By Anna Matson, staff writer
Abortion has always been a controversial topic, but according to a recent Gallup poll only 19 percent of people feel that abortion should be completely illegal. The other 81 percent of people are somewhere on the spectrum of feeling it should be legal under any circumstances to only certain circumstances. If you are a part of this spectrum then you should continue reading to learn the ways abortion access is being restricted.
Certain states have been passing laws that are restricting women’s access to abortions. These laws are referred to as T.R.A.P. laws; Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers. Texas passed the HB – 2 which states:
“A physician performing or inducing an abortion: (1) must, on the date the abortion is performed or induced, have active admitting privileges at a hospital that:
(A) is located not further than 30 miles from the location at which the abortion is performed or induced; and
(B) provides obstetrical or gynecological health care services…
On and after September 1, 2014, the minimum standards for an abortion facility must be equivalent to the minimum standards adopted under Section 243.010 for ambulatory surgical centers.” To put it simply: The abortionist must be able to admit patients to a local hospital and abortion facilities need the same standards as surgical centers. It may sound like they are aiming for improvements but in practicality this is not the result.
If abortion facilities must submit to these requirements, then birthing centers should as well, considering the Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health in its article “Outcome of Care in Birth Centers: Demonstration of Durable Model” published in 2013 states that, “12 percent were transferred [to a hospital] in labor after [birth center] admission.” Meaning that although women are transferred during labor from a birth center to a hospital, their physicians are not required to have admitting privileges, like abortion clinics are now required. The only purpose for re-
quiring admitting privileges would be to restrict access to abortion services, since hospitals will provide care to anyone who is in an emergency situation.
According to the Center of Disease Control and Prevention, “the national legal induced abortion case-fatality rate for 2008-2011 was 0.73 legal induced abortion-related deaths per 100,000 reported legal abortion.” So if you do the math, only 0.00073 percent of women whom receive abortions die from the procedure.
The Alabama women’s center was shutdown due to the building requirements. Then its owner, Dalton Johnson, used his retirement fund to purchase a different building that fit the requirements; however, despite his greatest efforts to continue providing the service to women while obeying the laws, his at- tempts may be futile.
“I spent close to $1 million to meet all of their requirements and when you think you’re done and what are they trying to do? They’re trying to pass another bill that said I can’t be within 2,000 feet of a school. They treating me, the patients, the physicians as sex offenders,” says Johnson.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, “the most common restrictions in effect are parental notification or consent requirements for minors, limitations on public funding, and unnecessary and overly burdensome regulations on abortion facilities”.
Distance and waiting times are problematic. Since many clinics are shutting down, women may have to travel very far for the procedure. Many clinics also have mandatory wait periods up to 72 hours between visits. So the women would have to either take multiple trips or go on an uneventful and unplanned three- day weekend.
In the U.S. Supreme Court ruling of Planned Parenthood Vs. Casey it was stated that laws could not be made for regulating abortion if it places “an undue burden… a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion”. What do they consider an undue burden or substantial obstacle? Generally, someone having to travel an excessive distance and time to get a procedure or a mandatory waiting period between the consultation and procedure would be an obstacle or a burden. How many extra challenges must a woman go through to get an abortion until it is considered too much for her?
These challenges can lead these women to consider desperate means to terminate their pregnancy. Andrea Ferrigno, the Corporate V.P. of Whole Woman’s Health, in the documentary Trapped by Dawn Porter described a call from a patient: “I told her, ‘you can come to San Antonio. We can help you here’ and she said, ‘I can’t. I don’t have the means. There’s no way I can get to San Antonio. So what if I tell you what I have in my kitchen cabinet and you tell me what I can do.’” These laws are making it so challenging for women to receive a legal abortion that they contemplate attempting to abort the babies themselves.
Marva Sadler, Clinical Director of Whole Woman’s Health whom also spoke in Trapped, said, “In order to see her I need to put her to sleep, and in order to do that I need a nurse anesthetist and because of this crazy law it is impossible to find people to work for us… She’s 13 years old, and she is a victim of rape, and she drove four hours from Megelian to San Antonio, and we had to turn her away, and there was nothing I could do to save her. And so now if she has a procedure – and that if is huge – she’ll have to go all the way to New Mexico, and pay $5,000, and get there, and spend three days. It’ll never happen. We know it won’t.”
It should be obvious that access being this limited to a medical service is wrong and needs to be fixed. As John Oliver said on the episode of Last Week Tonight about abortion laws, “abortion can’t just be theoretically legal, it needs to be literally accessible.” If abortion is inaccessible, then it is essentially banned for those who do not have the ability to jump through the hoops that these laws are putting up for these women, which puts those who are not financially stable in worse conditions considering the expense of the child. If someone isn’t ready for a family they should not be forced to have one due to their inability to get to a legal abortion facility.