Alabama Wants To Keep Abortion Clinics From Preying On School Kids With Free Candy

hey kids! how about an abortion?

Have you had an aneurysm yet during this primary season as you watch the GOP candidates trip over one another to explain who hates 'bortions, birth control, and oh, let's just be honest, women , the most? The pressure in your brain probably decreased a wee amount when Liar-in-Chief-in-Waiting Carly Fiorina wandered away from the race, as she was the candidate who was most committed to just stone cold lying about Planned Parenthood and insisting she'd seen videos of Planned Parenthood personnel literally conducting a Black Mass upon an altar of baby parts? Well, get ready to consider keeping a doctor on call again, thanks to the great state -- ok, a state -- of Alabama, which is going after abortion rights in not one but two disgusting ways.

What's the first thing, you ask? Oh, just regulating abortion clinics the same way they regulate the registration and location of sex offenders.

SB 205, sponsored by state Sen. Paul Sanford (R-Huntsville), would prohibit the Alabama Department of Public Health from issuing or renewing a health center license to an abortion clinic or reproductive health center located within 2,000 feet of a public school, regulating abortion clinics in the same manner as registered sex offenders. [...]

Sanford told the Times Daily that the legislation is not intended to limit the number of clinics that provide abortion services in the state, but he does not think clinics should be located across the street from a school “because they do tend to cause a certain amount of commotion on a regular basis.”

Gosh, I wonder why clinics that provide abortions cause commotion? Could it be that people who oppose abortion because Baby Jesus told them to feel the need to go scream at women who are getting a routine and extremely safe medical procedure? But we wouldn't want to regulate their behavior, now would we?

Sanford also worries that "elementary-age school children that actually have to walk on the sidewalk past it is not the best thing." Hmm. That either means that you, state Sen. Paul Sanford, agree that those protesters are unhinged nutbags who should be given a wide berth, or that you're so scared of an abortion provider that you think they actually leap out and carve up children who have been out of the womb for at least five years or so. Only the former is a sane position.

Remember the part where we said this wasn't the only awful thing Alabama was taking a swing at doing? You wish we'd forgotten, don't you? You wish Alabama would forget, don't you? Too bad.

HB 183 [an entirely different bill] would require that the physician provide the patient with a conflict of interest disclaimer that would disclose the physician’s personal financial information.

Among the financial information the physician would be required to disclose: gross income from the previous fiscal year, percentage of income obtained from providing abortion services, and a statement “concerning the monetary loss to the abortion provider which would result from the woman’s decision to carry the pregnancy to term.”

Ahh, yes. The hoary old trope that doctors are making bank by doing abortions and that they're somehow talking ladies who are otherwise totally inclined to carry their pregnancy to term into terrifyingly expensive back alley abortions. One problem with that theory: with the exception of breathless stories from those websites that call abortion providers "abortionists" or "murderers" or both, there's no evidence that you make piles of money performing abortions. A piece in Salon a few years ago found that abortion providers made as little as half of what their non-abortion-providing colleagues did. So -- lower salary and the awesome chance to get murdered by an anti-choice zealot? Sign us up!

It looks like Alabama might be the first state to try this cool new "make doctors give up their personal financial info" gambit, but it probably won't be the last, because there is an unfortunately inexhaustible supply of creeps really committed to restricting the rights of women to control their own bodies. America!

[ RH Reality Check ]