The
Weekly has reported in recent weeks about how
Gov. Doug Ducey signed an anti-abortion bill requiring doctors to force their patients seeking to terminate their pregnancy with the abortion pill to use an outdated FDA protocol.
That’s a bad situation for doctors, who are essentially being told to violate state law or violate their medical ethics to provide the best care for their patients.
It’s also obvious lawsuit bait, as a similar law has already been tossed out by both the federal and state courts.
And there’s
another state law that remains on hold regarding medication abortion. State lawmakers pushed through a bill, also signed by Ducey, that requires doctors to tell women that they can “reverse” their medication abortion if they take a different medication, even though
that’s just an unproven theory pushed by an anti-abortion doctor. Attorneys for the state have asked for a delay in the case as they don’t seem to have any credible witnesses to testify on behalf of the law.
Well, it now looks like state lawmakers are cobbling together legislation to repeal all of that legislation, which is a pretty good sign they don’t think they can defend any of it in court—and by the way, the state has already had to shell out more than a million bucks to Planned Parenthood attorneys because of the various unconstitutional laws they’ve passed to make it harder for women to get abortions.
Bryan Howard, president of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona, said he was happy to see the state moving to throw in the towel on these laws.
“Women and their physicians would both be better off if politicians refrained from inserting themselves into any doctor-patient relationship,” Howard in a prepared statement. “Arizona taxpayers would be better off if extremist advocacy organizations like the Center for Arizona Policy would stop demanding the blind passage of intrusive and unconstitutional legislation—year after year, costing Arizona taxpayers millions of dollars in legal fees.”