Recently the motel I was staying at dropped a USA Today on my door. One of the sidebars on the cover stated, “Court may face abortion rematch: Justices to decide whether to address state restrictions.”
In the article itself the first paragraph discussed how long it had been since the court took up an issue on abortion. The second small paragraph mentioned that both this instance and the last were during presidential elections. And then in paragraph three, it finally gave the gist of what was going on.
Quoting the article, the court may choose to “hear a challenge to tough new limits placed on abortion clinics and doctors in Texas.” Notice the word tough and the word limit. This implies to me limitations that some kind of unreasonable restrictions, but that wasn’t what I found in the article.
The effects of the law were discussed in two parts, the first of which is the new requirements and the second is the result on clinics. The two new requirements are that the doctors must have admitting privileges, for patients who have complications, to a local hospital and that the clinics must measure up to outpatient surgery centers.
What this article communicates to me is that clinics are currently staffed by hacks who do not care enough to have recourse to with deal the difficulties that arise from their procedures and the facilities they do these procedures in are substandard. I would not describe these laws as tough, but as common sense. Anyone opposing them would fit my description of taking advantage of and endangering women. But in today’s climate the idea that abortion clinics be made safer for the women who visit them is filed away as part of a war on women.
The second effect of the law discussed is that it would leave the state with only 10 clinics. The article didn’t say how many clinics will be forced to close, but they implied it was enough to restrict access. They didn’t seem to consider the possibility that these clinics would raise their standards.
How did abortion become such a sacred cow that the clinics need to be protected more than the women who enter them? When abortion was first becoming legal, one of the arguments was to get rid of dirty back alley locations staffed by ill trained workers. Now that abortion is legal the arguments are somehow in favor of these conditions.
Charles W. Short 