The underhand tactics of the pro-life movement in Texas are beginning to restrict the freedom of women who wish to undergo safe abortions – not just in the Lone Star State but in other areas of the US too.
Since the passing of House Bill 2, the number of places at which a Texan woman can expect to have a safe and straightforward abortion has plummeted. House Bill 2 is a piece of legislation that stipulates that, in order to keep functioning, abortion clinics need to have admitting privileges at hospitals within 30 miles – in other words, that they must find funds to scale up their operation to meet new guidelines, or close down. The 13 million women in Texas are now served by a mere six or seven providers; inevitably this means that for some the journey to the nearest provider is an agonising full day’s journey away. Inevitably it means that some will terminate their pregnancies in more dangerous circumstances, having been unable to reach a sanctioned clinic.
But it is not just in Texas that abortion provision facilities are being limited by Republican lawmakers; Oklahoma, Louisiana and Alabama are all at imminent risk of suffering drastic cuts to the number of practising clinics. The American Medical Association and American College of have poured cold water on the idea that abortion providers need have hospital admitting privileges in order to do their job, but, couched in terms that appear to treat women’s health as a priority, legislation continues to be written that gravely retards the rights of women to maintain autonomy over their bodies.
Erika L Sanchez writes about the grim state of affairs in the Guardian:
The Texas legislature has become an extreme example of new restrictions on abortion continuing to sweep statehouses in 2014, and the particulars buried by all those Wendy Davis profiles showcase a slick new tactics of the pro-life movement: a requirement for admitting privileges. At first glance, that kind of rules appears designed to protect women's health – to have an abortion provider make an arrangement with a local hospital in case of an emergency seems harmless, even helpful.
But this law, like so many others in the works, also imposes all kinds of obstacles to providers and clinics actually gaining these privileges. The end result: abortion clinics are shutting down all across the country. And because the (often Evangelical) bill-crafting language is so deceptively reasonable and so effective at defusing public outrage, we might not even have noticed that our constitutional right to safe and legal abortions is being steadily eroded.
“Women will die painful and sickening deaths because of House Bill 2, but it passed anyways,” 14-year-old anti-abortion campaigner Tuesday Cain told New Humanist in July 2013. As her father said, “This really is about anti-choice. It’s not about pro-life.” Read New Humanist’s article on the subject, and the full transcript of the interview with the pair.
