Injunction, Injunction, What's Your Function?

Recently in Mississippi, a law was passed in order to shut down the state's only abortion clinic. Of course, abortion, while controversial, is still legal in the United States, so Mississippi legislators can't just decide to close it because they are uncomfortable with a woman's right to choose.

But of course, that's exactly what they've been trying to do.

The TRAP law (while the acronym makes sense on its own, it actually stands for Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) requires doctors performing abortions to be OB-GYNs with admitting privileges to a local hospital. The Mississippi clinic is staffed by OB-GYNs, but they have been refused admitting privileges at all the hospitals in the required range. Because of this refusal, the clinic would have to close once the law goes into effect.

However, today, the day the law should have gone into effect, US District Judge Daniel P. Jordan issued a temporary injunction to keep that from happening. A lawsuit has been filed, calling the new law unconstitutional and medically unnecessary.

The best part about this is that the extreme Republicans who have been so proud of this new law that they have really shot themselves in the collective foot. If they had been able to come up with some sort of medical or health-inspection reason for the clinic to be shut down, then it would closed, over and done with. But Governor Phil Bryant and others strutted around, boasting of making Mississippi "abortion-free" and, I'm sure, hoping to win (and probably succeeding) conservative votes for this. And now these quotes and boasts have been brought into the case against the new law as evidence that the goal of the law was simply to shut down the clinic without any medical reasons.

If Mississippi's legislators were actually concerned about the health of their state's women, they wouldn't have bragged so arrogantly about shutting down the state's abortion clinic (of course, if they really cared about women's health, they wouldn't work to shut it down at all, but that's wishful thinking it seems...). Their overblown pride over shutting down the clinic could now end up being the very reason it stays open.

The fight over abortion in Mississippi (or the US) isn't over, but this current turn of events has me feeling optimistic for at least a few more days.