Missouri may lose its last abortion clinic this week. That's dark news for us all | Jill Filipovic

Anti-abortion activists know that you don’t need to outlaw abortion outright if you can make getting a safe, legal one nearly impossible

By the end of the week, women in Missouri may live in a state without a single abortion clinic. While restrictive laws in states like Alabama have made headlines, Missouri shows the other side of the anti- abortion strategy: steadily shave away at abortion rights. You don’t need to outlaw the procedure outright if you can make getting a safe, legal one nearly impossible.

The reason there’s only one remaining clinic in Missouri in the first place is because the state has tried to regulate abortion out of existence. A series of unnecessary rules and regulations makes it harder both for women to access abortions and for medical professionals to provide them. Missouri’s misogynistic laws already don’t trust women to make their own decisions – they mandate that any woman seeking an abortion in the state has to come to a clinic, request the procedure, and then go home and think about it for three days before it can be legally proffered. They also require that young people under the age of 18 notify both parents and get the notarized consent of at least one parent before they can terminate a pregnancy – a serious hardship for girls who live with abuse, or who don’t have a good relationship with their parents, or who don’t want to be mothers but want to keep their medical decisions private.

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