Thomas wrote that the decision "exemplifies the court's troubling tendency 'to bend the rules when any effort to limit abortion, or even to speak in opposition to abortion, is at issue.The rules required doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.'" Thomas was quoting an earlier abortion dissent from Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February. Washington: The Supreme Court struck down Texas' widely replicated regulation of abortion clinics Monday in the court's biggest abortion case in nearly a quarter century.The Supreme Court allowed the admitting privileges requirement to take effect in most of the state, but put the surgical center provision on hold pending the court's resolution of the case. It is on hold in Alabama, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Wisconsin.Texas passed a broad bill imposing several abortion restrictions in 2013.Abortion providers said the rules would have cut the number of abortion clinics in the state by three-fourths if they had been allowed to take full effect. Texas clinics sued immediately to block it claiming it impermissibly interfered with a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.

Rick Perry signed the law in 2013, there were about 40 clinics throughout the state. That number dropped to under 20 and would have been cut in half again if the law had taken full effect, the clinics said. The requirement is in effect in most of Texas, Missouri, North Dakota and Tennessee.Justice Stephen Breyer's majority opinion for the court held that the regulations are medically unnecessary and unconstitutionally limit a woman's right to an abortion.S.Texas is among 10 states with similar admitting privileges requirements, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the state, at first allowing challenged provisions to take effect and then upholding the law with only slight exceptions.The clinics won several favourable rulings in a federal district court in Texas. The rules required doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and forced clinics to meet hospital-like standards for outpatient surgery..The justices split largely along liberal-conservative lines in their emergency orders, with the court's conservative justices voting repeatedly to let the law be enforced.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.The justices voted 5-3 in favor of Texas clinics that had argued the regulations were a thinly veiled attempt to make it harder for women to get an abortion in the nation's second-most populous state. But each time, the New Orleans-based 5th U."Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined Breyer.A separate appeal is pending at the Supreme Court from Wisconsin, where federal judges have struck down that state's admitting privileges law.Texas had argued that its 2013 law and subsequent regulations were needed Wholesale Portable Nebulizer to protect women's health.The hospital-like outpatient surgery standards are in place in Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Virginia, and it is blocked in Tennessee and Texas, according to the center, which represented the clinics in the Texas case. The laws are on hold in both states, and a panel of federal appellate judges has concluded the Mississippi law probably is unconstitutional because it would force the only abortion clinic in the state to close.When then-Gov.