MSNBC’s Irin Carmon is worried sick about women in the South. They may soon find it harder to kill their unborn babies in poorly-regulated abortion clinics!
On Monday morning, Carmon penned an article on MSNBC.com apocalyptically titled “The End of Abortion Access in the South?”
The award-winning "champion of choice" essentially pleaded for the federal courts to step in and strike down laws in many southern states that would regulate abortion. A new Mississippi law, which was the main focus of her article, would require that abortions be performed by doctors who are board-certified OB/GYNs who enjoy admitting privileges at a local hospital. That particular law, Carmon fretted, would lead to the closure of the last remaining abortion clinic in the state. She issued a dire warning to her readers:
The same law that threatens to end legal abortion in Mississippi has swept across southern states, leaving women there with waning alternatives. Unless the federal courts step in, access may be decimated in a vast swath of the country, potentially closing three-quarters of the abortion clinics in states where 21 million women live.
Closing three-fourths of abortion clinics wouldn’t be the same as ending abortion access in the South, as Carmon’s title suggests. She went on to rail against “conservative judges” who have allowed southern states to pass abortion regulations. And of course, she snuck in a dig at “anti-abortion” conservatives:
Such laws would have the effect long desired by social conservatives: To end legal abortion, if not the need or desire for it. The difference is that now the anti-abortion movement has both willing state legislators and, at times, willing federal judges.
But again, these laws would not “end legal abortion.” They would lead to the closure of some clinics, but not others. Carmon herself wrote that a Texas law has closed one-third of abortion clinics in the state, and an Alabama law would close three-fifths of state clinics. She also cited Planned Parenthood data saying that new “admitting privileges laws” would shutter three-fifths of Louisiana’s clinics and two-thirds of Oklahoma’s.
When it comes to constitutional rights, the Left love to remind us that no right or liberty is absolute and may be subject to "common sense" restrictions. How quickly that changes when the right in question -- invented by an activist Supreme Court and not enshrined in the text of the Constitution -- is the one to take the life of the unborn.
