Abortion Doctors Seek Hospital Privileges To Escape Restrictions

Or to prove that they'll be otherwise blocked

Amid uncertainty over when — or if — Wisconsin's new regulation of abortion clinics will go into effect, seven doctors who perform the procedure are filing applications for hospital admitting privileges.

It would appear that they are trying to meet the regulation's central requirement: that they have privileges at hospitals within 30 miles of their clinics. But the doctors' advisers say they are applying more to prove that they cannot obtain the privileges than to actually secure them.

"Going through the process of trying to obtain as many privileges as we can helps prove our case that they're unrelated to the work that we do," said Nicole Safar, the policy director at Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. Planned Parenthood and two doctors it employs are plaintiffs in a legal challenge to the new law.