Republicans in Mississippi are already working hard to shut down the last abortion clinic in the state, imposing unnecessary, complicated regulations that may drive the clinic out of business and leave women with few options for surgical abortions. But that’s not enough for Mississippi’s anti-abortion lawmakers. Now, a GOP-sponsored bill also seeks to limit women’s access to medication-induced abortions as well.

The state’s Senate Health committee has approved a bill that would impose additional hurdles for women seeking to terminate a pregnancy with the abortion-inducing drugs mifepristone and misoprostol. The new measure would force women to make additional trips to the doctor’s office, as well as impose an outdated method of prescribing abortion-inducing medications that women’s health advocates warn will simply obstruct abortion access:

“The FDA protocol for medical abortion is an outdated procedure and it’s not commonly used,” said Felicia Brown-Williams, who lobbies for Planned Parenthood in Mississippi.

The measure would also require a woman to return to a doctor’s office to take a dose of misoprostol, instead of taking it at home, as is often now the practice. That would mean a total of four visits — one before prescription, one for the first course of mifepristone, one for the misoprostol, and then a follow-up visit 14 days later. [...]

“The reasons for these bills are to do everything possible to restrict abortion services,” Brown-Williams said. Her organization prescribes the drugs in other states, but not in Mississippi.

Only a doctor could prescribe the drugs under the proposed law, and the physician would have to report every prescription to the state Department of Health. Physicians would also have to report every “adverse event” to the FDA and the state Board of Medical Licensure. Any doctor who violates the law could face lawsuits, lose their licenses and be convicted of a misdemeanor.

Mississippi’s proposed bill is similar to legislation in Ohio that began restricting access to medication abortions in 2011. Because the outdated requirements require doctors to unnecessarily increase the dosage of mifepristone for their patients, Ohio’s law actually started raising the cost of the abortion pill for the women who need it — which could soon be the situation in Mississippi as well.

Making medication abortion services widely available helps lower the rate of later term abortions, since it gives women the opportunity to get the reproductive care they need as soon as possible. Of course, surgical abortions are an extremely safe medical procedure — but many women prefer the additional privacy that medicine-induced abortions allow them as they terminate a pregnancy, since they can take the RU-486 pill at home.

But the women in Mississippi may soon have very few places to turn for their abortion care. If GOP lawmakers successfully shutter the last remaining abortion clinic, there won’t be anywhere in the state to obtain a surgical abortion. And as politicians slowly chip away at access to medication abortions, women seeking reproductive health services — particularly the economically disadvantaged women who struggle to make multiple trips to the clinic, and may not be able to afford increasingly expensive RU-486 pills — may not have any safe abortion options left.

Mississippi’s only remaining abortion clinic, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, is struggling to stay open as it is faced with unnecessary, complicated restrictions imposed by the state’s Republican lawmakers. But its owners are staying positive — and they hope to send that positive message to the rest of the Jackson community, now that the clinic building has gotten a new, bright pink facelift:

The Jackson Women’s Health Organization over the weekend painted its one-story structure on the corner of State Street and Fondren Place in a vibrant, cheery hue. It’s in contrast to the dark shadow of legal woes that has plagued its operations since last year, when the state passed a law threatening its closure.

“It’s a woman’s color,” said clinic Owner Diane Derzis. “It says, ‘We’re right here, and we’re not going anywhere.’”

Since the paint job, the clinic has fielded numerous calls and heard dozens of comments from people saying they like it, according to clinic Director Shannon Brewer, who said the public reaction has surprised even clinic staff.

But since the Jackson clinic hasn’t been able to comply with the restrictive regulations — the new rules require the clinic’s doctors to secure hospital admitting privileges, but all seven hospitals in the surrounding area have so far denied them — it may be in trouble soon. On Thursday, the clinic received its first official notice that the state intends to revoke its operating license, although the women’s health organization will be able to remain open while it awaits a state hearing on the matter.

Anti-choice advocates claim they’re simply concerned about making sure clinics are safe. But at a closed-door event with abortion opponents earlier this month, Mississippi’s own governor revealed the GOP’s true intentions behind over-regulating the Jackson Women’s Health Organization. “My goal of course is to shut it down,” Gov. Phil Bryant (R) said. But it’s not going anywhere without a fight.

