The Supreme Court this week threw out parts of a Texas abortion access law that would have caused all but a handful of clinics in the state to close.

The justices also rejected Mississippi’s appeal to put “admitting privileges” restrictions on clinics. A lower court had already struck down the law.

The law would have likely closed Mississippi’s only abortion clinic.

The laws would have required doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and clinics to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers.

The court ruled that the law placed an “undue burden” on a woman’s ability to get an abortion. The problem with laws that restrict abortion is that the court has already made abortion a constitutional right, and so any law that restricts that right will likely be struck down.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the court has ruled as it has. Society, in general, no longer values life. The court simply reflects that change in society.

“The Court has simultaneously transformed judicially created rights like the right to abortion into preferred constitutional rights, while disfavoring many of the rights actually enumerated in the Constitution,” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent. “But our Constitution renounces the notion that some constitutional rights are more equal than others. … A law either infringes a constitutional right, or not; there is no room for the judiciary to invent tolerable degrees of encroachment. Unless the Court abides by one set of rules to adjudicate constitutional rights, it will continue reducing constitutional law to policy-driven value judgments until the last shreds of its legitimacy disappear.”

Thomas is right. But aside from the constitutional concerns, the decision further degrades the value of life — both the unborn child’s and the mother’s.