WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court June 4 threw out a lower
court's ruling that allowed a 17-year-old last year to obtain an abortion while
she was in a detention center after an illegal border crossing.
If the Supreme Court had not acted, the lower court's ruling could
have set a precedent that would have allowed minors in similar situations to
obtain abortions.
The legal battle began when the detained teenager had sought but
was denied permission to leave the government-funded center where she was
detained to obtain an abortion, saying she had been raped, found out she was
pregnant during the detention and did not want to go through with the
pregnancy.
The Trump administration objected to allowing her to leave the
shelter temporarily for the purposes of obtaining an abortion, and said if she
wanted an abortion, she could find a sponsor to get her out of detention or
leave the country voluntarily.
But an October ruling by a federal judge in Washington said the
government couldn't interfere with the teenager's access to doctors and such
actions infringed on her constitutional rights. Immediately after that ruling,
she was allowed to leave the shelter for what government lawyers believed was
pre-abortion counseling but she obtained an abortion instead.
The Trump administration subsequently sought to have lawyers for
the American Civil Liberties Union, who represented the 17-year-old,
disciplined, saying they had misled the Justice Department about why she had
left the shelter after the October ruling. But the Supreme Court did not seek
disciplinary action.
The ACLU, meanwhile, is representing clients in similar
situations and those cases will be allowed to move through the lower courts.
While seeming to back the Trump administration, the high court's June ruling is
not a final say on whether immigrant minors in government detention can be
allowed to obtain an abortion.