On a recent Saturday morning at Hope Medical Group for Women in Shreveport, La., Kathaleen Pittman was preparing for a day of procedures, as a couple dozen patients sat quietly in the waiting area.
Her clinic is challenging a law passed by Louisiana’s state legislature in 2014, which requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital in case of an emergency. The case, June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee, is scheduled to go before the U.S. Supreme Court next year, and the court’s decision has the potential to chip away at existing precedent protecting abortion rights.
“The whole process of trying to obtain privileges is crazy,” Pittman says. “It’s time-consuming. It could be a process of a few months to actually years. There are no guarantees.”
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