The Supreme Court on Monday upheld the broad reach of a federal law that bars people with misdemeanor domestic violence convictions from owning guns.

The justices rejected arguments that the law covers only intentional or knowing acts of abuse and not those committed recklessly — where a person is aware of the risk that an act will cause injury, but not certain it will. As examples, the court mentioned throwing a plate in the heat of an argument, or slamming a door.

The case involved two Maine men who said their guilty pleas for hitting their partners should not disqualify them from gun ownership.

Writing for herself and five other justices, Justice Elena Kagan said that Congress enacted the gun law some 20 years ago to close a loophole and "prohibit domestic abusers convicted under run-of-the-mill misdemeanor assault and battery laws from possessing guns." She said if the law were read to exclude misdemeanors in which a person acted recklessly, it would "substantially undermine the provision's design."

Today’s ruling breaks with a steady decay of abortion rights since 1973’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which found a constitutional right to an abortion. The ruling is particularly noteworthy because while anti-abortion lawmakers have focused on regulating the procedure itself -- banning certain methods, for example, or requiring waiting periods -- this time they argued they were taking steps to protect the health of women seeking abortions. The regulations, at 129 pages long, prescribed the width of hallways in clinics, the minimum distance to a hospital and the type of air-conditioning system that must be used, among other things.

The rules led 22 of Texas’s 41 clinics to close, even after a lower court in 2014 blocked some of the regulations pending review. These closings disproportionately affected young, low-income women of color from rural areas, according to Amy Hagstrom Miller, chief executive of Whole Woman’s Health, which runs three clinics in Texas and is the lead plaintiff in the case. If the court had ruled the Texas regulations were constitutional, Miller and other experts estimate the state would be left with only nine operating clinics, all in major metropolitan areas.
(snip)
Two major portions of the law were at issue in the Supreme Court case. One required abortion clinics to meet the structural and staffing requirements of an “ambulatory surgical center,” requiring renovations and operating costs that most clinics said were impossible to afford. The other required doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. This rule forced closures of clinics because they were too far from a hospital or because the local hospitals did not give out admitting privileges as a policy. Some abortion doctors are not eligible for admitting privileges at hospitals because abortion is considered too safe a procedure to need routine use of a hospital’s facilities.

In the United States, abortion was widely practiced before about 1880, by which time most states had banned it except to save the life of the woman. Anti-abortion legislation was part of a backlash against the growing movements for suffrage and birth control — an effort to control women and confine them to a traditional childbearing role.

This legislation was also a way for the medical profession to tighten its control over women’s health care, as midwives who performed abortions were a threat to the male medical establishment. Finally, with the declining birthrate among women from Northern European backgrounds in the late 1800s, the U.S. government and the eugenics movement were concerned about “race suicide” and wanted white U.S.-born women to reproduce.

This wasn’t Zika—it was rubella. And in the U.S., it had a profound effect on society. Abortion had been a taboo subject until then, but people began to advocate for abortion as a medical, not a moral, decision. Recent statements by public officials in Brazil and Colombia hint that Zika might have a similar effect in countries where abortions still are, with few exceptions, illegal.

The first reports that rubella, also known as German measles, could cause birth defects came in the early 1940s after an outbreak of the virus in Australia. Norman Gregg, an ophthalmologist who linked rubella to birth defects, was an early advocate of the idea that infected pregnant women should have access to abortion.

The United States suffered an outbreak of rubella in 1958, but it wasn’t until after the thalidomide disaster in the early 1960s—when a drug given to pregnant women caused severe birth defects—that Americans really began to fear the effects of rubella. During a 1964-65 rubella epidemic, U.S. public officials actively warned women of the danger of becoming infected, says Leslie J. Reagan, author of Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America.