The new rules passed by Republican legislatures require that doctors performing abortions must have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, a provision likely to shut down many abortion clinics across the region. Legal experts say the legislation is raising a fundamental question: At what point is access to abortion so limited that it violates the right to the procedure granted by the United States Supreme Court in 1973 in Roe v. Wade?
When a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans, heard arguments on Mississippi’s law in April, a lawyer for the state said that although the law would force the state’s sole abortion clinic to close, abortion providers were available in neighboring states. One of the judges, Stephen A. Higginson, responded by bringing up a possibility that has since become reality.
“Alabama has passed a law,” he said. “Louisiana is considering one. So then what?”
The requirement that doctors have admitting privileges has emerged as a new tactic of the anti-abortion movement, which says it is intended to protect women’s health. But major medical groups have said that the rule has no bearing on safety since, in the rare cases of emergency, hospitals will accept and treat women experiencing complications from abortion regardless. Abortion providers and many medical experts call the requirement a thinly disguised effort to shut down clinics and undermine the right to abortion under Roe v. Wade.
“With similar restrictions passed in neighboring states over the objection of leading medical experts, we are deeply concerned that women in a vast stretch of this country are in real danger of losing the ability to access legal abortion safely,” Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement on Wednesday.
