The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) regrets the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday that overturns a Louisiana law designed to protect women undergoing elective abortions. Abortion doctors challenged the law due to a requirement that they hold admitting privileges at an area hospital in case of complications.

The NAE joined the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops on an amici brief in June Medical Services v. Gee, arguing that the Louisiana law, as upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, was a reasonable law that protects women who face threatening complications of an abortion that require hospitalization.

The brief exposed the conflict of interest between the doctors, who opposed the law’s requirements, and the patients that the law sought to protect. The brief asked the Supreme Court to rethink its 2016 Whole Women’s Health decision, which overturned a similar Texas law but on a differing fact pattern.

Yesterday’s decision adds to the Supreme Court’s confusing abortion jurisprudence, leaving the possibility that similar laws in other states will be struck down as unconstitutional. The brief recommended that the Supreme Court rethink the Casey v. Planned Parenthood and Roe v. Wade decisions.

Because God created human beings in his image, every human life from conception to death bears the image of God and has inestimable worth. The NAE is committed to a consistent ethic of life that safeguards the essential nature of human life at all stages, with a special concern to protect the lives of the most vulnerable.