By Dave Andrusko
Editor’s note. A tip of the hat to LifeNews.

Abortion clinic operator Diane Derzis
Last week attorneys for Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi’s lone remaining abortion clinic, asked the United States Supreme Court not to hear an appeal of a decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals which blocked Mississippi from enforcing a law that requires abortionists to have admitting privileges at a local hospital.
Passed in 2012, the law was originally set to go into effect July 1, 2012. But at the eleventh hour Judge Daniel P. Jordan temporarily blocked Mississippi from enforcing the law. In 2013. Jordan extended the temporary restraining order. That was upheld by a divided 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel last July. (The dissent written by Judge Emilio M. Garza was brilliant. Our analysis of it can be read here.)
In February Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood asked the High Court to review the decision which was upheld by the full 5th Circuit without comments last November.
Hood challenged the nub of the argument made by the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights—that even when abortion is available in adjoining states, it placed an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions if Jackson Women’s Health Organization was unable to secure admitting privileges for its fly-in abortionists.
Hood also told the High Court that Mississippi was only trying to protect women’s health and “to level the playing field by requiring all doctors on staff at abortion clinics to meet the same professional licensing standards applicable to doctors in other areas of outpatient surgical practice.”
The Jackson Women’s Health Organization is owned by the flamboyant Diane Derzis who has abortion clinics in Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia.
Three of her attorneys argued that the justices should not hear the Mississippi case because it “does not squarely present the question of whether admitting privileges requirements in general are constitutional.”
By this they were alluding to the fact that a different panel of the 5th circuit had reached a different conclusion: it upheld the requirement that abortionists have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the abortion clinic. In their 34-page opinion, delivered in March 2014, Judges Edith Jones, Catharina Haynes, and Jennifer Walker Elrod carefully outlined why the provision was not an “undue burden” on the right to abortion.
But according to the three lawyers, since that panel “has upheld a different state’s admitting privileges law [Texas’s], when the consequences of that law would not have resulted in the closing of every abortion clinic in the state,” then “If the (Supreme) Court would like to consider the constitutionality of admitting privileges laws generally, it should await a case that presents that question.”
They also argued that “state officials are wrong to assert that abortion clinic physicians should be required to obtain hospital admitting privileges because physicians in outpatient surgical clinics are required to have them,” according to Emily Wagster of the Associated Press.
“Mississippi physicians who provide similar or less safe surgical procedures in their offices, such as colonoscopy, hernia repair, hemorrhoidectomy, and dilation and curettage, do not need admitting privileges,” according to Jackson Women’s Health Organization’s brief to the court. “Mississippi physicians can even provide surgery with general anesthesia in their offices without having admitting privileges.”