How a State Can Eliminate Abortion Access Without Roe Being Overruled

This is a really good piece about how Missouri was left with one abortion provider, and is likely soon to have zero:

The situation in Missouri is in large part a result of restrictions known as targeted regulation of abortion providers, or TRAP, laws. These laws, backed by anti-abortion groups in the 2000s, and especially after Republicans gained majorities in many state legislatures in 2010, include requirements that abortion doctors have admitting privileges at a local hospital or that abortion clinics have hallways of a certain width.

Abortion opponents have said that these laws are necessary to protect patients’ health, but many doctors and researchers say they are medically unfounded. Upadhyay, the obstetrics and gynecology professor, says her team has studied admitting privileges restrictions and found no effect on patient care.

But the laws do have an effect on clinics, often forcing them to close as the requirements prove too difficult to meet. It can be hard for abortion doctors to get admitting privileges, for instance, as hospitals often refuse to grant them.

TRAP laws passed around the country in the 2000s, but they have had an especially big impact in Missouri. In 2008, the state had five abortion clinics. In 2017, it had two. In October 2018, one of those clinics closed after it couldn’t meet a new requirement that abortion doctors have admitting privileges at a hospital within 15 minutes of the clinic, according to the Washington Post.

The Supreme Court in the 2016 decision Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt found TRAP laws in Texas unconstitutional. But the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Missouri in its jurisdiction, has failed to block such laws.

The ongoing march of restrictions has left the Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis to serve the more than 1 million patients of reproductive age in Missouri. Maine, the state with the lowest ratio of women of reproductive age to clinics, has one clinic for about every 13,000 women in the age group, Upadhyay said.

Her team has identified two cities in Missouri, Springfield and Columbia, as “abortion deserts,” where patients have to travel 100 miles or more to get an abortion.

The situation in Missouri is a reminder that while near-total bans in Southern states like Georgia and Alabama have gotten attention in recent months, clinic restrictions in the Midwest have already made abortion out of reach for many patients there.

There are “huge swaths of the middle of the country where there is no access,” Upadhyay said.

And while many of the near-total bans are meant as challenges to Roe v. Wade, Missouri could lose its last abortion provider without the Supreme Court saying a word.

If Whole Woman’s Health is overruled Roe is for all intents and purposes dead no matter how the Court describes how its holding relates to past precedents, and with a dissenter from WWH now the median vote that’s pretty much a mortal lock.

And, again, that’s why the “but in France they kiss on Main Street it’s marginally harder on paper to get an abortion after 12 weeks!!!!!!” arguments we’re going to be hearing more and more of is so disingenuous. What regulations are passed in countries where legislators are also doing everything they can to make abortions as inaccessible as possible are completely beside the point.