Supreme Court declines to hear case challenging parental consent for abortion

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court declined Thursday to review a Montana law that requires people under 18 to seek parental consent before obtaining an abortion, leaving in place a state court ruling that struck the law down.

Montana’s law, enacted in 2013, prohibits a doctor from providing an abortion to a patient under 18 without notarized written consent from a parent.

The state’s highest court had concluded that the law violated the Montana state constitution, which includes broader protections for abortion than the US Constitution.

The Supreme Court did not explain its reasoning, but conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas wrote a short statement asserting that technical problems with the case made it a “poor vehicle” for deciding the questions over such laws and that it was “especially important” that the denial not be read as a “rejection of the argument” the appeal raised.

“Parents’ authority extends to decisions about medical care,” Montana officials told the Supreme Court in their appeal, filed in January. “Because parents are presumed to act in their child’s best interest, the state may not ‘inject itself into the private realm of the family [and] question the ability of that parent to make the best decisions concerning the rearing of [their] children’ unless it has a reason to believe the parent is unfit.”

Planned Parenthood, which sued over the law, argued that the case is primarily about the state constitution.

Montana officials “seem to suggest that the existence of parental rights is the beginning and end of the inquiry – that so long as there is a federal due process right of parents to participate in decisions concerning their minor child’s medical care, there is no need to consider what other rights might be in play,” lawyers for Planned Parenthood said.

Under Montana’s law, which never went into effect, a doctor performing an abortion without parental consent would face both fines and imprisonment.

The law requires physicians to obtain notarized consent from a parent or guardian for anyone under 18. The law also allows a minor to “bypass” the requirement by convincing a court they are mature and well informed enough to make the decision on their own.

The Supreme Court dealt with a similar issue in the 1970s, a few years after it issued its decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973. In Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth, a majority of the court struck down similar consent requirements, relying in part on the constitutional right to abortion established by Roe. In a 1979 case, the court struck down a Massachusetts law because it did not include a path for a patient under 18 to “bypass” the parental consent requirement through a court.

Montana has argued in part that the Supreme Court’s decision three years ago to overturn Roe strengthened its justification for the law, partly because state courts found a similar right to abortion in Montana’s constitution that Roe found in the US Constitution. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court said that Roe’s reasoning was “egregiously wrong.”

The state supreme court’s ruling “flouted … longstanding principles” of parental rights, Montana argued in its appeal to the US Supreme Court, holding “that parents’ federal fundamental rights do not include the right to know about and participate in their minor child’s important medical decisions – at least not with the child’s decision whether to get an abortion.”

In its decision, the state court concluded that “minors, like adults, have a fundamental right to privacy, which includes procreative autonomy and making medical decisions affecting his or her bodily integrity and health in partnership with a chosen health care provider free from governmental interest.”

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