Vol. 77/No. 23 June 17, 2013
An Arizona law barring most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy was ruled unconstitutional by a federal appeals court May 21. The ruling applies to nine western states, including Alaska, which also has a 20-week limit. A similar law in Idaho was ruled unconstitutional in March.
On May 17, a federal judge in Arkansas blocked implementation of that state’s new law barring abortions at 12 weeks until a lawsuit challenging the law’s constitutionality is heard.
At the same time, supporters of women’s right to abortion in Mississippi and North Dakota are trying to prevent closure of their state’s only abortion clinic.
Passage of restrictive bills in Mississippi in 2012 and in North Dakota earlier this year would require doctors working at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. In both cases local hospitals have refused to grant them these privileges.
The North Dakota law, the most restrictive in the U.S., includes a provision banning abortions when a fetal heartbeat can be detected, as early as six weeks. When this law was passed in March, “nearly 1,000 people came out to protest,” Tammi Kromenaker, director of the Red River Women’s Clinic in Fargo, said in a May 24 phone interview. “People who hadn’t ever been involved came to the rallies. That’s what we need now, for everyday people to stand up and say, ‘This is too much.’”
The New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit May 15 in state district court in North Dakota to block the law’s implementation. In Jackson, Miss., a federal judge in April stopped for now the hospital admitting-privilege requirement.
At least one clinic, in Knoxville, Tenn., has closed as a result of similar admitting-privilege restrictions.
In April owners of the Hillcrest Clinic in Norfolk, Va., closed the facility after 40 years when the state Board of Health enacted regulations requiring abortion clinics to meet the same building standards as newly constructed hospitals.
Meanwhile, Dr. Kermit Gosnell in mid-May was convicted of first-degree murder in the deaths of three babies allegedly born alive at his Philadelphia abortion clinic and of involuntary manslaughter in the death of a 41-year-old woman, Karnamaya Mongar, an immigrant from Bhutan who was a patient. Gosnell was sentenced to life in prison without parole. State prosecutors had sought the death penalty and opponents of women’s rights are using the practices at Gosnell’s clinic to stoke opposition to the right to choose abortion and smear providers of the procedure.
As the Gosnell trial was taking place, the anti-abortion group Live Action released an undercover video made at Dr. Leroy Carhart’s clinic in Bellevue, Neb., by two women posing as patients. In the videos, Carhart answers questions from the women about how a late-term abortion is done. Carhart, one of a handful of remaining doctors in the U.S. who perform such abortions, was a colleague of Dr. George Tiller, who was gunned down by an anti-abortion rightist in Wichita, Kan. in 2009. Carhart began working at a Germantown, Md., clinic in December 2010 to continue providing late-term abortions, after Nebraska outlawed the procedure after 22 weeks.
Meanwhile, the Barack Obama administration May 24 filed to delay implementation of a federal court ruling lifting age limits and prescription requirements for the “morning-after” pill.