March, 2024; Vol. 3, Issue 2
What is a TRAP Law?
This is how Planned Parenthood described a TRAP Law in a Press Release dated March 6, 2024:
Until now, Michigan’s Targeted Restrictions of Abortion Providers (TRAP laws) had prevented the Irwin/Martin health center from providing procedural abortion care in its current building. TRAP laws were designed to close down health facilities that provide abortions by imposing costly and medically unnecessary building requirements. These regulations included rules on hallway widths, ceiling heights, HVAC systems, down-to-the-inch dimensions for operating rooms, janitors’ closets, and more. With these TRAP laws lifted, more health centers across the state are able to consider expanding their services.
What Planned Parenthood calls TRAP Laws are the very same laws that free-standing surgical centers—like out-patient eye surgery centers, for instance, follow for the benefit of their patients. The wide hallways are for Emergency Personnel to enable them to get the patient out of the room and to the ambulance.
The Reproductive Health Act was signed into law by Governor Whitmer in 2023 which repeal many of our laws like this one.
It’s been one month since clinic licensing has gone into effect and abortion facilities wasted no time. A formerly abortion-pill only Planned Parenthood in Grand Rapids just expanded their abortion services to provide surgical abortions. They no longer had a need to improve their facilities to ensure safety for their clients.
Now that there is no over-sight of abortion clinics, what standard of care do you think women will receive at their hands?
The repealed laws include the following: abortion clinic health and safety licensing requirements, humane disposal of fetal remains, priority funding for family planning money away from abortion providers, abortion reporting, abortion complication reporting, the abortion insurance opt-out law, the prohibition on partial-birth abortion, the “quick-child” law (enhanced penalties for late-term abortions), the prohibition on abortion referrals from the college parenting offices and the Abortion Insurance Op-Out Law.
Take heart knowing that Informed Consent and the 24-hour waiting period, protections for taxpayers so their dollars are not used to fund other people’s abortions, and parental consent were protected and are intact in Michigan law, for now.