The owner of Mississippi's onlyabortion clinic said Thursday she expected legislators to keep trying to putnew restrictions on the facility and the procedure, regardless of how a federaljudge rules in a fight over a new state law.
"They've made their intent quite clear," Diane Derzis told TheAssociated Press a day after a federal judge kept a restraining order againstthe law in place. "They're going to keep coming back. They're not going tobe satisfied until they have driven us out of business. I think everybody cansee that."
Employees at Jackson Women's Health Organization were still schedulingappointments for women seeking to terminate pregnancies Thursday.
A new law would require anyone who performs abortions at the clinic to be anOB-GYN with privileges to admit patients to a local hospital. The clinic fileda lawsuit June 27 seeking to stop the law, which it says creates unnecessarybureaucratic hurdles that could drive it out of business.
At least nine other states — Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri,Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah — require doctors who performabortions to have admitting privileges in local hospitals, according to NARALPro-Choice America, an abortion-rights group. The states all have at least oneabortion clinic.
"This situation is not simply isolated to Mississippi," the groupsaid in a statement. "These politically motivated restrictions are part ofa broader attempt to make it even harder for women, especially those who livein rural or under-served areas, to choose abortion care."
Judge Daniel P. Jordan III issued a temporary restraining order to block themeasure on July 1, the day it was supposed to take effect.
On Wednesday, Jordan heard two hours of arguments about the clinic's requestfor a preliminary injunction, which — if granted — would put the law on holdfor weeks or months. Jordan extended the temporary restraining order Wednesdaybut didn't indicate when he might rule on the request for a longer block.
Republican Gov. Phil Bryant said when he signed the bill in April that he wantsMississippi to be "abortion-free." Derzis said Bryant's statement,plus similar comments by Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, show lawmakers weretrying to eliminate access to a constitutionally protected medical procedure.
The law's sponsor, Republican Sam Mims of McComb, is chairman of the HousePublic Health Committee. He said Thursday that the measure was intended toprotect women's safety.
Derzis said the two out-of-state OB-GYNs who work at the clinic have applied toJackson-area hospitals but have received no response. The clinic's attorneystold Jordan there's no way to know when, or even if, the hospitals willconsider the requests.
Admitting privileges can be difficult to obtain. Some hospitals won't issuethem to out-of-state physicians, while hospitals that are affiliated withreligious groups might not want to associate with anyone who does electiveabortions.
The clinic says its physicians do almost all of the roughly 2,000 abortionsthat are performed in Mississippi each year. If Mississippi physicians perform10 or fewer abortions a month, or 100 or fewer a year, they can avoid havingtheir offices regulated as abortion facilities.
As the head of Personhood Mississippi, Les Riley of Pontotoc was active in a2011 effort to amend Mississippi's constitution to declare that life beginswhen a human egg is fertilized. The proposed constitutional amendment failed inthe November election. Riley often prays outside the abortion clinic inJackson, and he said in a phone interview Thursday that he wants lawmakers tocontinue pushing ways to regulate abortion.
"I think anything that legislators can do to make medical practices saferin Mississippi for patients, they ought to do," Riley said."Ultimately, our focus is answering the question of whether the unbornchild is a human being."