A Texas abortion procedure ban is unnecessary, full of theatrics and harmful to women

By The Times Editorial Board
Nov 12, 2018

No matter how often a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion is upheld by federal courts, there’s a state legislature somewhere trying to make it impossible for her to have one. The assaults on abortion rights have come in waves, as state legislatures dominated by anti-abortion lawmakers simultaneously pursue the same new legal gambits until blocked by a federal judge, at which point they change tactics and try again.

Most recently, abortion opponents have shifted from seeking restrictions ostensibly designed to protect the health of a pregnant woman — such as requiring abortion clinics to be outfitted like outpatient surgery centers, or requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital — to ones that focus on the fetus. For example, Texas and a number of other states slapped tough new restrictions on the dilation and evacuation procedure, or D&E, the safest and most common second-trimester abortion, calling it a “dismemberment abortion” and describing the procedure in ghoulish detail.

Continued: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-texas-ban-second-trimester-abortion-20181112-story.html