Yesterday
georgia10 highlighted what's at stake should the Supreme Court gain a majority of anti-choice justices--i.e., what happens if ScAlito is confirmed. She presented the chilling example of South Dakota.
1. There is only one abortion clinic in the state....
2. An anti-choice task force is successfully lobbying for a law "requiring that a woman watch an ultrasound of her fetus, that doctors warn women about the psychological and physical dangers of abortion, and that women receive psychological counseling before the abortion, among other measures."
3. The procedure costs $450. The state refuses to pay any of it, even in cases of rape or incest....
4. Some women in the state have to travel 700 miles in one day to get the procedure done....
The state is a prototype for anti-choice activists who, like Alito, prefer to dismantle Roe on the road to overturning it.
Today, it's Mississippi. Another state that has some of the highest levels of poverty in the nation. Another state that has a largely rural population, living far away from population centers. And another state that has just one abortion clinic, the Jackson Women's Health Organization. Another state in which the only abortion clinic is on the verge of being shut down.
Earlier this year, a federal judge knocked down a recently enacted state law that would have barred early second-trimester abortions at the clinic.
The law would have prevented abortions after 13 weeks' gestation, except in places with ambulatory surgical center standards. The clinic said it was ineligible for such a license in the state.
Gov. Haley Barbour urged lawmakers to pass another law after the judge's injunction. That law, which took effect July 1, made the clinic eligible to apply for a license to meet those ambulatory surgical standards.
Unless the clinic gains the certification, it will be illegal for the clinic to perform abortions beyond the first trimester.
About that certification, via Salon's Broadsheet (subscription):
What most news coverage has not noted is this: (1) Mississippi already has on the books 35 pages of requirements for clinic facilities, even down to parking lot size, and (2): as Hill confirmed today when Broadsheet called her to check, such standards are not, well, standard. "There are plenty of states, probably half, that don't require second semester abortions to be done in a surgery-center type facility," she said. "And the irony is, we've been doing them up to 16 weeks in a clinic that's been licensed for ten years. These are new regulations for the same facility. And sheer punitive actions against women."
Most news coverage has also not mentioned that Mississippi has the highest teen birth rate, but there you go.
Like the case of South Dakota, the doctors who provide abortion services at the Jackson Women's Health Organization fly in from out of state. One of the new requirements for certification? The provider must have hospital admitting privileges in Mississippi. One of the requirements of having such privileges? You have to reside in the state. These are just some of the many restrictions the Mississippi legislature has forced on the state's only abortion clinic and the state's women, all in an effort to do what ScAlito could do with one vote--end legalized abortion.
Think that's hyperbole? These are precisely the kinds of restrictions that ScAlito has recommended: "a legal strategy of dismantling abortion rights piece by piece" in order to eventually see the law overturned.
You might think of South Dakota and Mississippi as the outliers on this issue--that these states are backward and behind the times and things really aren't that bad out there in the rest of the country. You'd be wrong.