It was under the pretense of trying to protect women's health and safety that a Texas law that restricted abortion rights throughout the state was passed in July. But on Monday, a federal judge struck down a crucial part of the law that would have required all doctors performing the procedure to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.
The decision was announced one day before the law was scheduled to take place in a major victory for abortion rights activists. If the entire law were to come into place, that measure would have effectively forced one-third of Texas' abortion clinics to close.
In declaring that particular provision unconstitutional, Judge Lee Yeakel declared in his ruling that the "admitting-privileges provision is without a rational basis and places a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion."
And right he is.
The component that was struck down serves no medical purpose and was only intended to make a woman's ability to have an abortion more difficult. Many clinics throughout Texas use visiting doctors who cannot attain admitting privileges at any local hospitals.
This is common practice at clinics throughout the United States: Visiting doctors perform abortion procedures at clinics regularly with no safety risk to patients - and without admitting privileges at a local hospital. The rationale behind Texas lawmakers this summer was not grounded in facts and reason; it was part of a politically driven scheme.
Similar schemes have been common in states with Republican governors or Republican-controlled state legislatures, such as Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota and Wisconsin. And provisions such as the one recently blocked in Texas have received similar treatment by the courts - that such regulations are a violation of the established law of Roe v. Wade, which protects a woman's right to have an abortion as part of her right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of the 14thamendment.
Texas, being a large and expansive state, has citizens located in isolated areas where medical treatment centers that provide abortions are distant.
The provision that Judge Yeakel blocked was estimated to have prevented over 22,000 women from having access to abortion facilities, according to the Texas Policy Evaluation Project.
This would have clearly been a violation of what is currently the law of the land.
Unfortunately, however, Judge Yeakel upheld a harmful portion of the law, which limits medication abortions to an outdated protocol for using abortion-inducing drugs. This protocol was set up by the Food and Drug Administration years ago, but most medical doctors prefer to use a different protocol, which they consider safer and more effective, according to The New York Times.
Judge Yeakel came to the wrong conclusion in saying that this did not place an "undue burden" on women patients and their doctors. The problem this has is that it may force women interested in having a medication-induced abortion to have to go through the surgical alternative.
This option is generally more traumatic and difficult to go through. And this, too, was designed to impede abortions - something state governments should not be doing.
As Hillary Clinton once said, "abortions should be legal and safe and rare." Blocking women from having the most current form of medication abortion treatment does not encompass that goal. It only makes it harder for women who want to get an abortion, as is their legal right, to do so.
Judge Yeakel will not have the last say in this matter, however, as the State of Texas has already filed an appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Those justices will have a chance to rule that disallowing women to have access to the newest forms of medication should not be tolerated. It takes away a decision that should be made at the discretion of a woman and her doctor.
What has been happening in Texas along with a host of other red states is not acceptable; these are attempts to restrict abortion rights under the false claim of saying certain steps are necessary for women's safety.
What needs to be emphasized now, however, is exactly that: It is not true.
email: editorial@ubspectrum.com
