The end of abortion access in the South?

The same law that threatens to end legal abortion in Mississippi has swept across southern states, leaving women there with waning alternatives. Unless the federal courts step in, access may be decimated in a vast swath of the country, potentially closing three-quarters of the abortion clinics in states where 21 million women live. And so far, those courts have been decidedly divided on the constitutionality of such laws.

The Mississippi law in question sounds innocuous. It requires that abortions be provided by doctors who are board-certified obstetrician-gynecologists, and that they have admitting privileges at local hospitals. But in Mississippi and elsewhere, local hospitals have refused to provide those privileges, which the medical establishment say aren’t medically necessary. Indeed, the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have said such laws are worse than unnecessary: They “impose[s] government regulation on abortion care that jeopardizes the health of women.”

Mississippi politicians have hardly hid the intentions behind the law. Before he signed the law, Governor Phil Bryant said he would “work to make Mississippi abortion-free.”

Read more at MSNBC.