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127 Harv. L. Rev. F. 145 (2013-2014)
Undue Burdens in Texas

handle is hein.journals/forharoc127 and id is 147 raw text is: UNDUE BURDENS IN TEXAS Jennifer S. Hendricks In 2007 and 2008, I spent about six weeks living on a visitor's chair in my mother's hospital room, where she was being treated for cancer. Her treatment was overseen by at least five different doctors simulta- neously, none of whom, so far as I could tell, ever spoke to each other about her. They communicated through me and regularly counter- manded each other; each time a doctor scribbled something on the chart and departed, I was left to negotiate with the nurses how to in- tegrate the new dictates into the old. My mother was well-off and had excellent health insurance, but that didn't prevent her sickness and its treatment from being carved into pieces and distributed by specialty. Despite having the same five doctors over the course of most of her stay, she did not have continuity of care. In fighting tooth and nail against Obamacare, the State of Texas is on the front lines in the defense of the American people's right to some of the worst health care practices in the developed world, including the lack of continuity of care that people less well-off than my mother experience more acutely as they are shuffled through the health care bureaucracy Except, of course, when it comes to abortion, where states like Tex- as are all about raising the standard of care, at least if doing so in- creases cost and decreases access. Hence the Texas legislature's sud- den interest in continuity of care for women who have abortions, embodied in its new rule that any doctor performing an abortion must have admitting privileges at a hospital within thirty miles of where the abortion is performed. Everything's bigger - and farther away - in Texas, but only women having abortions have been singled out with such concern, purportedly aimed at making sure the doctor who performed the abortion will be available for follow-up if there are complications. Of course, we all know the real motivation for the new law, a type of law so common there's an acronym for it - a TRAP, or Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers. The purpose of a TRAP is to make abortion more expensive and more difficult to obtain or provide. Some TRAPs are aimed at the internal workings of an abortion clinic, such as special rules for how the building is constructed or maintained. Others directly regulate patient care, usually by requiring medically unnecessary procedures such as STD tests or, more recently, an ultra- sound twenty-four hours before the abortion. In addition to increasing the cost of providing abortions, TRAPs increase opportunities for state oversight and inspection of clinics. While Texas's thirty-mile law had the most dramatic effect - numerous clinics closing abruptly when

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