Wisconsin’s two abortion providers announced Friday they will sue the state in federal court now that Gov. Scott Walker has signed a bill requiring doctors at their facilities to have hospital admitting privileges.
The law will cut the number of clinics offering abortions in Wisconsin from four to two, and one of the remaining clinics wil have to dramatically cut the number of abortions it provides, according to the operators of the clinics.
“When women don’t have access to safe, legal abortions, there are health consequences and women die,” said Teri Huyck, president and chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin.
Walker said Friday that he has signed the bill.
“We are confident this bill will be held to be constitutional,” said Susan Armacost, legislative director for Wisconsin Right to Life.
The suit will be brought in federal court in Madison by Planned Parenthood and the state’s other abortion provider, Affiliated Medical Services.
Planned Parenthood has abortion clinics in Milwaukee, Madison and Appleton; Affiliated has one in Milwaukee. Huyck said once the law takes effect, Planned Parenthood would have to close its Appleton abortion clinic and offer at least 50% fewer abortions at its Milwaukee facility. Affiliated will have to close its Milwaukee clinic, according to one of its attorneys.
The clinics will ask the court to immediately block the law, contending it violates the constitution’s due process guarantee. The law takes effect almost immediately.
Challenges to similar laws in other states have had some success, at least initially. Nationally, the matter will likely be decided by higher courts ultimately, said Elizabeth Nash, the state issues manager for the Guttmacher Institute, a group that supports abortion rights.
“Even if a district court blocks a law, strikes down a law, nobody’s going to give up here,” Nash said. “This is going to go to the appellate court level. It’s a very long row to hoe.”
With Walker’s signing the law, Wisconsin becomes the eighth state to have a hospital admitting requirement, according to Guttmacher.
Judges have blocked the requirements in Alabama and Mississippi, as well as for some clinics in Kansas. The laws were not challenged in Utah and Tennessee and remain in effect there. A judge has yet to decide in a North Dakota case, and Arizona’s law has yet to be implemented.
The bill’s proponents have said the law was aimed at providing the best available health care, but Huyck said it would make women less safe by making abortion less accessible. Women in northern Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula already have to drive hours to get to the Appleton clinic, but would have to go even farther if that clinic closed, she said.
Abortion is an outpatient service that rarely requires hospitalization, she said. When it does, patients quickly get into nearby hospitals without problems under the current system, she said.
She said getting admitting privileges would be impossible in some cases because some hospitals require physicians to admit a certain numbers of patients annually, and abortion doctors rarely have reason to admit patients to hospitals.
Larry Dupuis, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney representing Affiliated Medical Services, said it would take that clinic months to obtain admitting privileges, if they could be obtained at all. Meanwhile, women with scheduled abortions would not be able to get them.
“I think we have extremely strong grounds on the harm to patients,” Dupuis said. “This clearly imposes a significant burden on women seeking abortions when abortion is perfectly legal.”
But Armacost of Wisconsin Right to Life said clinics should be able to get admitting privileges if they have competent doctors.
“Who are these people that they cannot even get admitting privileges at a hospital?” she said.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) has said clinics should have done more to get admitting privileges. They should have considered the possibility the requirement could pass when the idea was discussed early this year, he has said.
“If they have chosen to fail to even accept the fact that this bill is likely to pass because we are worried about protecting the mother, then they are going to have to take other circumstances into account for their own business model,” Vos said at a news conference before the Assembly debated the measure.
Lester Pines, an attorney for Planned Parenthood, said Vos’s comments were ridiculous.
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