Louisiana Truly Outdoes Itself in Fucking Over Women's Health with New Law

On Wednesday, a federal court ruled that Louisiana's extremely shitty anti-abortion law can take effect, which will shutter three of the four clinics still operating in the state—meaning that Louisiana will soon become the sixth state with just one abortion provider left.

Since 2013, anti-abortion lawmakers have passed nearly 300 laws restricting access to abortion. Their tactics are as diverse as they are insidious; rather than attacking women's constitutional right to choice head on, conservative politicians have been chipping away at that right gradually, with laws that restrict how and when doctors can provide abortion care.

The Louisiana law, which was signed by Governor Bobby Jindal in 2014, requires doctors who perform abortions to obtain admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of their practice. Its supporters insist that they're trying to protect women's health, but reproductive rights advocates find such claims deeply disingenuous. "That's just a sham," Ilene Jaroslaw, senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Broadly. "No physician, nobody in the scientific or medical community, believes that."

Jaroslaw noted that both the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have publicly come out against legislation that imposes specific, onerous restrictions on physicians who provide abortion care. "Respected medical organizations have said, 'This does not support women's health.' Nobody believes that it promotes women's health," she said. "This law is from model legislation from anti-abortion groups, and [such laws are] copied across states whenever a court lets them stand."

After the success of Texas's draconian abortion restrictions, which were signed into law in 2013 and have since caused over half the clinics in the state to close, conservative lawmakers across the South and Midwest began passing similar laws. The effects have been dramatic: According to a recent Bloomberg Business report, at least 162 abortion providers in the US have been forced to close since 2011. These closures have occurred in 35 states and affected an estimated 30.5 million women of reproductive age.

In addition to Louisiana, 14 other states require abortion doctors to enter into some kind of agreement with a local hospital. This is extremely difficult for physicians, for a variety of reasons that Jaroslaw laid out: "A lot of hospitals are hostile to abortion and, for political reasons, don't want to get involved," she said, noting that many of the abortion providers in Louisiana had previously held admitting privileges when they worked as obstetricians. One hospital, she added, requires doctors to submit 50 patients to the hospital a year in order to maintain their admitting privileges. "The issue is, when you do abortion, it's such a safe procedure that you can go 20 years and not have a patient get admitted to the hospital."

Abortion is one of the safest surgical procedures in the world—it is 40 times safer than a colonoscopy, for instance, a procedure that is not subject to the same kind of regulation as abortion. Because of Louisiana's admitting privileges requirement, however, the state may soon go from having six abortion practitioners to having just one. According to Jaroslaw, 10,000 women seek an abortion per year in the state.

"It's clear that one physician, who's located in New Orleans, cannot serve 10,000 women [each year] throughout the state of Louisiana. The capacity is not there," she said.

Research shows that preventing women from accessing abortion does not stop abortion from occurring. Instead, it puts them in potentially life-threatening situations. Women who cannot afford to travel long distances to obtain abortion care must choose between carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term or taking matters into their own hands. Anecdotal evidence suggests that American women are turning to the latter option: In Texas, the state that's been hit hardest by clinic closures, multiple outlets reported that women were turning to black market abortion pills. An abortion provider in Dallas previously told me that she's seen an increase in "patients who tried something to end their pregnancy before coming to the clinic."

"The reality is, some women will be pushed too late to get an abortion, and they'll be forced to bear a child against their will," Jaroslaw said. "Other women will try to self-abort. Frankly, what we've seen historically is that some women will go to unsafe and unlicensed providers, and that's the biggest threat of all."