2011 and 2012 were both record-breaking years for new abortion restrictions, and abortion opponents are aren’t showing signs of letting up this year. The “personhood” movement to endow zygotes with the full rights of U.S. citizens, effectively outlawing all abortions and even some forms of contraception, has largely been a failure — but that doesn’t mean anti-choice lawmakers are giving up their quest to redefine the medical terms of pregnancy. The push for “fetal heartbeat” bans is the next anti-choice movement to watch.

Fetal heartbeat measures seek to outlaw abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected — which can occur as early as six weeks, before many women even know they’re pregnant — in direct contradiction to Roe v. Wade, which guarantees women’s right to an abortion until the point of viability at about 23 or 24 weeks of pregnancy. Despite the fact that heartbeat bills are much more extreme than the 20-week abortion bans that are already floundering in court for running afoul of Roe v. Wade, anti-choice lawmakers in at least five states are flirting with this type of legislation:

– OHIO: Anti-choice lawmakers in Ohio first advanced a heartbeat bill in 2011. After the measure was stalled in the state senate for over a year, abortion opponents pressured the legislature to take up the issue again during their lame duck session after the 2012 elections. But ultimately, the bill didn’t come up for a vote because the state Senate leader, Tom Niehaus (R-OH), acknowledged it was too controversial even among abortion opponents. Niehaus said he wanted to wait until lawmakers anti-choice community reached consensus on the measure — which means it could be back on the agenda sometime this year.

– MISSISSIPPI: About a week into the new year, GOP lawmakers in Mississippi filed a fetal heartbeat bill virtually identical to the one that failed to make it out of committee during the state’s last legislative session. Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) has already made it clear that he would sign such a bill if it ever reaches his desk. At a private anti-abortion event at the beginning of January, the governor confirmed that he supports banning abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected. “It would tell that mother, ‘Your child has a heartbeat,’” Bryant said.

– WYOMING: About two weeks ago, state Rep. Kendell Kroeker (R) introduced a measure to supersede the medical definition of viability. Current state law says abortions are prohibited after a fetus has “reached viability,” and Kroeker sought to replace those words with “a detectable fetal heartbeat.” The Republican lawmaker said the idea for his heartbeat bill just came to him one day because “it became clear that if a baby had a heartbeat, that seemed simple to me that it’s wrong to kill it.” On Monday, a House panel struck down Kroeker’s bill because it was too medically vague. But if Ohio and Mississippi are any indication, this likely won’t be the last time that fetal heartbeat legislation shows up in Wyoming.

– ARKANSAS: Republicans in Arkansas also hopped on the fetal heartbeat train this week, but they went a step further — state Sen. Jason Rapert’s (R) proposed heartbeat bill would prosecute the doctors who perform abortions after the arbitrary cut-off with a Class D felony, punishable by up to six years in prison and up to a $10,000 fine. And thanks to the strong Republican majorities in Arkansas’ legislature, this piece of legislation has a good chance of advancing. It easily passed out of committee on Wednesday and is now headed to the state Senate, where 19 of the chamber’s total 35 members have already signed onto it as co-sponsors.

– NORTH DAKOTA: Like Arkansas, the anti-choice politicians in North Dakota want to prosecute the doctors who perform abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected — and their heartbeat ban was part of the “flurry” of anti-abortion bills that lawmakers rushed to introduce around last week’s Roe v. Wade anniversary. A House committee is currently considering the measure, along with an even more radical “personhood” proposal. North Dakota has already imposed some the most restrictive anti-abortion laws in the nation, and women’s health advocates in the state warn that the passage of these new bills “would be tantamount to banning abortion” altogether.

Three of the states on this list — Mississippi, Arkansas, and North Dakota — only have a single surgical abortion clinic left in the entire state, which means women already have to overcome significant geographic barriers to obtain an abortion. If women’s window to access legal reproductive services is narrowed by about 17 weeks, as lawmakers attempt to move the cut-off back from 23 weeks of pregnancy to just 6 weeks, many women may not have enough time to make the trip.

In an interview with Kaiser Health News on Wednesday, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) explained he remains a staunch opponent of Obamacare because health care reform is unnecessary. According to Bryant, every single American already has the health care they need.

In order to justify his continued refusal to expand his state’s Medicaid program — which would extend health coverage to an additional 200,000 low-income Mississippians — the governor explained that poor people don’t need a “massive new program” when they can simply visit an emergency room to receive care:

BRYANT: There is no one who doesn’t have health care in America. No one. Now, they may end up going to the emergency room. There are better ways to deal with people that need health care than this massive new program.

