The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that a 2014 Louisiana law designed to shutter abortion clinics can now be implemented. The law—Act 620—requires physicians who perform abortions at clinics to obtain admitting privileges at a hospital within a 30-mile radius. Implementation of the law had been stayed by a U.S. district court on the grounds that it placed an undue burden on women who wanted to terminate their pregnancies. The Fifth Circuit’s ruling lifted that stay.
Foes of the law say the admitting privileges are medically unnecessary and are not imposed on out-patient clinics performing procedures that have more risks of complications than abortions have. If the law is implemented, three of Louisiana’s four abortion clinics will have to close their doors. Jessica Mason Pielko writes:
Attorneys from the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) sued in August 2014, arguing the act was impossible to comply with and unduly burdened abortion rights. A federal court issued a temporary restraining order that month, allowing the provision to take effect but blocking enforcement of the law while doctors tried to meet the requirement.
The federal court in June 2015 held a six-day trial and in January of this year ruled the law should be blocked. Louisiana immediately appealed, asking the court to stay its decision blocking the law while that appeal proceeded. The court denied the request. Louisiana appealed that denial to the Fifth Circuit, which agreed Wednesday to overturn the lower court and allow the admitting privileges law to go into effect.
The CCR plans to appeal for a stay on implementing Act 620 at the U.S. Supreme Court. The Louisiana law is similar to a Texas law over which arguments will be heard on the merits by the Supreme Court next week. Lawyers for CCR will be handling the arguments on the Texas law, too.
Advocates say that if the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in the Louisiana case is allowed to stand, the nearest abortion clinic for many Louisiana women will be the Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Mississippi. That facility is the only one in the Magnolia State, which once had 14 abortion clinics.
That sole remaining clinic came under attack from forced birthers in 2012, when Mississippi passed a law requiring all abortion providers to have hospital admitting privileges. U.S. Judge E. Grady Jolly of the Fifth Circuit, which upheld the Texas law, ruled against Mississippi, noting that the state “may not shift its obligation to respect the established constitutional rights of its citizens to another state."
Like all such forced-birther statutes, the Louisiana and Texas laws—if upheld by the Supreme Court—will harm all women seeking to terminate their pregnancies in those states. But because affluent women can always get an abortion by going to another state or another country, the law’s greatest impact will be on poor women. It will, in fact, kill poor women. Don't expect legislators complicit in those deaths to accept responsibility for them. Despite all their "pro-life" rhetoric, that is not what they are really about.