For the third time in four years, new abortion restrictions are being enacted in Mississippi.
Gov. Phil Bryant signed the “Mississippi Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act” on Friday. The law prohibits the procedure known as dilation and evacuation, the most common method for ending a pregnancy in the second trimester.
The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Sam Mims, R-McComb, who serves as chairman of the House Public Health Committee, attended the signing with Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves and Sen. Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall.
“We’re making Mississippi the safest place in America for an unborn child,” Bryant said on Twitter. Mims could not be reached for comment.
In 2012, the Legislature passed a law requiring physicians at abortion clinics to be board certified OB/GYNs with local admitting privileges. In 2014, lawmakers banned abortions after 20 weeks.
“From trying to close the state’s only abortion clinics to outright banning abortion services altogether, Mississippi politicians are fixated on coming between women and their doctors,” Nancy Northup, president and chief executive officer of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a press release.
Northrup added: “We call upon politicians to take on the real needs of Mississippi women and their families instead of passing laws that jeopardize their health and rob them of their rights.”
A 2003 report by the Guttmacher Institute states that dilation and evacuation is safer than medical abortion for terminating second-trimester pregnancies.
Diane Derzis, owner of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi’s only remaining abortion clinic, said attorneys at the Center for Reproductive Rights are looking into whether the new law, which takes affect July 1, affects the clinic.
Derzis’ clinic has a case pending at the U.S. Supreme Court over the state’s 2012 admitting-privileges law.
She labeled the so-called dismemberment ban an example of “idiocy” and “wasting the taxpayers’ time and money.”
CRR officials say bans similar to Mississippi’s have been struck down in other states, including Kansas and Oklahoma.
In January, a federal judge ordered the state of North Carolina to pay CRR $1 million in legal fees in a case challenging a law requiring women seeking abortions to be shown a narrated ultrasound.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.