New anti-abortion laws in South, most recently in La., increase difficulties for women in rural areas

"The Louisiana State Legislature on Wednesday passed a bill that could force three of the state’s five abortion clinics to close, echoing rules passed in Alabama, Mississippi and Texas and raising the possibility of drastically reduced access to abortion across a broad stretch of the South," Jeremy Alford and Erik Eckholm report for The New York Times. "The new rules passed by Republican legislatures require that doctors performing abortions must have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, a provision likely to shut down many abortion clinics across the region."

Like those in some of the other states, most rural hospitals in Louisiana don't have doctors who perform abortions and rely on those services to be performed by "visiting doctors who are ineligible for admitting privileges at nearby hospitals because they do not admit enough patients or for other reasons unrelated to medical skills," the reporters write. Passage of the bill forces many rural patients seeking abortions to drive hundreds of miles away, sometimes to another state. But as anti-abortion laws continue to sweep the South, driving distances keep increasing.

"In addition, some religiously affiliated and other hospitals refuse formal associations with abortion clinics," the Times reports. "But these hospitals still accept emergency patients and have specialists who treat women suffering abortion complications, medical experts say." (Read more)