductive rights cases in decades, he was silent.

This is not entirely surprising: For Kennedy, the dignity granted to pregnant women, as evidenced by his opinions in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Gonzales v. Carhart, has been steeped in gender-normative claptrap about abortion being a unique choice that has grave consequences for women, abortion providers’ souls, and the dignity of the fetus. And in Whole Woman’s Health, when Kennedy was given another chance to demonstrate to us that he does recognize the dignity of women as women, he froze.

He didn’t write the majority opinion. He didn’t write a concurring opinion. He permitted Justice Stephen Breyer to base the most important articulation of abortion rights in decades on data. There was not so much as a callback to Kennedy’s flowery articulation of dignity in Casey, where he wrote that “personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing, and education” are matters “involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy.” (While Casey was a plurality opinion, various Court historians have pointed out that Kennedy himself wrote the above-quoted language.)

Of course, that dignity outlined in Casey is grounded in gender paternalism: Abortion, Kennedy continued, “is an act fraught with consequences for others: for the woman who must live with the implications of her decision; for the persons who perform and assist in the procedures for the spouse, family, and society which must confront the knowledge that these procedures exist, procedures some deem nothing short of an act of violence against innocent human life; and, depending on one’s beliefs, for the life or potential life that is aborted.” Later, in Gonzales, Kennedy said that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban “expresses respect for the dignity of human life,” with nothing about the dignity of the women affected by the ban.

And this time around, Kennedy’s silence in Whole Woman’s Health may have had to do with the facts of the case: Texas claimed that the provisions advanced public health and safety, and Whole Woman’s Health’s attorneys set about proving that claim to be false. Whole Woman’s Health was the sort of data-driven decision that did not strictly need excessive language about personal dignity and autonomy. As Breyer wrote, it was a simple matter of Texas advancing a reason for passing the restrictions without offering any proof: “We have found nothing in Texas’ record evidence that shows that, compared to prior law, the new law advanced Texas’ legitimate interest in protecting women’s health.”

In Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s two-page concurrence, she succinctly put it, “Many medical procedures, including childbirth, are far more dangerous to patients, yet are not subject to ambulatory-surgical-center or hospital admitting-privileges requirements.”

“Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers laws like H.B. 2 that ‘do little or nothing for health, but rather strew impediments to abortion,’ cannot survive judicial inspection,” she continued, hammering the point home.

So by silently signing on to the majority opinion, Kennedy may simply have been expressing that he wasn’t going to fall for the State of Texas’ efforts to undermine Casey’s undue burden standard through a mixture of half-truths about advancing public health and weak evidence supporting that claim.

Still, Kennedy had a perfect opportunity to complete the circle on his dignity jurisprudence and take it to its logical conclusion: that women, like everyone else, are individuals worthy of their own autonomy and rights. But he didn’t—whether due to his Catholic faith, a deep aversion to abortion in general, or because, as David S. Cohen aptly put it, “[i]n Justice Kennedy’s gendered world, a woman needs … state protection because a true mother—an ideal mother—would not kill her child.”

As I wrote last year in the wake of Kennedy’s majority opinion in Obergefell, “according to [Kennedy’s] perverse simulacrum of dignity, abortion rights usurp the dignity of motherhood (which is the only dignity that matters when it comes to women) insofar as it prevents women from fulfilling their rightful roles as mothers and caregivers. Women have an innate need to nurture, so the argument goes, and abortion undermines that right.”

This version of dignity fits neatly into Kennedy’s “gendered world.” But falls short when compared to jurists internationally,  who have pointed out that dignity plays a central role in reproductive rights jurisprudence.

In Casey itself, for example, retired Justice John Paul Stevens—who, perhaps not coincidentally, attended the announcement of the Whole Woman’s Health decision at the Supreme Court—wrote that whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is a “matter of conscience,” and that “[t]he authority to make such traumatic and yet empowering decisions is an element of basic human dignity.”

And in a 1988 landmark decision from the Supreme Court of Canada, Justice Bertha Wilson indicated in her concurring opinion that “respect for human dignity” was key to the discussion of access to abortion because “the right to make fundamental personal decision without interference from the state” was central to human dignity and any reading of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms 1982, which is essentially Canada’s Bill of Rights.

The case was R. v. Morgentaler, in which the Supreme Court of Canada found that a provision in the criminal code that required abortions to be performed only at an accredited hospital with the proper certification of approval from the hospital’s therapeutic abortion committee violated the Canadian Constitution. (Therapeutic abortion committees were almost always comprised of men who would decide whether an abortion fit within the exception to the criminal offense of performing an abortion.)

In other countries, too, “human dignity” has been a key component in discussion about abortion rights. The German Federal Constitutional Court explicitly recognized that access to abortion was required by “the human dignity of the pregnant woman, her… right to life and physical integrity, and her right of personality.” The Supreme Court of Brazil relied on the notion of human dignity to explain that requiring a person to carry an anencephalic fetus to term caused “violence to human dignity.” The Colombian Constitutional Court relied upon concerns about human dignity to strike down abortion prohibition in instances where the pregnancy is the result of rape, involves a nonviable fetus, or a threat to the woman’s life or health.

Certainly, abortion rights are still severely restricted in some of the above-mentioned countries, and elsewhere throughout the world. Nevertheless, there is strong national and international precedent for locating abortion rights in the square of human dignity.

