Abortive rules

FOR the past several years, opponents of abortion rights have cloaked their obstructionist efforts under all manner of legitimatesounding rationales, like protecting women’s health. This has never been more than an insulting ruse. Their goal, of course, is to end all abortions, and lately they’re hardly trying to pretend otherwise.

On Tuesday afternoon, shortly after a federal appeals court panel largely upheld a 2013 Texas law that will make access to abortion services more difficult for hundreds of thousands of women, Attorney-General Ken Paxton of Texas, in explaining that the law protects the unborn, called the ruling a “victory for life and women’s health”.

The federal district judge who struck down the law last year saw it for what it is: a “brutally effective system of abortion regulation”, one whose intent is “to reduce the number of providers licensed to perform abortions, thus creating a substantial obstacle for a woman seeking to access an abortion”. The law would most likely force the closing of about half the state’s remaining 18 clinics; there were more than 40 when it was passed.

The statute, like similar ones around the country, requires abortion clinics to meet the same building, equipment and staffing standards as ambulatory surgical centres – a costly and medically unnecessary standard. It also requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 45km of the clinic.

Neither of these rules provides any benefit to women’s health or safety, as doctors and medical associations have said repeatedly and as the trial court judge found. To the contrary, first-trimester abortions, which account for nearly nine in 10 of all abortions, are already among the safest of all medical procedures, with a major complication rate of less than one-tenth of a percent.