Oklahoma’s Unabashed Attack on Abortion

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/26/opinion/oklahomas-unabashed-attack-on-abortion.html

Version 0 of 1.

Give Oklahoma lawmakers points, at least, for honesty. They wanted to ban abortion, so they voted effectively to do just that — without offering any pretense of trying to protect women’s health, as supporters of other virulent anti-choice laws in states like Texas have done.

Last Thursday, the Oklahoma House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to bar doctors from performing abortions in all cases except to save the woman’s life. A doctor who violates the law would be committing a felony, punishable by up to three years in prison and the loss of his or her medical license.

If the House bill gets final approval from the State Senate, which passed an earlier version in March, it will be sent to Gov. Mary Fallin, a Republican, who has signed several other measures to reduce women’s access to abortion and reproductive health care in Oklahoma, where only two abortion clinics remain.

This legislation is plainly unconstitutional, and would be struck down as quickly as earlier attempts to ban abortion outright — which Utah and Louisiana tried in 1991. Since Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld a woman’s right to an abortion before the fetus is viable.

While other states haven’t attempted an outright ban in recent years, they have managed to shut down clinics that offer abortion by imposing expensive and unnecessary staffing and facilities standards and requiring their doctors to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Those laws, and others like them, have left millions of mostly lower-income women without access to abortion and other reproductive health services. The Supreme Court in March heard arguments over the Texas law, which has already forced the closing of about half the roughly 40 clinics in the state; the court is expected to issue a decision by the end of June.

The Oklahoma Legislature has chosen a different tack to block women from exercising their constitutional right. And though the bill appears to criminalize only the actions of doctors, it is by no means clear that women would escape prosecution. For example, around the country, women who attempt to perform abortions on themselves have been charged with crimes, including murder.

For years, anti-abortion forces have relied on onerous regulations on providers to limit abortion services and lied about their true purpose because they know that a vast majority of Americans support a woman’s right to choose and that the Supreme Court has affirmed that right for more than four decades. Governor Fallin would save everyone the time and expense of litigation by vetoing the bill.