Watch the south’s abortion clinics disappear in one scary GIF

As I mentioned yesterday, the Louisiana legislature just passed a bill that could close three — possibly four — out of the state’s five abortion clinics.

If that sounds disturbingly familiar, it’s because it should. Like similar bills in Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi, Louisiana’s new TRAP-style law requires that abortion providers have admitting privileges at a local hospital. And, just like in those other southern states, its intended effect is to shut down clinics and, ultimately, “end abortion in our country.”

Texas’s law has already partially gone into effect — and this map shows the huge blow it’s dealt to abortion access in the Lone Star State — but the laws in Mississippi and Alabama are in various stages of being considered by the courts. Meanwhile, Oklahoma is considering its own bill. If all these laws went into effect, it’s not an exaggeration to say it would basically spell the end of safe, legal abortion access in the south.

Just take a look at this GIF from Planned Parenthood:


impact of trap laws in the south, before and after gif

A woman in New Orleans would be nearly 300 miles from the nearest abortion clinic. As Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards said, “We are deeply concerned that women in a vast stretch of this country are in real danger of losing the ability to access legal abortion safely.”

Maya DusenberyMaya is an Executive Director of Feministing and a recent transplant to the south.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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