Friday marked the 43rd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, which granted legal access to abortions. In the 43 years since the decision, anti-abortion activists have helped lead state legislatures to enact a wide variety of restrictions on a woman’s right to have an abortion. In the past five years alone, states have adopted hundreds of different restrictions on a woman’s access to abortion.
One of the most recent restrictions has been to enact policies that require abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Anti-abortion activists claim that having admitting privileges at hospitals will allow doctors providing abortions to treat those women with complications at local hospitals. However, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, emergency room physicians and hospital-based physicians can already provide services to those with abortion-related complications. The requirement for admitting privileges is also complicated by the fact that some hospitals require doctors with admitting privileges to admit a certain number of patients every year. Yet, the American Civil Liberties Union states that abortion is safe enough that those doctors providing solely abortions will not be able to meet those requirements.
Already, these requirements have closed multiple abortion clinics. A dozen clinics have been closed in Texas since their admitting privilege regulation took effect. Oklahoma, Louisiana and Wisconsin will face the same closures of their abortion clinics if their laws take effect. Under the admitting privilege regulation, Mississippi’s only abortion clinic would have closed had a federal court not stepped in and found the law an unconstitutional violation of a woman’s right to get an abortion.
Admitting privilege regulations place an undue burden on doctors to receive the qualifications necessary to perform safe, legal abortions. They require unnecessary relationships to hospitals that can be hard to come by for a variety of reasons. Although anti-abortion activists say that these regulations are to protect women’s safety, the real goal is to shut down abortion clinics and make it harder for a woman to receive their procedure. These admitting requirements are just one more attempt by anti-abortion activists to further unnecessary restrictions on the right to receive an abortion.