A federal judge is weighing whether new abortion restrictions, which providers say will close 13 clinics in the state, should go into effect next Tuesday.
Under review is whether the state can require doctors to maintain hospital admitting privileges and to prescribe abortion pills in a way federally approved 20 years ago, but now widely discounted.
In closing arguments, state attorneys defending the law and said Texas lawmakers have the right to impose reasonable restrictions to preserve fetal life.
The state can legally regulate abortion and the new requirements are well-within constitutionally allowed limits, such as 24-hour waiting periods and bans on partial-birth abortions, said Deputy Solicitor General Andrew Oldham.
The state has “a rational basis” to want doctors qualify at hospitals and to use a federally-sanctioned drug protocols that already had been used by thousands of women, Oldham said.
But abortion rights advocates said the state is using a “back door” method to close down abortion clinics, counting on hospitals to deny doctors admitting privileges.
In the past four months, doctors working at abortion clinics have applied to up to 20 hospitals for such privileges. So far, none have been granted or turned down.
Without having hospital privileges in place by Tuesday, when the law goes into effect, clinics in Lubbock, Waco, Killeen, McAllen and Harlingen will close, said Janet Crepps, a lawyer with the Center for Reproductive Rights.
She said some of the doctors working in abortion clinics in El Paso, Austin and San Antonio will have to stop practicing and that clinics in Dallas and Houston will be the only ones still fully operational.
“Hospitals have their own agendas in who they give privileges,” and those include how many patients they treat at the hospital and whether they live in the city, Crepps said.
Testimony showed that abortions rarely require hospitalization and that many of the doctors work part-time at clinics outside their home city.
She also said patients will be harmed by refusing them a safer, more effective way of dosing abortion pills.
Crepps said the state’s new law orders doctors to “turn back the clock 20 years” and use abortion pill protocols first tested in the 1990s. While approved by the FDA, those protocols have since been refined through clinical tests involving hundreds of thousands of women, she said.
The new method is now widely in practice, is cheaper, requires lower dosages and has fewer side-effects, doctors testified.
“There’s no justification to deny women access to the best medical care available,” Crepps said.
U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, said “both sides raised strong issues,” and that he would try and rule quickly.
“I realize the clock is ticking towards Oct. 29,” Yeakel said.
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