Comments Elsewhere

“It could be used to restrict the state’s ability to keep abortion safe. … Malpractice law and regulatory law (requiring that abortions be performed by licensed MDs) could be construed as restricting abortion.”

Laws such as these are very bad ideas and if an amendment were to ban them from going on the books, so much the better for the amendment. Abortion is not a particularly dangerous procedure; prior to legalization it was safely performed by Women’s Liberation activists in the Jane network after they had been trained by a paramedic. And of course there is nothing to prevent women who want an abortion only from a licensed MD from getting it.

Doctor-only and hospital-only laws are a staple of anti-abortion efforts to limit access to abortion; that’s because they dramatically restrict the availability of abortion and drive up the cost. Women who will be able to obtain abortions regardless of the cost or distance that they have to travel to get one will be fine, but the effects are insidious and oppressive for poor women who don’t have the same options.

Lucinda Cisler of New York Radical Women took up the point in Abortion Law Repeal (Sort Of): A Warning to Women back in 1969 (particularly in the closing sections). And the sad thing is that nearly everything she predicted three years before Roe has since come to pass.