This is not a new train of thought in the Republican Party. During the presidential election, GOP candidate Mitt Romney claimed that “we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance” by picking them up in ambulance and taking them to the hospital. But suggesting that uninsured Americans can simply get the care they need in the ER is naive. Emergency room and ambulatory care are some of the most expensive medical services in the industry, and the current health care safety net isn’t able to accommodate the strain of an influx of uninsured, low-income Americans who can’t foot those bills.

And, of course, Bryant’s assertion that “there is no one” who lacks health care in this country is false. The Census Bureau estimates that nearly 49 million people were uninsured in 2011. Over 20 percent of working Americans don’t have health care, and 40 percent of the people living in poverty were unable to visit a doctor in 2010. Some of the country’s poorest residents are currently unable to qualify for Medicaid coverage — and even when they do, they can still struggle to access the health services they need.

Obamacare makes big strides to improve Americans’ access to care, particularly with its optional Medicaid expansion, which could extend coverage to 17 million previously uninsured low-income people across the country. But if Republican leaders like Bryant — whose own state has a 19 percent uninsurance rate, one of the worst in the nation — continue to oppose health care reform by pretending uninsured Americans don’t exist, that progress will be placed in jeopardy.

Today marks the deadline for Mississippi’s sole remaining abortion clinic, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, to comply with the restrictive, unnecessary restrictions that the state’s Republican legislators imposed last summer. The new regulations require the clinic’s doctors to secure hospital admitting privileges, but all seven hospitals in the surrounding area have so far denied them. A Bush-appointed federal judge temporarily blocked the law to give the doctors more time to secure the privileges they need, but that order expires today.

In public, anti-choice advocates claim they support enacting additional regulations for abortion clinics as an important measure to protect women’s health and safety. But when Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) attended an anti-abortion event on Thursday, he didn’t feel the need the sugarcoat his real motives for signing the restrictive measure into law last year:

“My goal of course is to shut it down,” Gov. Phil Bryant said after addressing a group of pastors attending a pro-life luncheon Thursday in Jackson.

The governor doesn’t have that authority. Instead, by Friday lawyers representing the state must file a response in federal court to a motion by the Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Bryant himself doesn’t have the authority to ensure that women in Mississippi are forced to go without a single abortion clinic, but he certainly can move closer to his goal by imposing “Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers” (TRAP) laws with the sole intention of indirectly restricting women’s reproductive rights. TRAP laws have been a successful method of targeting abortion providers in other states, since clinics are often forced to close when they are unable to meet the complicated new standards.

Bryant isn’t the first politician to suggest that TRAP laws are nothing more than a politicized attack on women’s constitutional right to an abortion. After Virginia imposed similar restrictions on its abortion clinics last year, the state’s health commissioner saw right through them — and resigned in protest of the Virginia Board of Health’s anti-choice agenda.

Unfortunately for the women of Mississippi, Bryant’s move toward accomplishing his goal could have dire consequences for them. The state already has high rates of teen and unintended pregnancy, statistics that Bryant chooses to blame on teenagers rather than accept responsibility for his own policies that promote ineffective, medically inaccurate abstinence education in schools.

Following last week’s tragic shooting in Newtown, CT, tens of thousands of Americans have signed their names to a petition calling on the White House to “produce legislation that limits access to guns.” Some lifelong gun advocates have even begun to reconsider their stances and call for “common sense” gun safety policies.

Indeed, since gun regulations vary across states, some states currently impose harsher restrictions on getting a driver’s license, qualifying for food stamp assistance, accessing medical services, or even buying a pet than they do for purchasing a gun. In fact, as states passed dozens of new abortion restrictions over the past year, these are just five states where it’s significantly harder to get an abortion than a gun:

1) ARIZONA: When it comes to gun regulations and restrictions, Arizona is one of the most lenient states in the country. In fact, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg hired undercover agents last year to demonstrate just how easy it is to purchase firearms in Arizona without being subjected to a background check. But Arizona also passed one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country, requiring women seeking abortions to undergo a 24-hour waiting period, an in-person “counseling session,” and a mandatory ultrasound. The Arizona government also recently launched a misleading website dedicated to educating women about the dangerous decision to have an abortion, even though it is a safe medical procedure.

