LA Times Op-Ed: Anti-Choice TRAP Laws Exposed
Anti-choice state legislation has been alarmingly successful at limiting abortion access across the country over the last few years, writes CUNY Law Professor Caitlin Borgmann in an incisive opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times this week.
TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws are crafted to masquerade as women’s health regulations while in fact they are specifically intended to shut down abortion clinics. As Borgmann writes,
TRAP laws are designed to fly under the radar, by mimicking ordinary health regulations. In reality, they target abortion facilities and providers with special, onerous regulations that are exceedingly costly or impossible to meet.
Many of these sham restrictions sound innocuous enough at first. They often require that abortion providers have admitting privileges at local hospitals or mandate prohibitive and superfluous hospital-level facility upgrades for clinics with already-impeccable safety records,
However, the unwarranted regulations, denounced by national organizations such as the American Medical Association and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists because they are medically unneccessary, have forced the closure of dozens of clinics providing essential reproductive care, particularly in Southern states such as Texas and Mississippi.
Read the entire LA Times Op-Ed. >,