The Left has shifted from supporting legal abortion to also pushing for “reproductive justice,” or the idea that everyone should have taxpayer-funded abortion clinics within a certain radius of their home. Legal abortion isn’t enough — now the government has an obligation to make accessing abortion more convenient for you, they say.
Many abortion advocates are lamenting that abortion clinics are “out of reach” for too many women. According to the New York Times, 11.3 million women are more than a one-hour drive from the nearest abortion facility. The ACLU noted that many states have less than a third of the abortion clinics they had 30 years ago and attributed the change to restrictive abortion regulations. However, this is simply untrue, and a look at the most recent Supreme Court precedent reveals this.
Because of Roe v. Wade, the greatest burden states can impose on abortion clinics is holding them and hospitals to similar safety standards (a completely reasonable expectation), or requiring them to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, and even many of the latter laws have been struck down. In Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law requiring all abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles because it would have put an “undue burden” on women seeking abortion by closing a significant number of clinics. A similar law in Louisiana was blocked by the Supreme Court just a few months ago.
Anyone who says hospital admitting privilege requirements are shutting down abortion clinics is clearly unaware of the most recent legal precedent on the matter.
Very few Planned Parenthood clinics are shut down by abortion regulations (and if a Planned Parenthood clinic is shut down by what minor abortion regulations are allowed, that tells you where its focus was).
Rather, clinics are being shut down because people just aren’t getting abortions as often as they used to. Maybe it’s because birth control is increasingly prevalent, or maybe the pro-life culture is permeating more than celebrity tweets might have you believe. Either way, the abortion numbers don’t lie.
According to the most recent numbers from the Guttmacher Institute which is a pro-choice institution, there were twice as many abortions performed in 1981 as there were in 2014, and abortion is Planned Parenthood’s most profitable service. According to Planned Parenthood’s own website, first trimester abortions cost a minimum of $350 and can cost as much as $950. Any business would be struggling if its most profitable service got cut in half like this. It’s basic economics.
According to CBS, there are currently six states with only one abortion clinic. Interestingly, Planned Parenthood is perfectly equipped to increase abortion access in these states, if it wanted to, as the abortion giant’s federal funding recently reached an all-time high of $563.8 million per year. If Planned Parenthood wants to build an abortion clinic in rural West Virginia, there’s no law stopping them. If they want to open one in rural Montana, there’s no law stopping them. The same can be said for almost everywhere else in the country.
The greatest restriction a state government could impose is a requirement that abortion clinics be constructed with requirements similar to that of a hospital, primarily so the doors and hallways are wide enough for women to be safely rolled out of the clinic in case of an emergency. This may pose a significant burden for a current clinic that has already been built with different sized doors, hallways, etc. But if Planned Parenthood wants to build new clinics in rural areas, they just need to build in compliance with the preexisting regulation. It’s that simple.
Yet Planned Parenthood refuses to realize that operating abortion clinics in rural and predominately pro-life areas of the country is not a profitable endeavor.
The force shutting down abortion clinics is not the heavy hand of government. It’s the invisible hand of the free market.
