974
Per Curiam
abortions with a licensed physician (who also performs abortions) present, see Brief in Opposition 4, meaning that no woman seeking an abortion would be required by the new law to travel to a different facility than was previously available. All this strongly supports the District Court's finding, after hearing testimony, that there was insufficient evidence that the law created a "substantial obstacle" to abortion. And there is simply no evidence that the legislature intended the law to do what it plainly did not do.2
The Court of Appeals' decision is also contradicted by our repeated statements in past cases—none of which was so much as cited by the Court of Appeals, despite the District Court's discussion of two of them—that the performance of abortions may be restricted to physicians. We first expressed this view (although it was not necessary to our holding) in Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113, 165 (1973), saying that "[t]he State may define the term 'physician,' . . . to mean only a physician currently licensed by the State, and may proscribe any abortion by a person who is not a physician as so defined." We reiterated this view in Connecticut v. Menillo, 423 U. S. 9, 11 (1975) (per curiam), where, in the course of holding that the Federal Constitution posed no bar to the conviction of a person with no medical training for the performance of an abortion, we said that "prosecutions for abortions conducted by nonphysicians infringe upon no realm of personal privacy secured by the Constitution against state interference." Finally, in Akron, in the course of striking down a requirement that licensed physicians rather than other medical personnel provide specified information to patients (the holding overruled in Casey), we emphasized that our prior cases "left no doubt that, to ensure the safety of
2 Since the record does not support a conclusion that "the legislature's predominant motive," post, at 980, was to create a "substantial obstacle" to abortion, it is quite unnecessary to address "whether the Court of Appeals misread this Court's opinions in Miller [v. Johnson, 515 U. S. 900 (1995),] and Shaw," post, at 981.
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