Over 60 percent of the Americans living in the Deep South support Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, according to the results from a new poll that surveyed a broad sample of people in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.

The poll, conducted between March and April by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, found that support for Medicaid expansion is somewhat divided along partisan lines. Nevertheless, a solid majority of residents in each of the five Deep South states favor expanding the public insurance program to extend coverage to additional uninsured Americans:

(Credit: Families USA)

That public support stands in sharp contrast to the five states’ political leaders, who have resisted cooperating with health care reform at any cost. The GOP governors in each of those Southern states — Govs. Robert Bentley (R-AL), Nathan Deal (R-GA), Bobby Jindal (R-LA), Phil Bryant (R-MS), and Nikki Haley (R-SC) — have refused to expand their Medicaid programs.

“This survey clearly shows that governors and state legislators in the South who are resisting the Medicaid expansion are out-of-step with their constituents,” Brian D. Smedley, the director of the Joint Center’s Health Policy Institute, pointed out.

The broad public support for Medicaid expansion in this region makes sense. Low-income Americans in the South who don’t currently qualify for their state’s Medicaid program are being forced to simply skip out on medical care, and expanding Medicaid’s eligibility levels would ensure that they can access the health treatment they need. Deeply red Southern states also tend to have worse health outcomes compared to Democratic-controlled states on the coasts, and expanding Medicaid could help lessen some of those disparities.

But political resistance to Obamacare, even in the states that stand to benefit the most from it, remains strong. The governors in highly uninsured states are still refusing to consider cooperating with the Medicaid provision of the health reform law. And even when Republican governors reluctantly agree that Medicaid expansion is the right decision for their constituents, GOP-controlled legislatures in their states continue to block it.

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) approved new abortion clinic restrictions on Tuesday that threaten to, in the words of Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, “essentially ban abortion statewide.” Bentley claims the new law will simply ensure that Alabama’s abortion clinics are held to appropriate safety standards. But in reality, the complicated new restrictions will put an unnecessary burden on the state’s handful of remaining clinics, likely forcing them to close their doors.

Alabama is following in the footsteps of states like North Dakota and Mississippi, where Republican lawmakers have passed similar laws to indirectly restrict abortion access by targeting women’s health clinics. That popular anti-choice tactic — known as the Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, or TRAP — represents one of the most serious affronts to reproductive rights in the country because it is such an effective way to cut off women’s access to abortion.

After Alabama’s new TRAP law takes effect on July 1, the state’s four licensed abortion clinics will have 180 days to meet the new standards. Clinics will need to update their facilities to meet all the same standards as ambulatory surgical clinics — which often includes unnecessary measures like widening doorways and replacing flooring — and abortion doctors will be required to obtain admitting privileges from local hospitals. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Many abortion clinics can’t afford to make those costly updates to their buildings, and hospitals often deny abortion providers admitting privileges even after they apply for them.

Nikema Williams, the vice president of Planned Parenthood Southeast, told the Associated Press that there’s no good reason to require Alabama’s abortion clinics to adhere to these arbitrary standards. “Having admitting privileges is not a requirement for being a licensed medical provider and is not a designation of the quality of a provider. Admitting privileges do not hasten a patient’s care in the event of an emergency,” she explained.

Nevertheless, Republicans are successfully advancing TRAP laws all over the country this year. The anti-choice lawmakers in Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, and Texas are all also currently considering these type of abortion clinic restrictions.

Anti-choice Republicans in Alabama are inching closer toward successfully forcing the state’s five remaining abortion clinics to close their doors. On Tuesday, the Alabama House of Representatives approved a bill that would impose complicated, unnecessary restrictions on abortion providers — the exact same type of restriction that is threatening to close Mississippi’s last abortion clinic.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mary Sue McCurkin (R), claims the measure is “truly is a women’s rights bill” because it “protects the right of women having an abortion to have it in a healthy, safe environment.”

But that’s a standard obfuscation in the anti-abortion community. In fact, under the guise of being concerned about women’s safety, anti-choice lawmakers indirectly restrict women’s reproductive rights by subjecting abortion clinics and doctors to burdensome requirements that aren’t placed on other medical professionals. “Ever since we legalized abortion in 1973, there have always been attempts to restrict access to women by overregulation,” Alabama Rep. Patricia Todd (D), who opposes the proposed bill, pointed out during the debate on the House floor.

After three hours of debate, however, the bill ultimately passed by a 73-23 vote. The legislation now heads to the GOP-controlled Senate.

Rep. Mary Sue McClurkin (R), sponsor of HB 57

The bill, the so-called “Women’s Health and Safety Act,” passed the Republican-controlled House Health Committee on Wednesday morning, and could come to vote in the full legislature as soon as Thursday. If passed, it would require clinics to meet certain architectural standards and have a physician present for all abortions — a provision Republicans claim is for the safety of patients, but is in fact a smokescreen designed to make compliance as difficult as possible:

But critics charged the bill sets impossible standards that have little to do with patient safety and that the bill stems from a template created by the pro-life group Americans United for Life.

