JACKSON, Miss. — It was only recently that Dr. Willie Parker began flying down from Washington, heading to work at a vaultlike building that sits unassumingly on a busy thoroughfare.
On his way in, he might pass professor Matt Friedeman, standing on the sidewalk with a Bible and a handful of pamphlets, having made the four-minute drive from his home as he has done once a week for years.
And once inside, Parker will begin seeing the young women who have made their way from all corners of the state to the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi’s only abortion clinic.
All of these journeys may end soon after July 1, when a new Mississippi law goes into effect. The law, which was passed this spring by large margins in the state Legislature, requires all physicians associated with an abortion clinic to have admitting privileges at local hospitals.
It is no secret that the physicians who do the majority of the work at the clinic do not meet this requirement; three out of four of them, including Parker, do not even live in Mississippi. “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.
Diane Derzis, who owns the clinic, has threatened to sue. But for now the doctors at the clinic have been applying to local hospitals for admission, a process that will almost certainly not be over by July 1. What will happen that week remains unclear. A spokesman for the state Department of Health said that even if state officials inspect the clinic early July 2, as they plan to do, the clinic would have 10 days tocome up with a plan of compliance and “a reasonable amount of time” to put that plan into effect.
“It’s not like they don’t give them chances,” said Terri Herring, who is the president of the state chapter of the Pro Life America Network and has been lobbying the Mississippi Legislature for stricter regulations on abortion clinics for more than 25 years. “We’re dealing with a sacred cow.”
But state Rep. Sam Mims, the sponsor of the law, is determined that things will move faster this time.
In a letter sent Wednesday, he asked the state health officer “to personally insure” that the law is fully enforced July 2 and said his expectation was that any clinic not in compliance “must immediately cease performing abortions” until the requirements are met.
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. Mississippi political leaders have said the law is intended to safeguard the health of women, but they have not been circumspect about the larger goal.
“This is the only state where the proponents are this honest about what exactly their motivation is,” said Michelle Movahed, a lawyer with the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing the clinic.
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.”
Mims said that the law does not outlaw abortion; the idea, he said, was to require physicians at the clinic to be able to follow their patients to a localhospital if complications arise. But, he added, “if this abortion clinic is closed, I think it’s a great day for Mississippi.”
Mississippi’s abortion rate is already low, in part because of the restrictions currently in place. But it is not surprising that this may be the first state to have no abortion clinic. Mississippi is also 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 there occur out of wedlock.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 06/24/2012