Letter: Restricting care can lead to tragedies – Knoxville News Sentinel

Miriam Leibowitz, reproductive freedom organizer, American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, Nashville

The reprehensible crimes committed by Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his clinic staff in West Philadelphia bring to mind reproductive health conditions prior to the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion. In Tennessee, women’s access to reproductive health care is also protected by the privacy guarantees of the Tennessee Constitution, as the Tennessee Supreme Court articulated in the ACLU case Planned Parenthood v. Sundquist.

However, a ballot initiative that would remove this privacy protection from the Tennessee Constitution is up for public vote on Nov. 4, 2014. If this ballot initiative passes, it puts Tennessee women at risk once again, opening the door for lawmakers to more freely play politics with women’s health, passing laws that further restrict access to comprehensive reproductive health care, often by creating obstacles for law-abiding clinics so burdensome they are forced to close down.

While all health care providers and clinics should be and are regulated, these regulations should be based on health care needs, not political agendas. When access to safe and legal reproductive health care is restricted, it creates conditions for “doctors” like Gosnell to abuse vulnerable people.

Rather than removing the protections afforded by the Tennessee Constitution, we should focus our efforts on shoring up those protections, supporting equitable medical care for underserved communities and, most importantly, upholding safe and legal access to comprehensive reproductive health care.