The notion of progress has been absent from our state government for quite some time. When they are not busy banning gay marriage or decimating our education system, they occupy their time by limiting resources to curb teenage and unwanted pregnancies.
Last spring, the state Legislature passed House Bill 2564 and Senate Bill 1175, which restricted abortion procedures and the sale of emergency contraceptives.
The new measures allowed only physicians to perform the procedure and gave pharmacists permission to deny a customer the sale of emergency contraceptives.
Thankfully, this nonsense came to a screeching halt Tuesday when a Maricopa County Superior Court judge issued an injunction that stopped these stipulations.
The injunction took affect Wednesday morning at 12:01 a.m. and came from a lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood.
HB 2564 and SB 1175 violated the policies set forth in the 1992 Supreme Court case Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey and were subsequently overturned by the Maricopa County Superior Court.
The Arizona Republic reported the 1992 Supreme Court case “upheld the idea that states can restrict access to abortion if the restrictions do not pose an ‘undue burden’ on a ‘large fraction’ of women affected by that restriction.”
These laws placed unnecessary strain on women because it severely limited where the procedure could be performed.
The Arizona Daily Star reported this provision could eventually force women to come to Phoenix because not many clinics will perform abortions in southern Arizona.
Unfortunately, a 2006 study by the Guttmacher Institute revealed that Arizona has the second highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation, second only to Nevada.
Another 2006 study by the Guttmacher Institute gave the Arizona sex education policies the worst rating and ranked the state 29 in efforts to avoid unwanted pregnancies.
These facts should make us reevaluate our sex education programs and our contraceptive availability. If we put more stock in these areas, we can reduce the unwanted pregnancy rate as well as the number of abortions.
However, the Arizona Legislature did not heed these facts. The restrictions put in place presented more problems than they solved as the court ruling shows.
This past spring, after the passage of HB 2564, I wrote that practicality must carry the day in emotional debates such as this. I still stand by that belief; policies must be realistic and reasonable. The policies of the laws overturned were not practical, rather grounded in an ideology. But with the issue of a simple injunction, reason triumphed over ideology.
