What abortion profiteers long have feared, especially since President Trump’s appointments have shifted the U.S. Supreme Court to the right, is happening.

The justices said Friday they will hear an abortion case, June Medical Services LLC v. Gee, a dispute over health standards requirements for abortionists.

“The Supreme Court now has a chance in this case to reconsider, reverse, and return Roe v. Wade and the issue of abortion to the American people, which is long overdue,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America.

“States should absolutely have the right to pass their own health and safety standards designed to protect women inside abortion vendors. The inhumanity of abortion must be debated.”

The lawsuit was filed by June Medical Services, a Louisiana abortion business, and the cross-petition was filed by the state of Louisiana.

The case provides the court with the first opportunity to address abortion since the Hellerstedt decision three years ago. And it could impact the viability of the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade in 1973 and affirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992.

At issue is Louisiana’s law requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges – the authority to directly admit a patient to a hospital if necessary.

In Hellerstedt, the Supreme Court overturned a law that included the admitting privilege requirement. But the ruling did not address the merits of the requirement, and Louisiana argues its rule imposes no undue hardship.

The question to the Supreme Court is how the decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirming the admitting privileges requirement should be addressed.

‘Lowering the bar’ to expand abortion

Hawkins noted that a Students for Life sponsored poll earlier this year showed that 65% of Millennials want a voice on abortion policy.

“And even as this case is being debated, we have learned, in recent weeks, that an Indiana abortionist who couldn’t keep his medical license was storing thousands of babies he aborted at his home and that Planned Parenthood has been orchestrating the inductions of living babies to harvest their body parts, calling it ‘abortion,'” she said.

Hawkins said the “horrific ‘business’ of abortion needs to be brought out of the shadows and addressed to protect mothers and their preborn children from a predatory abortion industry.”

Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, said abortion activists “are more than willing to lower the bar on women’s health in order to expand abortion, but stricter clinic regulations are in the best interest of women.”

“Just recently we were reminded of the need for more oversight when it comes to abortion, not less, with the appalling case of the abortionist Ulrich Klopfer who collected thousands of aborted babies’ bodies in his home,” she said. “We applaud the Louisiana bill’s sponsor Katrina Jackson as well as its other supporters for taking concrete steps to protect women in that state.”

Catherine Glenn Foster of Americans United for Life said her group welcomes the review of “both the commonsense Louisiana admitting privileges law and the legal question whether an abortionist should be able to stand in the shoes of his patients to challenge a medical requirement that is designed to protect them from him.”

“Louisiana’s long and sordid history of dirty and dangerous abortion businesses being shuttered one by one in order to protect women from fly-by-night and dangerous abortionists should tell the court all it needs to know, both about the legal benefits of this law and the dubious right of abortionists to sue to overturn laws designed to protect their own patients,” she said.

Overturning Roe

WND has reported pro-life activists are pursuing several cases with the goal of reaching the high court and providing an opportunity to overturn Roe, which would return regulation of abortion to the states.

There is considerable scientific evidence of the personhood of the unborn that was not available in 1973 when Roe was decided.

Even the author of the Roe opinion, Associate Justice Harry Blackmun, admitted that if the personhood of the unborn were to be established, the premise of the ruling would collapse.

Justice Clarence Thomas recently chastised his fellow justices for avoiding the issue.

He referenced the court’s decision not to hear a case regarding a 2016 Alabama law on the dismemberment of unborn children.

“This case serves as a stark reminder that our abortion jurisprudence has spiraled out of control,” he said.

“Earlier this term, we were confronted with lower court decisions requiring states to allow abortions based solely on the race, sex, or disability of the child. … Today we are confronted with decisions requiring states to allow abortion via live dismemberment,” Thomas wrote.

“None of these decisions is supported by the text of the Constitution.”

Thomas quoted from the court of appeals, which said: “In this type of abortion the unborn child dies the way anyone else would if dismembered alive. It bleeds to death as it is torn limb from limb. It can, however, survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off … at the end of the abortion – after the larger pieces of the unborn child have been torn off with forceps and the remaining pieces sucked out with a vacuum – the abortionist is left with a tray full of pieces.”

Thomas explained the Alabama law did not prohibit abortion, but “it does prevent abortion providers from purposefully ‘dismember[ing] a living unborn child and extract[ing] him or her one piece at a time from the uterus through use of clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors, or similar instruments’ that ‘slice, crush, or grasp … a portion of the unborn child’s body to cut or rip it off.'”

Thomas said: “The notion that anything in the Constitution prevents states from passing laws prohibiting the dismembering of a living child is implausible. But under the ‘undue burden’ standard adopted by this court, a restriction on abortion” even when the procedure is “gruesome” – “is unconstitutional if ‘the ‘purpose or effect’ of the provision ‘is to place a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion.'”

He pointed out the appeals court even found the abortion standard was an “aberration of constitutional law” and recommended it be overturned.

Bound by precedent

WND reported the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said it had to throw out the Alabama abortion restriction because of the Supreme Court’s precedent.

Chief Judge Ed Carnes lamented in his opinion that he was bound by precedent.

“In our judicial system, there is only one Supreme Court, and we are not it,” he wrote.

Judge Joel Dubina wrote separately to express his agreement with Thomas and Justice Antonin Scalia in Gonzales v. Carhart in which Thomas wrote, “I write separately to reiterate my view that the court’s abortion jurisprudence,” including in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Roe v. Wade, “has no basis in the Constitution.”

When the case was at the 11th, the judges were revolted by the procedure.

They snarked that “a majority” of the Supreme Court “discovered that [abortion] right lurking somewhere in the ‘penumbras of the Bill of Rights’ as illuminated by the ‘concept of ordered liberty.'”

The 11th Circuit is not the only court to take the U.S. Supreme Court’s approach to abortion to task lately. About the same time as the 11th Circuit ruling, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled an unborn baby is a “person” under the law, and, consequently, causing the death of that person can be punished with execution.

Further, in a special concurrence, Justice Tom Parker called on the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit Roe v. Wade.

“I write specially to expound upon the principles presented in the main opinion and to note the continued legal anomaly and logical fallacy that is Roe v. Wade,” he said. “I urge the United States Supreme Court to overrule this increasingly isolated exception to the rights of unborn children.”

Parker affirmed the Alabama court’s rationale that “unborn children are persons entitled to the full and equal protection of the law.”

He asserted Roe is “without historical or constitutional support, carved out an exception to the rights of unborn children and prohibited states from recognizing an unborn child’s inalienable right to life when that right conflicts with a woman’s ‘right’ to abortion.”

“This judicially created exception of Roe is an aberration to the natural law … and common law of the states,” Parker said.

Thomas argued that court precedents that are “demonstrably erroneous” should be overturned.

That stance drew criticism from the left, including by members of the court.

The far-left Think Progress reacted with a piece headlined “Justice Thomas just admitted he wants to burn down the very idea that courts should obey precedent.”

“After nearly three decades on the Supreme Court – Thomas finally articulated his approach to stare decisis, the principle that courts should generally follow the rules announced in past decisions,” Think Progress said.

The piece said Thomas apparently believes that the court should “burn down any decision that five of its members do not like.”

But that is precisely the standard for the nine-member court, and many decisions are 5-4. It was only five justices who created same-sex marriage in 2015, despite, according to the dissenting opinion, the ruling’s lack of any connection to the U.S. Constitution.