"Alabama politicians are at it again in their relentless attack on women's access to abortion," Dalton Johnson, the owner and operator of Alabama Women's Center for Reproductive Alternatives, writes in an Alabama Media Group opinion piece.
Johnson explains, "Over the years we in Alabama have seen a multitude of laws restricting abortion, and they are nothing but different roads to the same destination: to close clinics and make a wom[a]n's right to abortion so inaccessible that it is nonexistent." He points to two recently approved bills, including one (SB 363) that would ban a medically proven method of abortion and another (SB 205) that would prohibit the location and licensure of abortion clinics within 2,000 feet of certain public schools.
According to Johnson, SB 205 threatens to shut down the clinic that he operates -- the sole clinic in Huntsville, Alabama, and one of just five clinics in the state. If SB 205 "were allowed to go into effect," Johnson writes, the number of clinics in the state would fall to three. "Think about that for a second -- just three clinics to care for 2.5 million women in Alabama," he writes.
Johnson notes that when he opened his clinic, he was prepared for opposition from abortion-rights opponents, but he did not expect the "onslaught [of] direct and disingenuous attempts to shut all of the clinics in the state down."
He cites a "medically unnecessary law" in 2013 that mandated "all abortion clinics be outfitted as ambulatory surgical centers." According to Johnson, "Major medical organizations like the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association have opposed such laws that single out abortion clinics for inappropriate requirements even though far riskier medical procedures, like colonoscopies and liposuctions can be conducted in much simpler physical locations." Johnson writes, "I recognized this law for what it was: another attempt to close abortion clinics," noting that the measure "came very close to shutting [the] clinic down."
He explains that because he was unable to retrofit his former clinic to comply with the law, he had to cash in his retirement savings to buy a new building that previously "operated as an ambulatory surgical center." Johnson notes, "I thought our troubles were over, but it turns out that they were just beginning." He explains that the same abortion-rights opponents "who protest outside my clinic pressured politicians to introduce [SB 205]." Noting that SB 205 "would shutter my clinic and the only clinic in Tuscaloosa," Johnson writes that the measure "is nothing but an attempt to make it impossible for women to obtain safe, legal abortion care." He adds, "[I]n fact, the politicians have all but admitted as much with SB 363, which would severely curtail abortion access by banning a medically proven method of abortion."
If Alabama Women's Center "had to shut its doors, it would severely limit abortion access in the state, and women would suffer," he writes, noting that his clinic received "an alarming number of gut-wrenching calls" from women asking about how to self-induce an abortion last year, when one of the clinics in the state temporarily closed. He concludes, "No matter how you feel about abortion, it is a right guaranteed by the Constitution ... I [provide abortion care] because I know that without access that right is meaningless" (Johnson, Alabama Media Group, 5/6).