2) MISSOURI: After state lawmakers loosened regulations for purchasing firearms in 2007, there is no longer any waiting period for gun ownership in Missouri. There’s also no limit to the number of firearms that residents can purchase at one time, and gun owners don’t have to obtain a license or register their firearms. On the other hand, women seeking abortions in Missouri have several hurdles to overcome. Women are required to wait 24 hours before they can have an abortion, make an additional visit to the clinic to receive “in-person counseling,” and confirm that they have not been coerced into the procedure. And if Missouri lawmakers have their way, it could soon be more difficult for women to obtain affordable contraception than it is for them to obtain a gun.

3) MISSISSIPPI: There’s no license or permit required to purchase a firearm in Mississippi. The state also doesn’t require any kind of firearm safety training as a prerequisite to buying or carrying a gun, and does not require handguns to meet safety standards. But while lawmakers in Mississippi may not be particularly concerned about gun safety legislation, they are worried about women’s health clinics. After state legislators passed a restrictive regulation to hold abortion clinics to unnecessary standards — an indirect method of limiting women’s reproductive freedom by targeting abortion providers — the state’s clinics were forced to stop performing the medical procedure. There’s only one abortion clinic left in the entire state of Mississippi, and it may be forced to close in January.

4) TEXAS: Texas does not require a waiting period to buy guns, but it does impose a 24-hour waiting period on women who seek abortions. Texans also don’t need a license or registration for their firearm — but women who are looking for health services rather than a gun could be out of luck, since Texas legislators have been on a crusade to defund the women’s health organizations that provide abortion services. Preventing low-income women from having access to health services at clinics that also perform abortions isn’t enough for Texas Republicans, though — they also want to prevent doctors from even talking about abortion with their patients, although discussing guns would probably be considered fair game.

5) UTAH: Utah imposes one of the harshest restrictions on women who seek abortions, requiring them to wait a full 72 hours before undergoing the procedure. The same isn’t true for purchasing guns, since there’s no waiting period whatsoever for buying a firearm. Utah lawmakers may hope that women end up changing their mind about getting abortion if they’re required to wait several days and attend an in-person “counseling session,” but studies have shown that imposing those hurdles don’t actually impact women’s decisions. On the other hand, there’s evidence to suggest that imposing waiting periods for gun ownership can be an effective safeguard mechanism to provide enough time for background checks to go through, as well as allow for a “cooling off period” in the cases where an emotional altercation may have encouraged one of the participants to obtain a weapon.

Even though the increased numbers of young women using effective forms of birth control have contributed to a steady decline in the teen birth rate over the past decade, Mississippi has retained the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the nation. At an event this week to address the issue of unintended pregnancy in the state, Gov. Phil Bryant (R) told reporters he believes that although most adolescents do know how to obtain and use contraception, “the problem is teenagers do not care enough” about using birth control.

The GOP governor cited an education campaign that his administration sponsored this year as an example of the steps he’s taking to address the problem:

Bryant appointed a group earlier this year to study ways to reduce teenage pregnancy, and it has also sponsored town-hall meetings in Jackson and Lexington. The group has posted several billboards around the state with a photo of a pregnant belly, complete with stretch marks, next to the slogan: “Scars may fade. A baby is FOREVER.” [...]

Bryant told The Daily Leader that town-hall meetings to discuss teen pregnancy are important. “The road to success is in having an open, frank discussion and saying we need to stop this,” Bryant said.

Bryant has said repeatedly that he believes abstinence-only is the best approach to teaching young people about sex. It’s the approach that’s been used for years by the school districts that already were teaching optional classes about sex education.

In fact, Bryant’s approach to reducing the number of unintended pregnancies in his state is directly contradictory. Even though he claims Mississippi’s high teen pregnancy rate is not due to a lack of education about birth control, and rather a disregard for using it, the reality is that many teens choose to forgo contraception because they are grossly misinformed about how effective it is. According to the Centers for Disease Control, about one third of teen mothers decided not to use birth control when they became sexually active because they just didn’t believe they could get pregnant.

And that lack of education about effective contraception is a direct result of the abstinence-only education programs that Bryant supports. Studies have confirmed that when students aren’t given comprehensive, medically accurate information about how to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, they end up with serious gaps in their sexual education.

A 2011 Mississippi state law requires that some kind of gender-separated sexual education must be offered in public schools, but the school districts are split between providing abstinence-only education classes and “abstinence plus” classes that — while still primarily pushing shame-based abstinence messages — include some mention about some forms of contraception. Even though Bryant’s billboards may be trying to tell teenagers that babies are “forever,” young adults won’t start getting the message about effectively preventing unintended pregnancy until they receive medically accurate information about it.