The Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Planned Parenthood Southeast, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the ACLU of Alabama are joining forces to challenge HB 57, a new state law that would force most of Alabama’s health clinics to stop offering abortion services. Gov. Robert Bentley (R) approved the abortion clinic restrictions in April, and they are set to take effect on July 1.

Under HB 57, Alabama’s abortion providers will be forced to comply with new, burdensome regulations within 180 days. Clinics will need to update their facilities to meet the same standards as ambulatory surgical clinics — an unnecessary standard that typically requires health clinics to make expensive renovations like widening their doorways, installing water fountains, and updating their air conditioning systems — and abortion doctors will have to obtain admitting privileges from local hospitals.

Three of Alabama’s five abortion clinics will be unable to comply with the new regulations if the law goes into effect at the beginning of July. Two of those clinics are operated by Planned Parenthood. Unless HB 57 is successfully blocked in court, Alabama will no longer have any health facilities that provide abortion care in any of its three most populous cities: Birmingham, Mobile, or Montgomery.

“This law is part of a coordinated national campaign designed to outlaw abortion, state by state,” Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a press release. “This law insults women’s intelligence by claiming to be about safety, when the true intent is to shut down clinics and prevent a woman from making a real decision about her pregnancy.”

Even though abortion opponents claim that laws like HB 57 are important measures to protect women’s safety, women’s health advocates disagree. They say these types of restrictions constitute the Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, or TRAP — a popular anti-choice tactic designed to indirectly limit reproductive rights by forcing abortion clinics to close their doors. TRAP laws are currently threatening to shut down abortion clinics in states like North Dakota, Indiana, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Medical professionals don’t support TRAP laws. Just earlier this week, a national group representing thousands of OB-GYNs across the country publicly came out against any type of anti-abortion legislation that compromises doctor/patient relationships by imposing a political agenda onto medical care. Doctors have also spoken out specifically against Alabama’s law. “Requiring doctors who provide abortions to have staff privileges at a nearby hospital won’t make women safer and, in fact, could jeopardize their health by depriving women in Alabama access to safe, high-quality health care,” Dr. Anne Davis, an OB-GYN who serves as the consulting medical director at Physicians for Reproductive Health, said in a statement in reference to HB 57.

Women’s health advocates are hoping that the case in Alabama will reflect the outcome of a similar lawsuit in Mississippi, where a federal judge recently blocked a TRAP law from taking effect. Without that court decision, the only abortion clinic left in the entire state of Mississippi would have been forced to close.

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.