Indiana’s ‘Unequal Regulatory Treatment’ of Abortion Clinics Is Unconstitutional, Says Federal Judge

An Indiana law defining “abortion clinics” to
include facilities that prescribe abortion drugs was found unconstitutional by a federal judge
Wednesday. 

Passed by Indiana’s General Assembly in 2013, the law defined
any facility that offers abortion by pill—also known as medical
abortion or non-surgical abortion—as an “abortion clinic”, and thus
subject to building and safety standards set for places that
perform surgical abortions. Private physicians that offer the
abortion pill, however, were exempted from the state’s new
regulatory requirements. 

As it stands, there’s only place in Indiana that prescribes the
abortion pill without performing surgical abortions and isn’t a
doctor’s office: a Planned Parenthood clinic in Lafayette, Indiana.
The clinic is tucked away in an office alcove on the outskirts of
town, a fact I know because I used to live in Lafayette and—absent
health insurance or a car—trekked out there on the city bus to pick
up $7 packs of birth control pills and get tested for cervical
cancer.

Lafayette is not a wealthy community, nor a big one. For many
low-income women, this Planned Parenthood serves as the only place
to get affordable contraception, gynecological exams, STD tests,
and, yes, sometimes the abortion pill. Under the new law—one of
more than 200 abortion restrictions passed by Indiana’s
GOP-controlled legislatures since 2011, according to Bloomberg Politics—the
office would have had to make costly and unnecessary renovations or
stop prescribing the abortion pill. 

But with help from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of
Indiana, Planned Parenthood filed a suit alleging that the law is
unconstitutional and makes an unfounded distinction between
physician’s offices and other facilities that offer abortion drugs.
In yesterday’s decision, Judge Magnus-Stinson sided with
Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, describing the ‘unequal regulatory
treatment’ of physician’s offices and other places that prescribe
abortion drugs as “arbitrary” and having “no rational
basis”. 

“It is undisputed that a ‘physician’s office’ with the same
physical layout and amenities as the Lafayette clinic would not
have to modify itself to comply with the physical plant
requirements at issue because it would qualify for the ‘physician’s
office’ exception,” wrote Magnus-Stinson. The court granted Planned
Parenthood of Indiana’s motion for summary judgement on claims that
the abortion clinic law violated the U.S. Constitution and the
Equal Protection Clause. It denied the claim that the law violated
the Fourteenth Amendment by denying patients’ access to
abortion. 

The case is Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky v.
Commissioner.