And where else would they be located? If dignity is all about permitting people to make decisions of fundamental personal importance, and it turns out, as it did with Texas, that politicians have thrown “women’s health and safety” smoke pellets to obscure the true purpose of laws like HB 2—to ban abortion entirely—where’s the dignity in that?

Perhaps I’m being too grumpy. Perhaps I should just take the win—and it is an important win that will shape abortion rights for a generation—and shut my trap. But I want more from Kennedy. I want him to demonstrate that he’s not a hopelessly patriarchal figure who has icky feelings when it comes to abortion. I want him to recognize that some women have abortions and it’s not the worst decision they’ve ever made or the worst thing that ever happened to him. I want him to recognize that women are people who deserve dignity irrespective of their choices regarding whether and when to become a mother. And, ultimately, I want him to write about a woman’s right to choose using the same flowery language that he uses to discuss LGBTQ rights and the dignity of LGBTQ people.  He could have done so here.

Forcing the closure of clinics based on empty promises of advancing public health is an affront to the basic dignity of women. Not only do such lies—and they are lies, as evidenced by the myriad anti-choice Texan politicians who have come right out and said that passing HB 2 was about closing clinics and making abortion inaccessible—operate to deprive women of the dignity to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term, they also presume that the American public is too stupid to truly grasp what’s going on.

And that is quintessentially undignified.

The Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit Friday in federal district court challenging abortion restrictions passed by Louisiana lawmakers this year.

Despite facing a budget crisis, lawmakers passed seven laws that restricted access to reproductive health care, including abortion services, which the Center for Reproductive Rights claims “individually, and cumulatively” unduly restrict the “constitutional right to abortion.”

Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement that the laws collectively create a “web of red tape” that restrict women’s ability to access reproductive health care.

“Louisiana politicians are trying to do what the U.S. Supreme Court just ruled decisively they cannot, burying women’s right to safe and legal abortion under an avalanche of unjustified and burdensome restrictions,” Northup said.

The lawsuit comes in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision that struck down two provisions of Texas’ omnibus anti-choice law known as HB 2.

Stephen Griffin, a constitutional law professor at Tulane University, told the Times-Picayune that the Supreme Court’s ruling on HB 2 was a “strong rebuke” of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld the law.

“I think the Louisiana law and any similar laws are going to be struck down,” Griffin said. “[Justice Ruth Bader] Ginsburg filed a reminder to courts that the five-member majority is going to be looking very skeptically at targeted regulation of abortion providers.”

Among the laws challenged is a law similar to Texas’ HB 2.

HB 488 requires that physicians providing abortion care be licensed to practice medicine in Louisiana and that they be board-certified or board-eligible in obstetrics and gynecology or family medicine. Previously, the law required that a physician be licensed to practice medicine in Louisiana and be currently enrolled in or have completed a residency in obstetrics and gynecology or family medicine.

The bill was sponsored by Rep. Katrina Jackson (D-Monroe), who in 2014 authored the state’s Texas-style admitting privileges law. The law is the subject of another Center for Reproductive Rights lawsuit, and is currently blocked by a Supreme Court decision.

Ben Clapper, executive director of Louisiana Right to Life, told the Times-Picayune that the Supreme Court’s ruling on HB 2 “does not predict a favorable forecast” for a similar law passed in Louisiana.

“The sad thing here as we see it is that these judges are replacing the elected officials and the legislative process as the determiner of what is medically important or not,” Clapper said. “We don’t believe that’s how it should be.”

Among the other laws challenged include those that restrict abortion procedures, require a waiting period before an abortion, impose restrictions on the handling of fetal tissue, and ban public funding for organizations that provide abortion services.

HB 1081 targets a procedure known as dilation and evacuation (D and E), which is frequently used during second-trimester abortions. A growing number of states have passed laws to ban the procedure, while state courts have blocked such measures passed by GOP lawmakers in Oklahoma and Kansas.

HB 386 tripled the state’s waiting period for a pregnant patient seeking an abortion from 24 hours to 72 hours.

HB 1019 prohibits a person from intentionally performing or attempting to perform an abortion with knowledge that the pregnant patient is seeking the abortion solely because the “unborn child” has been diagnosed with either a genetic abnormality or a potential for a genetic abnormality.

HB 815 prohibits the buying, selling, and any other transfer of the “intact body of a human embryo or fetus” obtained from an induced abortion. The law also prohibits the buying, selling, and any other transfer of “organs, tissues, or cells obtained from a human embryo or fetus whose death was knowingly caused by an induced abortion.”

In addition, it “require[s] burial or cremation of remains resulting from abortion,” which acts as a de facto medication abortion ban, since an embryo miscarried at home, through medication abortion, cannot in practice be buried or cremated.

SB 33, similar to HB 815, prohibits the sale, receipt, and transport of fetal organs and body parts obtained from an induced abortion. Any person who violates this provision would be sentenced to a term of imprisonment at hard labor between ten to 50 years, at least ten years of which must be served without benefit of probation or suspension of sentence, and may, in addition, be required to pay a fine of not more than $50,000.

HB 606 prohibits entities that perform abortions from receiving public funding, unless the abortion was necessary to save the life of the pregnant patient, the pregnancy was a result of incest or rape, or the pregnancy was diagnosed as “medically futile.”

Most of the bills were passed with significant bipartisan support, and were signed into law by Gov. John Bel Edwards (D). Each of the laws is set to take effect on August 1. 

”We are asking the district court to immediately block these unconstitutional laws,” Northup said.