A Judge Rules for Alabama Women on Abortion
In large parts of the country, women’s access to safe and legal abortion care is increasingly coming to depend on the willingness of judges to rigorously examine and reject new (and medically unnecessary) restrictions imposed by Republican legislatures.
In just that sort of searching review, a federal judge last week struck down as unconstitutional an Alabama law requiring doctors at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. The requirement - advertised, falsely, as necessary to protect women’s health - is one of the main strategies being deployed nationally by opponents of abortion rights to shrink the already inadequate number of abortion providers.
The decision, by Judge Myron Thompson of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, followed a 10-day hearing. The ruling is a big victory for Alabama women and should be an instructive model for other courts.
The starting point for Judge Thompson’s analysis was the Supreme Court’s 1992 Casey decision, which said a state abortion regulation goes too far when it imposes an “undue burden” on a woman’s ability to choose to have an abortion before a fetus is viable. The judge said that despite the state’s effort to minimize the rule’s impact, it would shut down three of Alabama’s five abortion clinics. All five provide only early abortions, well before viability. He noted that the rule would actually harm women, especially poor women, by forcing them to wait longer and travel longer distances for the procedure.
“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,” the judge concluded, based on an impressively detailed, step-by-step parsing of the evidence presented by both sides.
Judge Thompson found unconvincing the state’s “facile assertions” that the shuttered clinics would be replaced by other facilities, not least because of the hostile climate in which clinics and doctors operate in Alabama. And he found “exceedingly weak” the evidence advanced by the state that admitting privileges were necessary to women’s safety. Abortion complications are exceedingly rare, he said, and there already are reasonable procedures in place to handle them.
The Alabama ruling followed last month’s welcome, but more limited, 2-to-1 decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that upheld a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of Mississippi’s version of the rule because it would leave the state with no abortion clinic. A proceeding on Texas’s admitting privileges rule and other new restrictions is expected to conclude this week.
Judge Thompson’s detailed and cogent debunking of each and every claim abortion rights opponents make in support of the admitting privileges requirement should command attention as the issue continues to play out before different judges on the way toward likely resolution by the Supreme Court.
In just that sort of searching review, a federal judge last week struck down as unconstitutional an Alabama law requiring doctors at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. The requirement - advertised, falsely, as necessary to protect women’s health - is one of the main strategies being deployed nationally by opponents of abortion rights to shrink the already inadequate number of abortion providers.
The decision, by Judge Myron Thompson of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, followed a 10-day hearing. The ruling is a big victory for Alabama women and should be an instructive model for other courts.
The starting point for Judge Thompson’s analysis was the Supreme Court’s 1992 Casey decision, which said a state abortion regulation goes too far when it imposes an “undue burden” on a woman’s ability to choose to have an abortion before a fetus is viable. The judge said that despite the state’s effort to minimize the rule’s impact, it would shut down three of Alabama’s five abortion clinics. All five provide only early abortions, well before viability. He noted that the rule would actually harm women, especially poor women, by forcing them to wait longer and travel longer distances for the procedure.
“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,” the judge concluded, based on an impressively detailed, step-by-step parsing of the evidence presented by both sides.
Judge Thompson found unconvincing the state’s “facile assertions” that the shuttered clinics would be replaced by other facilities, not least because of the hostile climate in which clinics and doctors operate in Alabama. And he found “exceedingly weak” the evidence advanced by the state that admitting privileges were necessary to women’s safety. Abortion complications are exceedingly rare, he said, and there already are reasonable procedures in place to handle them.
The Alabama ruling followed last month’s welcome, but more limited, 2-to-1 decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that upheld a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of Mississippi’s version of the rule because it would leave the state with no abortion clinic. A proceeding on Texas’s admitting privileges rule and other new restrictions is expected to conclude this week.
Judge Thompson’s detailed and cogent debunking of each and every claim abortion rights opponents make in support of the admitting privileges requirement should command attention as the issue continues to play out before different judges on the way toward likely resolution by the Supreme Court.