The Alabama Legislature late Tuesday adopted stringent new regulations for abortion clinics that supporters called a step to protect women but that others called medically unnecessary and a disguised effort to force the closing of the state’s five abortion clinics.  Antiabortion and abortion rights activists clashed on Tuesday outside the Alabama Statehouse in Montgomery, where new regulations were passed.  The bill, like measures passed last year in Mississippi and Tennessee and last month in North Dakota, would require that doctors performing abortions have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Several of Alabama’s clinics rely on doctors who fly in from out of state, and given the hostile political climate it appears unlikely that nearby hospitals would grant them such privileges, said Nikema Williams, vice president for public policy of Planned Parenthood Southeast, which runs two of the clinics.  A similar admissions requirement passed last year in Mississippi would shut down that state’s only abortion clinic, but enforcement is stayed while a federal court decides whether the law amounts to an unjustified infringement on access to abortion.  Another clause in the Alabama bill would require clinics to meet the building, equipment and staffing standards of ambulatory surgery centers, which would require some clinics to spend millions of dollars altering buildings, and buying beds and monitoring equipment, for what they say is no relevant medical purpose.  The bill will be sent to Gov. Robert Bentley, a Republican, who previously said he planned to sign it. The American Civil Liberties Union said that if the bill becomes law it is likely to sue to block it.  The Alabama measure is part of a spreading effort by anti-abortion groups to tighten the regulation of abortion clinics. Such laws seldom receive the attention of more sweeping bans on early abortions, like those recently adopted in Arkansas and North Dakota to protect the fetus once a heartbeat is detected, but are increasingly disruptive, said Carole Joffe, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies abortion laws and support abortion rights.  “Those other laws may sound more drastic,” she said of the bans on early abortions, “but one assumes the Supreme Court will not uphold them.”  “It’s the more reasonable-sounding things like hallway width, or requiring a doctor to have local admitting privileges, that some courts will possibly approve,” Dr. Joffe said. “These have the capacity to be much more devastating to the ability to provide abortion care.”  Dan McConchie, vice president for legislative affairs of Americans United for Life, said stricter regulations of doctors and facilities represented a genuine effort “to ensure that if clinics are going to operate, they operate to high standards that protect women’s health and safety.”  His organization, with headquarters in Washington, has offered sample regulatory laws to state legislators, including those in Alabama.  “If you’re genuinely concerned about women’s health, then you want the doctor to have the ability to care for complications,” he said of the proposed rules.  Abortion rights supporters said that the endangered clinics in Mississippi and elsewhere had arrangements with local doctors and hospitals to handle emergencies, and that requiring the visiting doctor to have admitting privileges offered no extra safety.  Mr. McConchie replied, “These are the doctors performing the procedure, they are the ones with greatest knowledge of what happened” in an emergency.  Admitting-privilege requirements have been adopted so far in Arizona, Kansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Utah and North Dakota, according to Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager with the Guttmacher Institute, a research group in Washington that supports abortion rights. The rule in Tennessee forced the closing last year of one of Knoxville’s two clinics.  Mr. Bentley, as he praised the proposed clinic and physician regulations on March 5, spoke of more than medical safety, saying, “We need to remember we are dealing with human life and this is what God expects us to do,” according to The Associated Press.  Ms. Williams of Planned Parenthood said, in an interview on Wednesday, “If the politicians really cared about the health and welfare of women, they’d be working with us to address the poor health outcomes for women in Alabama.”
Doctors who perform abortions would be required to have admission privileges at local hospitals, which the political climate could make difficult for them to obtain.