Montana abortion facilities challenge state law requiring licensing standards

Two abortion businesses in Montana filed a legal challenge Tuesday against a state law requiring abortion facilities to meet certain licensing requirements.

All Families Healthcare in Whitefish and Blue Mountain Clinic in Missoula filed the motion, asking the court to extend its previous block on the law while a lawsuit they filed last year continues to be considered.

House Bill 937 set regulations for abortion facilities, including medical standards like hallways that can fit gurneys, as well as measures that ensure women who walk through the door are not being coerced or trafficked. The law also requires background checks on all abortion facility staff.

“[T]he licensure requirements will help ensure the safety, health, and wellbeing of abortion clinic patients. The department does not believe that the licensure requirements would limit (or ban) access to abortions or force facilities to be shut down,” the Department of Public Health and Human Services (DPHHS) wrote when it adopted the rules.

A temporary injunction was placed on the law in September 2023, while the state was told to shore up several aspects of the law that were considered “vague.” According to the Montana Free Press, the state complied and DPHHS finalized the law’s rules last month; the court’s previous injunction is scheduled to expire in November, spurring the new request for another block on the law.

READ: Montana Supreme Court says minors have a ‘right’ to abortion in ‘radical and out-of-touch’ ruling

“The new rules have no purpose other than making abortion harder to provide and access. This is yet another attack on Montanans’ fundamental rights to privacy and bodily autonomy,” Hillary Schneller, senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement.

Though the abortion industry paints abortion as a standard medical procedure and routine healthcare, Live Action News regularly reports on women who are injured at these facilities, to say nothing of the lives that are brutally ended there.

Regulations to make sure hallways are a certain width so that they can accommodate ambulance gurneys, and ensuring abortion facility workers are not felons are not designed to infringe on anyone’s rights — they are simply designed to make sure that women are kept safe.

Urge Walmart, Costco, Kroger, and other major chains to resist pressure to dispense the abortion pill