In January, Louisiana official gave up their wacked-out proposal to force women to wait 30 days for blood test results before being allowed to obtain an abortion. And also a proposal to force all abortion clinics to meet new, highly restrictive and unnecessary building restrictions. But one lawmaker, Democrat Katrina Jackson, has introduced another ridiculous forced-birther proposal. It's
House Bill 388. Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal favors it.
As Katie McDonough at Salon points out, Jackson's bill—the “Unsafe Abortion Protection Act”—is in keeping with the latest trend of couching "sweeping and dangerous restrictions on abortion care and reproductive health services in the language [of] patients’ rights and health."
The bill's provisions:
• Require state officials to maintain a database of all medication abortions
• Require physicians performing abortions to have hospital admitting privileges
• Change language in the current law by redefining the first trimester of pregnancy of "six to fourteen weeks" to "up to fourteen weeks."
If the legislation being proposed was for a database of all guns purchased in Louisiana, you could hear the screams all the way into the 24th century. What's the purpose behind this? Could it be to encourage some women not to get an abortion because they think their name might just happen to leak into the public eye, courtesy of some anti-abortion Louisiana clerk with access to the files? The question is whether the abortion database requirement could run afoul of the privacy accorded in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
As for requiring abortion-providing doctors to have hospital admitting privileges, this is one of the means forced-birthers in several other states—Mississippi, North Dakota and Texas—have imposed or tried to impose on clinics in order to shut them down. Last week:
The sole remaining reproductive health clinic in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, one of the poorest regions in the nation, closed its doors Thursday. Whole Woman’s Health in McAllen fought to stay open in the wake of the state’s sweeping new abortion restrictions, even continuing to provide counseling, referrals and other health services after its physicians were denied admitting privileges at local hospitals and legally barred from performing abortions, but is now laying off staff and looking to lease the building the clinic inhabited for a decade.
“The consequence of HB2 is an injustice, plain and simple. It is an injustice to the women we serve and to our communities,” Whole Woman’s Health CEO Amy Hagstrom Miller said in a statement. “It is an injustice to those in Texas seeking their legal right to end an unwanted pregnancy safely. The legislators lied when they said HB2 would not close our clinics, that they weren’t trying to make safe abortion care inaccessible. Now, we see the truth.”
Truth, as we've all discovered in the struggle over reproductive rights, is alien territory for the forced-birther crusaders.