Legislative Protection For Abortion Access

A good article here about the conflict surrounding a new Planned Parenthood clinic in Aurora, IL. The clinic has been delayed by zoning issues with the local government, which is also threatening to pass an inevitably useless parental involvement regulation. The tactic of arbitrarily using zoning or other regulations as a pretext to shut down clinics — see also Missouri, Mississippi, and Ohio — is particularly important, with the potential to place far more severe burdens on abortion access than any of the regulations explicitly upheld in Casey. Such actions also attract much less attention than trying to ban abortion outright.

Obviously, using litigation is one important element of a strategy to counter these methods. However, local abortion regulations like parental notification have already been held to be constitutional, and given the current composition of the federal courts one can’t be optimistic of an “undue burden” standard being applied with much teeth when it comes to states using regulations to shut down safe abortion clinics. In conservative states, this is a serious problem for the time being. But in pro-choice states, supporters of reproductive freedom should push for uniform access laws that prevent localities from obstructing poor women’s abortion access and also prevent zoning laws from treating abortion clinics differently than other non-residential entities. Thinking about ways to legislatively protect abortion rights — as Elliot Spitzer has done in New York — should be an important part of the pro-choice arsenal.