Real Goal of Abortion ‘Limits’: Bans
Anti-abortion groups that saw a chance to get state legislatures to restrict women’s reproductive rights piously declared that all they wanted to do was to make women safer. This argument had little credibility then, and it has even less now. What has actually happened is that in state after state, with the enthusiastic support of Republican lawmakers, it has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for women to get safe and legal abortion care.
“In some parts of the country,” says Brigitte Amiri of the American Civil Liberties Union, “women will be living in a pre-Roe v. Wade situation, when those who weren’t wealthy or couldn’t travel long distances — especially the young and poor — couldn’t access safe and legal abortion services.”
That emerging reality was driven home late last month before a three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The court heard arguments in a constitutional challenge to a Mississippi law requiring doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. If that law is allowed to take effect, Mississippi’s sole remaining clinic, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, would be forced to close because its doctors have been unable to secure admitting privileges at any nearby hospital — hardly surprising given the local political atmosphere.