Via picardfacepalm.com

The Texas Senate passed three new abortion regulations today, during a special session that was supposed to be about things like jobs or the economy. Apparently, Texas legislators can’t focus on jobs so long as they are distracted by thoughts of unregulated ladybits. These regulations serve no purpose other than to make operating a clinic that provides abortion services either impractical or impossible, and driving them out of business. (The fact that this is a direct regulation on business that is likely to eliminate jobs probably isn’t lost on state Republicans. They just don’t care.) Here’s as good a summary as I can manage off the top of my head (copied from a series of Facebook comments), so some of this may not be 100% accurate.

The first regulation requires abortions to take place in ambulatory surgical centers, which are facilities that provide outpatient surgical care and must conform to a set of health and safety standards geared towards procedures involving anesthesia and incisions. Abortions generally don’t involve either of those things, so requiring them to take place in an ambulatory surgical center means that either (1) existing ASCs must take in existing abortion providers, or (2) facilities that currently provide abortions must meet state requirements for ASCs, even though they will never perform a surgery. Existing ASCs have no reason to start providing abortions, and nearly every incentive not to be targeted by protesters, and upgrades to ASC certification would cost current providers thousands upon thousands of dollars and give ideologues on the bodies that handle licensing endless opportunities to find ways to deny them. There is no reason for this regulation except to drive abortion provers out of business.

The second regulation requires doctors providing abortions to have admitting privileges to a hospital within 30 miles. I’m not sure what goes into getting admitting privileges, but I think it generally involve doctors who routinely work at or with that hospital. Again, this requirement serves no purpose but to make life harder for abortion providers. More and more doctors who provide abortions travel to clinics around the state, so this regulation would force them either to undertake an unreasonable and unsustainable level of admitting privileges, or stay within a 30-mile radius of wherever they are. The one plausible justification I’ve heard for this is that doctors who perform abortions need admitting privileges to local hospitals in case complications occur that require an immediate trip to the emergency room, but that’s not true, from what I’ve read.

The third regulation requires doctors to administer RU-486 in person. I’m not sure how that particular drug is administered. I know it’s more than just a pill or an injection, but so is chemotherapy, and nothing requires doctors to do that personally. Same goes for pain medication infusers. In fact, we entrust most routine procedures to nurses and medical techs, not to mention physician’s assistants and nurse practitioners. Unless administering RU-486 requires monitoring and reactions to complications on par with open heart surgery (I’m sure it doesn’t), this is just another way to make it difficult for doctors.

This is about controlling women’s sexuality. Period. I have yet to see an argument against abortion, along with the trumped-up arguments against birth control and reproductive care, that didn’t eventually boil down to “she shouldn’t have had sex.” The argument flagrantly fails to take into account the myriad ways people can become pregnant, the non-birth-control benefits of the pill, or the fact that people are redefining the very definitions of “birth control” and “abortion” as we go along. At this point, given all the information out there, I have to conclude that people who still oppose abortion on the grounds I’ve heard cited are either lying or are too dumb to have an opinion worth taking seriously.

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