Washington State Suing To Challenge Trump Administration’s Abortion Policy

Although abortion is legal in all 50 states in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade, more and more legislation is being introduced to make access to abortion more difficult. President Donald Trump’s administration has angered millions across the country with the latest policy that will make it near impossible for some women to get the medical care that they need.

Some Democratic states have already made clear their intention to fight the new policy, with Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson announcing that the state will be suing, according to The State.

Ferguson made clear his feelings on the new policy, calling it a “transparent attack on Planned Parenthood” that would make it much harder for women to seek abortions should they not want to carry a pregnancy to term.

The policy that was announced on Friday will mean that taxpayer-funded family planning clinics will no longer be allowed to refer patients for abortions. Those clinics will also no longer be allowed to share facilities with abortion providers. Ferguson argued that the latter particular stipulation will mean that many abortion clinics will be forced to move, which many of them cannot afford to do, meaning that they will just disappear entirely.

This means that lower-income women, usually in more outlying areas, will have a much harder time getting access to this treatment.

“Rural communities currently have a shortage of health care providers,” Ferguson said. “This rule will make the shortage even more acute.”

Washington state sues over President Trump's abortion policy https://t.co/fAOxjmGbsb

— KOMO News (@komonews) February 26, 2019

Ferguson, who has already sued the Trump administration on a number of other different policies it has introduced, announced that he will be filing this lawsuit in the federal court in Spokane as soon as the new policy is publicized, and will seek to block it from being signed into law in the state.

The grounds on which Ferguson will be filing the lawsuit is that it violates both the Affordable Care Act and the Administrative Procedures Act.

Chris Plante, policy director for the Christian group Family Policy Institute of Washington, has blasted the legal action Washington has decided to take against the administration’s policy.

“A doctor can still talk about abortion,” Plante argued. “The doctor simply can’t say, ‘There’s an abortion provider three streets down, turn left.'”

Under this new law, doctors are no longer obliged to offer women abortion as a valid option when they discover they are pregnant.

According to a report by The Hill, New York and California are among other Democratic states that have threatened legal action against the new policy, although they have not made official statements about their intentions after the bill was announced on Friday.