Alabama will have to reconsider
a requirement that abortion-clinic
doctors have hospital admitting privileges. In a 172-page court
decision released Monday, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson
declared the requirement—part of a package of Alabama abortion
regulations passed in 2013—unconstitutional and admonished state
lawmakers for exceeding their authority in passing it.
A similar
law in Mississippi was deemed unconsitutional last week.
In Thompson’s comprehensive decision,
he said that evidence “compellingly demonstrates” that the
requirement would result in three out of Alabama’s five remaining
abortion clinics closing. “Indeed, the court is convinced that, if
this requirement would not, in the face of all the evidence in the
record, constitute an impermissible undue burden, then almost no
regulation, short of those imposing an outright prohibition on
abortion, would,” Thompson wrote.
Drawing what some might see as an odd parallel (but many have
pointed out here in the past), the Judge wrote that “the right to
decide to have an abortion and the right to have and use firearms
for self-defense” aren’t all that different. For both, the Supreme
Court has ruled that some regulation is okay but it must not “tread
too heavily” on these protected rights. And both constitutional
protections are rejected “as more or less important” to people
based on their subjective beliefs.
“With this parallelism in mind,” wrote Thompson,
the court poses the hypothetical that suppose … the federal or
state government were to implement a new restriction on who may
sell firearms and ammunition and on the procedure they must employ
in selling such goods and that, further, only two vendors in the
State of Alabama were capable of complying with the restriction:
one in Huntsville and one in Tuscaloosa.The defenders of this law would be called upon to do a heck of a
lot of explaining–and rightly so in the face of an effect so
severe. Similarly, in this case, so long as the Supreme Court
continues to recognize a constitutional right to choose to
terminate a pregnancy, any regulation that would, in effect,
restrict the exercise of that right to only Huntsville and
Tuscaloosa should be subject to the same skepticism.
He rejected the state’s argument that new abortion clinics would
open to take the place of those closing if only clinic
administrators would pay doctors more competitively.
In the words of the State’s expert Dr. Peter Uhlenberg,
describing the potential for new clinics opening, “If we think of
this as a supply and demand and the demand is high, the market is
there, there’s no reason to expect that someone wouldn’t step
forward to provide that service.”As the discussion above makes clear, there are in fact several
very good reasons to expect that no one would step in to provide
abortion services. Many OB/GYNs in Alabama do not know how to
perform an abortion because many residency programs in the region
to not offer the training; many OB/GYNs have strong anti-abortion
convictions; and others fear, reasonably, that they could not
provide abortions without sacrificing another part of their
practice or that providing abortions would expose them and their
families to violence. The court finds, therefore, that the
inability to obtain local abortion doctors is not a matter of
money, but rather a reflection of the difficulty of pursuing that
occupation in the State.
Judge Thompson extended an order blocking enforcement of the
hospital admitting privileges rule and said he would issue a final
order on the law after considering more arguments. Alabama Attorney
General Luther Strange promised that his office would appeal the
decision. In a statement, Gov. Robert Bentley said he was
“extremely disappointed” by the ruling and would support the
appeal.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1nopteH
via IFTTT