My state is trying to kill me

Abortion in Louisiana going the way of the Dodo if conservatives have their way

No one with even a passing familiarity of Louisiana politics will be surprised at the way these new TRAP laws were passed. Over a busy holiday, little fanfare, backroom deals with no public input. That's pretty much par for the course around here. What is surprising is just how brutal these new regulations are.

How brutal? Every single clinic in the state could be closed.  Every. Single. One.
Should a clinic avoid the closing, and you find yourself in need of an abortion, pray you had certain blood work about 30 days ago. Why? Well, because the new regs require that everyone seeking an abortion "undergo blood tests at least one month before an abortion procedure. That means that unless a patient happens to have gone to the doctor previously and had those tests done by chance, she will face a mandatory thirty-day waiting period."

Add to that the fact that Louisiana forbids abortions after 20 weeks and this gets really dicey. Say you don't find out you're pregnant until you are about 8 weeks along. You're uncertain what you want to do, so you take some time to think over you're options. (As women are wont to do, regardless of what certain portions of the population believe.) So, ok. You take a few weeks, decide you aren't in a position to birth a child at this point. So, that's 10 weeks. You call the clinic and make an appointment. Only to be told you can't get in for at least another 30 days, because you have to have some blood work. Ok, you make an appointment that week to get the blood work done. So now you're at 11 weeks. The blood work gets done, you call back for the appointment. At this point, you're at 15 weeks (because you had to wait for those 30 days to pass.) You've got five weeks left, so it's later than you'd like, but you can still do it. Except that because there is only one clinic left open in the entire state, they can't get you in under the deadline. Or they can get you in, but the cost at this point is prohibitive. What was once a few hundred dollar procedure had morphed into $1,000+. What are your options? Well, if you're very very lucky, you have access to funding to go out of state and have your procedure done. (Although, given the state of TRAP laws in Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi, good luck with finding a place with a day's drive.) Most women in this state will not be so lucky. So they either are forced to have a child they did not want or they'll be forced into more drastic measures. People like to pretend that a woman will just give up and have the baby, but there are many, many , many woman who will do ANYTHING to no longer be pregnant. The Pre-Roe septic wards and deaths prove that. It's just been so long since we've seen that, we've forgotten.