Vol. 77/No. 17      May 6, 2013

In 2012 the state legislature passed a measure requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. No hospitals in the Jackson area have been willing to grant such privileges for the clinic’s two doctors, who come from Illinois and North Carolina several times a month to perform abortions.

“We are not going to lie down and take this,” said Laurie Roberts, 34, president of the Mississippi National Organization for Women, in an April 13 phone interview from Jackson. “We will fight! There is support for women’s right to choose in Mississippi.”

A so-called personhood referendum was defeated in Mississippi in November 2011. That measure would have changed the state’s constitution to define life as beginning “from the moment of fertilization,” effectively outlawing abortion and some forms of contraception.

“If the Jackson clinic did close, women would have to go to Memphis or Huntsville or New Orleans for the procedure,” Roberts said. “Coming to Jackson is already a hurdle, because you have to come twice due to the 24-hour waiting period requirement. Women come here from all over the state and from Louisiana, from as young as 15 to grandmothers.” The clinic has been the sole abortion provider in the state since 2002.

A decision on a federal lawsuit filed in 2011 by the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Planned Parenthood challenging the law’s constitutionality is pending.

The Virginia Board of Health voted April 12 to require abortion clinics in the state to meet stricter hospital-type building codes, such as widening hallways and installing new ventilation systems. Some of Virginia’s 20 clinics, which have two years to comply with the potentially costly requirements, could be forced to close.

Dozens of abortion rights supporters filled the hearing room in Richmond to oppose the measure.

The Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives in Huntsville, the only abortion clinic in northern Alabama, faces the same challenge after the recent passage of a similar law by the state legislature.

“If we go down, we’re going to go down fighting,” clinic administrator Dalton Johnson told the Militant. “We’re not going to throw in the towel.” The clinic has hired an architect to see if the required modifications are feasible for the building.

Other states, including Arizona, Kansas and Michigan, have passed similar measures, all aimed at forcing the closure of abortion clinics. Other providers of outpatient surgical and medical care do not face the same requirements for their facilities.

Meanwhile, a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bloomington, Ind., was vandalized, causing extensive damage during the night of April 11. The clinic was splashed with red paint, windows were broken and computers damaged. The man arrested, Benjamin Curell, said he attacked the building with an ax because people who work at the clinic “murder babies,” according to the Bloomington Herald Times. The clinic reopened the following day.  
 
 
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