At the federal level, through the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, women are supposed to have access to safe and legal abortions in all of the United States.
Separately, states are legally prevented from enacting laws that contradict federal laws.
However, as has been demonstrated in Mississippi, there are ways to get around the implications of these two facts.
According to a story reported this week in The New York Times, and by other news outlets, a law passed this spring in Mississippi requires all physicians associated with an abortion clinic to have admitting privileges at local hospitals.
The physicians who do the majority of the work at the Jackson Women's Health Organization, the only remaining clinic that performs abortions in Mississippi, do not currently meet this requirement.
"If it closes that clinic," Gov. Phil Bryant was quoted as saying during the bill-signing ceremony, "then so be it." Mississippi would then be the only state with no abortion clinic.
The Mississippi law goes into effect July 1. The doctors at the clinic have been applying to local hospitals for admission, a process that will most likely not be completed by July 1.
According to the reporting by the Times, Mississippi is the poorest state in the country and has the highest birth rate among teenagers, and the second-highest infant mortality rate, according to statistics compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation. More than half of births here occur out of wedlock. Of the 2,297 women who had abortions in Mississippi in 2010, according to the State Department of Health, most were unmarried, most already had at least one child and more than three-quarters were black.
One state legislator, Bubba Carpenter, was videotaped in May telling a gathering of Republicans that with the new law the Legislature had “literally stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi.” This makes it very clear that the goal of this legislation is not to protect women's health, or to ensure that the doctor performing the abortion can admit the women to a hospital in Mississippi if necessary; the goal of this legislation is clearly to stop abortion in Mississippi, although this is a violation of Federal law providing women in all 50 states access to legal abortion services.
One of the most interesting things about Carpenter's videotaped remarks is that he says "you have to have moral values"; apparently "moral values" are part of the rationale for this abortion-blocking legislation.
1) How is it morally valuable to violate the spirit of federal law and deny women access to safe and legal abortion in one of the United States?
2) How is it morally valuable to send women in Mississippi out of state to obtain abortions because they cannot obtain them there, although according to Federal law they should be able to obtain them in Mississippi?
3) How is it morally valuable to prevent access to abortion, leaving some women to potentially kill themselves by inducing their own abortions or going to amateurs because they think they have no choice?
Is their pride in circumnavigating Federal law a significant moral failing of legislators in Mississippi?
The clinic intends to sue. Nine other states have local admitting requirements for abortion providers, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group focused on sexual and reproductive health and rights. But in none of those states did such a rule effectively end abortion, and that will be the crux of the legal fight.