Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) Files Papers with U.S. Supreme Court Supporting Texas "30 Mile" Rule for Abortions

TUCSON, Ariz., Nov. 12, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) joined the Texas Lieutenant Governor and 60 Texas legislators in standing up for women's health and the unborn, by filing legal papers with the U.S. Supreme Court in defense of Texas HB 2. This law prevents abortion clinics from dumping the complications they cause onto other physicians and hospitals. It requires that abortionists have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the abortion facility.

AAPS's filing explains that Texas women flow into the Texas hospital system due to abortion-related complications, many of them life-threatening. There is on average one such hospitalization every business day.

Good, ethical surgeons take responsibility for handling complications of their operations. Many abortions are performed by practitioners who do not have and likely would not qualify for medical staff privileges at a hospital. Their patients who have complications must rely on physicians who may have no information about what happened during the abortion.

Planned Parenthood almost immediately obtained an injunction blocking the implementation of HB 2 from the federal district court. A unanimous all-women panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reinstated the law with "little difficulty." Planned Parenthood then took its crusade against HB 2 on an extraordinary emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Instead of acting to protect women's health, abortion clinics seek a result that would enable them to continue to shift the expensive costs of their complications onto others, including physicians and Texas taxpayers.

The billion-dollar abortion industry receives hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies every year—yet it shifts the costs of its complications onto others. If hospitals attempt to do this with any other type of patient it is called "dumping." In economic terms, the abortion industry imposes its negative externalities on others.

Those who suffer the most are young women whose care is delayed, sometimes with fatal consequences.

AAPS points out in its filing that Texas enacted HB2 in the wake of the Gosnell prosecution and the accompanying revelations about the abortion industry murdering live-born, viable infants while also endangering and even killing women abortion patients.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit upheld a similar law in Missouri because it "furthers important state health objectives" by "ensuring both that a physician will have the authority to admit his patient into a hospital whose resources and facilities are familiar to him and that the patient will gain immediate access to secondary or tertiary care" (quoting Women's Health Ctr. v. Webster, 1989). HB 2 is fully constitutional for the same reason, as AAPS's filing explains.

"It is time to stop shielding the abortion industry from responsibility for the harm it does to women," stated AAPS executive director Jane M. Orient, M.D.

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a national organization representing physicians in all specialties, founded in 1943.

SOURCE Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)