Court Ruling Preserves Lone Mississippi Abortion Clinic

Image: Fibonacci Blue
Image: Fibonacci Blue

As Diana Hsieh and I discuss in “The Assault on Abortion Rights Undermines All Our Liberties,” conservatives in various states have sought to regulate abortion clinics out of existence, thereby borrowing a political tactic the left commonly uses in other contexts. The Onion satirizes such laws: “New Anti-Abortion Legislation Requires Doctors To Scale 18-Foot Wall Surrounding Clinic.” Partly as a consequence of such laws, Mississippi has only a single abortion clinic—Jackson Women’s Health Organization—which nearly shut down when its doctor was  unable to obtain admitting privileges to a local hospital, as state law requires, as Emily Le Coz reports for the Clarion-Ledger. But, as Le Coz reports, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld a preliminary injunction against the law in question, (perhaps) “essentially dooming the state law that had threatened to close” the clinic.