Mississippi — On March 2nd, the Supreme Court will review the Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt case, the abortion case that will be decided by Justice Anthony Kennedy. Depending on Kennedy’s decision, the states of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas may be facing the elimination of legal abortion.
Texas, like many other states in the south, has imposed new legal standards for abortion clinics. These new legal measures are so difficult for the clinics to maintain that the majority of them have been forced or will be forced to close.
Some of the new legal requirements assure that abortions now need to take place in an ambulatory surgical center, –a millionaire facility for a small procedure that sometimes just involves taking a pill–. Also, doctors must have admitting privileges at the local hospitals.
The Whole Woman’s Health clinic in Mississippi is the only remaining clinic in the state. The doctors at the clinic have applied for this privileges in more than 13 hospitals and they have all been denied. According to the American medical association and the American college of obstetricians and gynecologist, these admitting privileges are medically unnecessary.
“My goal is to end abortion in Mississippi,” assured the governor of Mississippi Phil Bryant, during his state of the state speech. But, in reality, if the ruling assures that these measures are necessary, thousands of women seeking for legal abortion will be forced to flee towards the border to Mexico and acquire illegal abortion pills to finish the unwanted pregnancies. This would result in precarious women’s health and sanitation issues.
Regarding Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion on abortion, he upholds the federal partial-birth abortion ban, and assures the horror that he sees in abortion. This opinion was detailed about how the abortion procedure was performed using the word “baby” assuming it’s a child’s form. According to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kennedy refers to obstetricians and gynecologists as “abortion doctors” all of this statements come from the Gonzales V. Carhartt case in 2007; a case that upheld the partial- birth abortion ban act in 2003.
There have been multiple protests in the south regarding the abortion matter and the supreme court was forced to order one of the most serious laws in the US, the limit protest in Massachusetts, because of the violence in the protests.
The abortion clinics hope for a Kennedy that understand that these restrictions endanger women, making legal abortion harder to access.
Source: NBC News