Under a phony guise of protecting the health and safety of women, states with Republican governors and state legislatures have been keeping busy enacting one burdensome scheme after another designed to radically curtail access to safe and legal abortion care.
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On Monday, a federal judge in Texas rejected one of the most underhanded of these legislative efforts by blocking an important part of the state's new abortion law, which would have required doctors performing the procedure to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.
Ruling the provision unconstitutional, Judge Lee Yeakel of the United States District Court in Austin declared that the law's "admitting-privileges provision is without a rational basis and places a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion."
Coming a day before the provision was to take effect, the judge's rejection of the hospital-privileges rule was an enormous victory for women and an important vindication for principled defenders of reproductive rights, including Wendy Davis, the Democratic state senator who is now running for governor. She tried unsuccessfully to block the measure by leading an 11-hour filibuster that attracted major national attention.
Had Judge Yeakel ruled the other way, as many as one-third of the state's 36 licensed abortion facilities would have had to have stopped offering the procedure. Similar provisions have been kept from going into effect by courts in Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota and Wisconsin.
Unfortunately, Judge Yeakel largely upheld a second bogus "safety" measure. He allowed to stand the provision in the law limiting medication abortions to an outmoded protocol for the use of abortion-inducing drugs. The protocol was established years ago by the Food and Drug Administration. Current medical practices now use a safer and more effective protocol.
His misguided conclusion will have the practical effect of leaving many women who might safely opt for a medication abortion with only a surgical option.
Judge Yeakel recognized that the old protocol requires "at least one additional visit to a clinic and allowing less control over the timing and convenience of the medically induced miscarriage," but nevertheless he said it did not impose an "undue burden" on abortion rights because surgical abortion is still available. He did, however, allow a small number of medication abortions to occur for health reasons between 50 and 63 days after a woman's last menstrual period, which is a longer time period than allowed under the F.D.A. rules.
Judge Yeakel's decision will not be the final word on the new statute. Texas has already filed an appeal of the judge's decision with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. And, on Tuesday, the Oklahoma Supreme Court, responding to questions from the United States Supreme Court, explained that it found Oklahoma's restriction on medication abortion unconstitutional because it "restricts the long-respected medical discretion of physicians" and effectively bans medication abortions and the nonsurgical treatment of women with ectopic pregnancies.
The justices must now decide whether to proceed with their tentative plan to hear the Oklahoma case. If they do, they should affirm the Oklahoma court's decision that prohibiting women and their doctors from using the latest forms of medication abortion is unacceptable.
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Editorial: A Mixed Decision on the Texas Abortion Law
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