“This bill targets regulatory standards of architectural structure, equipment and staffing that are totally unnecessary and cannot be met by the clinics,” said Gloria Gray, director of the West Alabama Women’s Health Center in Tuscaloosa. “How does requiring a six-foot hallway make it safer for a woman to have an abortion?”

Among the staffing concerns is a provision which states that only a licensed physician with admitting privileges to a hospital within the same metropolitan area as the clinic be allowed to administer abortion-inducing drugs.

In Tennessee, an abortion clinic that had been open for nearly four decades was forced to close after a similar bill was passed in that state last year. And in neighboring Mississippi, the state’s one and only abortion clinic may have to close its doors after a new law went into effect last year requiring a physician with admitting privileges to be present for all abortions.

Abortion clinics, especially ones in states where taxpayer funding is negligible if it exists at all, don’t often have room in their budgets to pay licensed physicians. The end result — much to the delight of the anti-choice lawmakers who propose these bills — is that clinics fall out of compliance and are forced to close or end their abortion services.

As the 40th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision approaches, anti-abortion fervor is reaching a fever pitch in some conservative areas. At Alabama’s Women Center for Reproductive Alternatives — one of just a few reproductive health resources in the entire state — anti-abortion protests have been intensifying for the past several months, culminating in at least one arrest and increased numbers of volunteer clinic escorts working to safeguard the women walking to and from the health center.

Since state law requires the Alabama Women’s Center to list the days when abortion procedures might be performed, anti-abortion protesters are able to plan their harassment for days when the women visiting the clinic are likely to be seeking an abortion. The protesters are now monitored by local police officers, and clinic escorts will park women’s cars for them so they can slip into the back door of the clinic to avoid confrontations.

Pamela Watters, one of the women’s health advocates who helps organize clinic escorts, told the Alabama press what the volunteers have been up against since they started escorting women in October:

This week, pro-life protestor Joyce Fecteau, 70, was arrested for assault based on an incident alleged to have happened the week of Christmas. A pro-choice protestor told police that Fecteau sprayed her in the face with what Fecteau says is holy water.

Fecteau told The Huntsville Times that she was spritzing holy water to cleanse the air of smoke from a pro-choicer’s sage smudge, and that the pro-choice protestor walked into the spray. [...]

Pro-choice marchers recalled a particularly painful event last month when a woman whose baby had died en utero was coming to the clinic to have it removed. In an awful coincidence, that was the day, Watters said, when the pro-life demonstrators collected a children’s choir on the sidewalk to sing “Happy Birthday Dead Baby” to anyone driving in.

“Will had to physically restrain the father,” Watters said, nodding to one of the men marching in a pro-choice jacket. “And by the time she walked through them, she was an emotional wreck.”

Even though Roe has guaranteed women’s constitutional right to an abortion for nearly 40 years, the case study in Alabama highlights the anti-choice activity that works to undermine legal abortion services at the state level. Alabama already places some of the nation’s most stringent restrictions on women who seek abortions. Women are required to receive counseling intended to talk them out of terminating their pregnancy, undergo a 24 hour waiting period, and take a mandatory ultrasound. Late term abortions are not permitted, and insurance plans in the state’s health exchange won’t cover abortion services. Nonetheless, anti-abortion activists aren’t satisfied — they also want to physically and emotionally intimidate the women coming and going from women’s health clinics.

Over the past two decades, incidents of violent harassment at abortion clinics have been on the rise. Research suggests that restrictive abortion legislation — such as the multiple anti-choice laws in Alabama — could contribute to the issue by creating a hostile environment and encouraging anti-abortion activists’ fervor. In some cases, anti-abortion harassment has actually gotten so bad that it has forced health clinics to close their doors.

State Rep. Patricia Todd (D)

Alabama State Rep. Patricia Todd (D), the state’s first openly gay legislator, is once again introducing a bill to repeal the state’s 1992 sex education law, which requires teacehrs to teach that homosexuality is illegal and that “abstinence from sexual intercourse outside of lawful marriage is the expected social standard.” Todd pre-filed the bill ahead of the 2013 legislative session that will begin on February 5.

If the legislature approves the law, then the Alabama Department of Education would be in charge of establishing the state’s sex education programs instead of the legislature:

“The Department of Education needs to be making those guidelines, not the Legislature,” Todd said.

“We need to make sure there is evidence-based education being done in the schools, and all the evidence shows that abstinence-only is not effective.”

The bill would have no effect on the state’s sexual-misconduct law, which makes homosexual acts a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year imprisonment. But it would strike requirements that teachers emphasize “homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public and that homosexual conduct is a criminal offense.”

Todd sponsored the same bill during the 2012 session along with Republican Rep. Mary Sue McClurkin, but it failed to make it out of committee.

Including Alabama, 37 states currently emphasize abstinence in their sexual health curricula. Alabama is one of 19 states that actually require sex education programs to include information about the importance of sex only within marriage. But considering the fact that the states with abstinence-only policies are facing staggering teen pregnancy rates, some conservatives in Mississippi are beginning to slowly move away from abstinence-only education curricula in favor of including contraceptive options as well.