Abortion Fight in Mississippi Reaches Official Clusterfuck Status

On the last episode of What the Shit Is Going On in Mississippi?, the state’s overwhelmingly Republican lawmakers passed a law that would have placed unnecessary new requirements on the state’s last remaining abortion clinic, effectively forcing it to close its doors. This was all done under the guise of “protecting women,” which we know was crap because after the law’s passage, a bunch of lawmakers started running around bragging about how they were eliminating abortion in the state, which is technically not-constitutionally-okay. Legal advocacy groups intervened, and a judge allowed the clinic to stay open while they tried to meet the requirements set forth by the bill. Now, several months later, abortion rights groups are asking the judge to throw the whole law out on the grounds that meeting the law’s requirements is completely impossible. And that’s what the shit is going on in Mississippi.

Mississippi’s TRAP (or Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) law specifically targeted the Jackson Women’s Health Care Clinic by requiring that all doctors practicing there be board-certified OB-GYN’s with admitting privileges at local hospitals. The first part wasn’t a problem for the three doctors who practice at JWHO; the second part was. Because anti-abortion people are gun-wavingly, doctor murderingly insane, many abortion practitioners are understandably hesitant to live in areas with a lot of shouting sign holding types, and two of JWHO’s doctors aren’t local residents. Hospitals have the right to grant or refuse admitting privileges to whatever doctors they want just because, and so the law effectively put the fate of abortion rights in the entire state of Mississippi in the hands of a few hospital administrators in the greater Jackson area.

But now that every single hospital has refused to grant JWHO’s doctors admitting privileges, those scrappy, huggable Center for Reproductive Rights is spearheading a renewed legal fight to keep the law from being enforced. Today, they filed an injunction with a federal court in Jackson in the hopes that a judge will agree that the new law is garbage, and women in Mississippi won’t have to travel at least 3 hours to a state with a 24 hour waiting period in order to end an unwanted pregnancy.

As it stands, things are pretty rough if you accidentally get pregnant in the state of Mississippi. But they’ll be even worse if the last option for elective abortions is closed by a band of rabid ideologues.

Further, if lawmakers are so concerned with protecting women, perhaps they should work on the state’s sky high obesity rate, pathetically low education and high poverty rates, or all of the other glorious states of affairs that have combined to make Mississippi the worst state in America in which to live.