Vol. 81/No. 23      June 12, 2017

 

Fight grows to stop Kentucky gov’t moves to close
last clinic

 
The drive by Kentucky state government officials to shut down the EMW Women’s Surgical Center in Louisville, the state’s only remaining abortion clinic, has become an important front in the fight to defend a woman’s right to choose abortion. It comes as anti-women forces are stepping up attacks on abortion rights across the country.

The Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services told EMW its license would be revoked April 3 because its agreements with a local hospital and ambulance service were deficient.

“Calls to our hotline by women seeking abortions have increased,” Marcie Crim, executive director of Kentucky Health and Justice Network, told the Militant by phone May 16. “It’s gone from six to 10 calls a week to 20 to 30. And more women are attempting self-induced abortions.”

Some 300 pro-choice activists rallied outside the clinic April 2, carrying signs that said, “My body my choice!” and “Resist!” The American Civil Liberties Union won a restraining order blocking the closing and then filed a federal lawsuit challenging the closure order as unconstitutional. A trial on the suit is set for Sept. 6. State officials agreed to back off shutting down the clinic while the suit is pending.

At 6 a.m. on May 13 as many as 100 Operation Save America thugs swarmed the clinic, blocking the entrance. The group was formerly known as Operation Rescue. OSA Director Rusty Thomas told the Louisville Courier-Journal they would be back in July.

The drive to shut down the Louisville clinic follows the successful effort over the past year by “unapologetically pro-life” Gov. Matt Bevin to shut down EMW’s satellite clinic in Lexington and to block a new Planned Parenthood clinic from performing abortions.

“Whatever happens we will continue to have protest rallies,” Crim said.

The right of women to choose abortion has been under assault since the U.S. Supreme Court decriminalized the medical procedure in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Increased restrictions on the right to abortion and attacks on clinics — and the lack of sustained mobilizations against them — has meant that the number of abortion providers has been steadily dropping for decades. Since 1973 states have passed more than 700 laws restricting access, often under the guise of “protecting women’s heath.”

These attacks have “been made easier by the character and content of the 1973 court ruling,” Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes said in The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why Washington Fears Working People. “Roe v. Wade was based not on a woman’s right ‘to equal protection of the laws’ guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, but on medical criteria instead.”

Kentucky, which had 17 abortion providers in 1978, is today among seven states — along with North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri, Mississippi, Wyoming and West Virginia — with just one.

The outcome of the Sept. 6 trial on the EMW suit will have a bearing on other challenges to restrictive state abortion laws. Last June the Supreme Court rejected the Texas government’s claim that it was protecting women’s health by requiring doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at local hospitals and that abortion clinics meet hospital-like standards. Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and the Center for Reproductive Rights have filed lawsuits against similar restrictions in Alaska, Missouri and North Carolina.

Due to funding cuts and political attacks by anti-abortion politicians, Planned Parenthood recently announced the closure of 10 health centers in the Midwest and Southwest. This means the nonprofit organization no longer exists in Wyoming and North Dakota.
 
 
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