The Alabama legislature passed a bill Wednesday that prohibited abortion clinics from being within 2,000 feet from any K-8 public school — the same rule a sex offender must follow in the state.
If signed by anti-abortion Gov. Robert Bentley (R), the rule will force at least one abortion clinic to move — or close. This won’t be the first time the Huntsville clinic, Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives, will be forced to relocate because of an anti-abortion law. The clinic moved to its current location across the street from a new elementary school to comply with a 2013 anti-abortion bill that placed unnecessary restrictions on abortion clinic facilities.
We all agree that protecting our children is a top priority. But this law isn’t about protecting Alabama’s children.
“It disturbs me that a person has tried to abide by the law, and still gets penalized,” Democratic Rep. Laura Hall said, according to the Associated Press. “It is unfair for an individual to meet the demands of a law that we passed and when they moved, we create another law to put them basically out of business.”
Supporters argue that the regulation is meant to keep aggressive anti-abortion protesters away from children, something a clinic has no control over. But other state lawmakers have been more direct about the fact that their general dislike of abortion clinics fueled the vote.
“I don’t feel like these types of facilities need to be anywhere near our children,” said Republican Rep. Ed Henry, who carried the bill in the House.
The anti-abortion advocacy organization that fought for the bill echoed Henry’s opposition.
“Our message is to point out that killing a baby is still killing a baby whether its politically correct or not,” says local activist Rev. James Henderson, the executive director of the Christian Coalition of Alabama, the group responsible for getting the bill into the statehouse. He said it made sense that abortion clinics should have the same buffer zone from schools as sex offenders because, he said, the majority of underage girls brought to abortion clinics, “according to studies that have been done, are pregnant as a result of statutory rape anyways.”
If passed, Alabama could become the first state to enforce such restrictions. But it won’t be the first to suggest that abortion providers should be distanced from public schools.
In 2013, Kansas lawmakers introduced a bill banning anyone who works or volunteers at an abortion clinic from volunteering at a school, including their own child’s. Later that year, Kansas passed a law that successfully banned these employees and volunteers from providing schools with any information or instruction on human sexuality. Other states have passed a more direct form of this law, banning abortion providers like Planned Parenthood from teaching sex education in public schools, even though Planned Parenthood is the largest nonprofit provider of sex ed in the country. And this year, Oklahoma is even fighting to bring anti-abortion education — often based on junk science — into public schools, some of which lack any alternative form of sex education.http://archive.thinkprogress.org/health/2014/11/24/3596266/alabama-abortion-clinic-sex-offenders/The ACLU has already said it will sue Alabama if the bill passed Wednesday is enacted.
“We all agree that protecting our children is a top priority. But this law isn’t about protecting Alabama’s children,” wrote Susan Watson, executive director of the ACLU of Alabama, in an April op-ed. “It’s about making a sure a woman who has decided to have an abortion can’t get one.”
Along with the school buffer zone bill, the Alabama House passed another piece of legislation Thursday that would ban so-called “dismemberment” abortions, the safest procedure for performing a second-trimester abortion.