Calling the Anti-Choice Bluff
By As I have noted, the reactionary response to the horrors of the Gosnell clinic was to propose laws…that would make Gosnells more likely and safe first trimester abortions much harder to obtain. As Irin Carmon reports, California is responding to the lessons of Gosnell in a way that’s actually concerned with women’s safety:
The Early Access to Abortion Bill will enable trained nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives, and physician assistants to perform first-trimester abortions by vacuum aspiration. It’s the logic of cause and effect: If you make it easier to access an abortion, earlier, and from a legitimate provider, there will be fewer desperate customers turning to unsafe providers.
Nearly one third of women will have an abortion before the age of 45, but the number of providers is at best stagnant and in many places diminishing. In California, the country’s most populous state, almost half of women live in a county without an abortion provider. Nationally, the number of counties without an abortion provider is 87%–where a third of American women live.
The new law puts California in stark contrast with other states. States like Arizona have in recent years have already explicitly banned anyone but a doctor from performing the relatively simple first-trimester procedure. In the last few months alone, Iowa moved to prevent women in rural areas from consulting with a doctor via webcam before taking abortion pills; most of Virginia’s clinics will have their fate determined by the next election; and new Texas laws threaten to close one-third of abortion clinics. There’s another departure from those states: California’s law is guided by actual medical evidence, including a multi-year empirical study.
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Women who went to Gosnell, sometimes repeatedly and usually without complaint, plainly felt they had no other choice. They were predominately low-income and women of color–the same groups that will be the likeliest to benefit from California’s law, since research shows that they are more likely to see nurse practitioners or physician assistants than obstetricians and gynecologists.
In theory, abortion “centrists” should applaud the legislation. In practice, they will oppose it, because it contradicts their fundamental policy preference, which is to combine a rhetorical focus on the small minority of late-term abortions with an array of policies that make late-term abortions more likely while serving no legitimate purpose whatsoever.