The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Wisconsin, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin filed a lawsuit challenging a state law that places medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion providers that would severely restrict women’s access to safe and legal abortion in a state where access is already heavily restricted.
The law requires every physician who performs an abortion at a clinic to have staff privileges at a local hospital. Hospitals typically require doctors to admit a minimum number of patients to have admitting privileges. Because abortion is an extraordinarily safe procedure that very rarely requires hospital admission, doctors who specialize in abortion care often cannot obtain admitting privileges.
This requirement is opposed by doctors and leading medical groups, such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Wisconsin Public Health Association, because they prevent women from getting safe, high quality health care.
If implemented, the Wisconsin law would have closed one of the state’s few remaining abortion clinics and would force a woman to wait eight to 10 weeks to access abortion care.
In a victory for reproductive freedom in Wisconsin, a federal judge blocked the law. A federal appeals court upheld this decision in 2013 and again in 2015. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review.
