Skip to main content

Virginia regulations on abortion clinics

Virginia is on its way to forcing abortion clinics to adhere to difficult-to-meet building requirements (essentially, those of hospitals). These regulations will likely put many abortion clinics in the state out of business temporarily or permanently.

These kinds of regulations are known as "TRAP" laws (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers). The idea is to regulate abortion clinics in a way that looks innocuous but makes continued operation impossible.

What Virginia is doing with building regulations has been in vogue lately with state governments. The asserted reason for adding additional regulations on abortion providers is to ensure the highest standard of safety and care for women who are undergoing a serious medical procedure. The problem is that a) there is little to no evidence that the additional regulations are necessary and will in fact reduce incidents of complications in abortions (the vast majority of which are relatively simple and safe 5-10 minute procedures), and b) similar regulations are not being imposed on other types of comparable medical clinics or facilities. 

This is one of those areas of American politics that is just pure theater: Everyone knows what pro-life government officials are doing, yet those officials keep up the pretense. It baffles me why, under the Casey decision, TRAP laws are not easily found unconstitutional as "undue burdens."  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Medically necessary abortions: The battle of the experts

Apparently, Representative Joe Walsh is not entirely alone! The assertion that an abortion is never medically necessary has been floating around in the pro-life universe for at least a little while. We are now witnessing a battle of the experts. One the one side is Joe Walsh and friends. Walsh himself released a pdf document with quotations from several doctors-- including some historically prominent pro-choice doctors, like Alan Guttmacher-- making the 'never medically necessary' claim seem quite reasonable. Also on Walsh's side are several doctors  who particpated in a recent "International Symposium on Maternal Health" in Dublin. Ireland, despite a European Court of Human Rights ruling in 1992 , has a total ban on abortion. Irish pro-lifers want the country's politicians to resist pressure to implement even a life exception, so the question of medical necessity is directly relevant there. The "Dublin Declaration," released after the S...
3 comments
Read more

Asking Pope Francis to reexamine abortion

Philosopher Gary Gutting, who always writes something interesting for The Stone column in The New York Times , recently asked if Pope Francis might reconsider the Catholic Church's traditional absolutist opposition to abortion. In doing so, Gutting makes a case for a kind of minimalist justification for abortion-- that is, abortion is immoral in most circumstances but there are a few cases where abortion is justified (in the case of rape, for example).  For that reason, the column makes for informative reading. Still, Gutting puts the cart before the horse: how and why would Pope Francis review the Church's view on abortion before reexamining its even-more-restrictive view of artificial contraception?  Anything can happen, of course, but Pope Francis has not really indicated a willingness to reconsider the doctrine of the Church on sex, conception, and abortion. Everything I have read from and about Francis is that he is advocating for a change of tone and emphas...
Post a Comment
Read more