TRAP Laws

Recorded:
Oct 2023
Speaker
Dr. Trisha Seal
Duration
00:01:39
AUDIO CLIP
TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Tricia Seal: In my state, abortion care is something that was very, very hard to put into any regular OBGYN office. In South Carolina, there’s only three clinics that provide abortion care. And that’s been the whole time I’ve been there the last seven years. There’s one in Charleston, one in Columbia, and one in Greenville. All three of those locations provide services, were providing services up to fourteen weeks. And the reason there’s only three, and the reason that private offices don’t do abortions, is that there’s a limit on the number you can do before you have to register your clinical area as an abortion clinic. So if we do more than five first-trimester abortions at any given site, or any second-trimester abortion at any given site, excluding hospital-based care, you have to register as an abortion clinic. And it really puts you in danger of all of these TRAP [Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers] laws, which would require changes in your facility’s physical structure, the increased risk of drop-in evaluations from the Department of Health and Environmental Control. And that’s just something that we didn’t want to be subject to. It would also mean that we would lose all of our federal funding for Medicaid and Medicare if we were an abortion clinic designation. So in a place where we’re providing most of the prenatal care to indigent populations, as well as the bulk of GYN care, that was not the fiscally responsible thing to pursue.

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