Supporters of the law said the law protects the health and safety of women seeking abortions, and that the requirements for obtaining admission privileges help ensure the competence of doctors. Opponents argued that, saying hospitalizations after abortions are rare, that women would receive medical care in hospitals whether or not their doctors had admission privileges, and that abortion providers often cannot obtain admission privileges for reasons outside its competition.
Only two of the five doctors who perform abortions in Louisiana have obtained admission privileges, one in New Orleans and one in Shreveport. But the Shreveport doctor stated that he couldn’t handle the clinic work alone. If the law went into effect, a trial judge concluded, there would be a single doctor at a single clinic in New Orleans available to provide abortions in Louisiana.
Judge John W. deGravelles, of the Federal District Court in Baton Rouge, reversed the Louisiana law in 2017 and said it created an undue burden on women’s constitutional right to abortion. The Shreveport clinic’s experience, Hope Medical Group for Women, showed, she wrote, that the law was a solution in search of a problem.
“In the past 23 years, Hope Clinic, which serves more than 3,000 patients per year, had only four patients who required a transfer to a hospital for treatment,” wrote Judge deGravelles. “In each case, regardless of whether the physician had admission privileges, the patient received appropriate care.”
The law, the Gravelles judge ruled, was essentially identical to the Texas law that the Supreme Court struck down in the 2016 decision, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. Judge Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the majority in that decision, said the courts must consider whether the benefits claimed by laws imposing restrictions on abortion outweigh the burdens they impose on the constitutional right to procedure.
