June Medical Services L.L.C. v. Russo

In June Medical Services L.L.C. v. Russo, abortion providers and clinics in Louisiana challenged Act 620, a state law requiring any doctor performing abortions to hold active admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the procedure site. The law was nearly identical to a Texas statute struck down in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt (2016). The plaintiffs argued that Act 620 imposed an undue burden on women's constitutional right to abortion, offering no significant health benefits while threatening to leave only one doctor at a single clinic to serve roughly 10,000 women annually. The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision authored by Justice Breyer and joined in the judgment by Chief Justice Roberts, held the law unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to affirm the judgment of the Fifth Circuit in part, reversing the Fifth Circuit's decision and striking down Act 620 as unconstitutional. Justice Breyer announced the judgment, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan. Chief Justice Roberts concurred in the judgment but on narrower grounds based on stare decisis. Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh dissented. The Court held that the law imposed an undue burden on abortion access for the same reasons articulated in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt.

Whether Louisiana's Act 620, requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles, imposes an unconstitutional undue burden on women's right to abortion under the Fourteenth Amendment, and whether abortion providers have third-party standing to challenge the law on behalf of their patients.

The decision was widely regarded as a significant but fragile victory for abortion rights supporters. It preserved abortion access in Louisiana but relied on Chief Justice Roberts's narrow stare decisis concurrence rather than a broader endorsement of abortion rights. The ruling reinforced the undue burden standard from Casey and Whole Woman's Health, yet legal scholars noted that Roberts's reasoning left the door open for future restrictions. The case underscored the increasingly precarious state of abortion jurisprudence in the United States and foreshadowed the eventual overruling of the undue burden test in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022).