Of all the controversial issues surrounding abortion, the latest reproductive rights battle seems relatively benign: hospital admitting privileges for abortion providers. At first glance, requiring doctors who perform abortions to be associated with a hospital that will admit their patients seems like a no-brainer - why not try to ensure a safer experience for patients? But like most anti-choice measures couched in pro-woman rhetoric, this legislative fight has nothing to do with making abortions safer and everything to do with making them impossible to obtain.

After Wisconsin passed a measure last year requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at hospitals, Planned Parenthood and Affiliated Medical Services (AMS) sued, arguing privileges are too hard to get and that the mandate will force clinics to close. On Friday, the federal judge attached to an appeal of the law said he was "troubled" in making a decision, and urged Dr Dennis Christensen – the provider at AMS - to keep trying to get privileges until the judge's written decision, which is expected this summer. These Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (Trap) laws are also sweeping statehouses, and closing abortion clinics, across the south this spring- Mississippi, Texas, Alabama and now Louisiana and Oklahoma all passed similar measures centered on admitting privileges.

Dr Willie Parker, a reproductive justice advocate and an abortion provider in Mississippi and Alabama, says this move by the anti-choice movement is just a way for states to "gut Roe". Faced with a country that consistently supports Roe v Wade, the US supreme court case that gave American women the right to abortion, anti-choicers have resorted to a "chipping away" strategy: inundating states with so many abortion restrictions that Roe is near-useless. So while abortion remains legal in name, all the waiting periods, ultrasound mandates, Trap laws and consent mandates implemented by state legislatures make abortions so hard to get that the procedure becomes effectively illegal.

And when it comes to those admitting privileges so popular among anti-choice politicians and the advocates who back them, Parker notes that less than 1% of abortion care even necessitates hospital care. "It passes the common sense test, but when you look deeper, it's a barrier," he told me late last week. "Given that hospital care is almost never indicated, requiring it under the guise that it facilitates care is not informed by the reality of how medicine is practiced."

Parker also pointed out that the decision to grant admitting privileges to doctors is generally a function of the business arm of the hospital, and part of what those decision-makers take into consideration is how many patients - and how much money - a doctor will bring in. So abortion providers - who almost never transfer patients to hospitals - may not be able to get privileges precisely because abortions are so safe. Combine that with how much hospitals generally loathe to get embroiled in political fights - and that some are threatened with protest and harassment by anti-choice activists - and all of a sudden it becomes pretty difficult for anyone who actually performs abortions to get their admitting rights in the first place.

The truth is that these thinly-veiled laws have nothing to do with what's safest for women. In the extremely rare case that a patient receiving abortion care needs hospitalization, that patient is taken to the nearest hospital emergency room. In fact, requiring providers to take patients to hospitals where they have privileges could mean bypassing the nearest hospital and putting the patient in danger.

The other clear indication that mandating admitting privileges has nothing to do with women's health or abortion safety is that the same movement fighting for this legislation is simultaneously trying to strip privileges from the doctors that do have them. In Texas, two doctors have sued University General Hospital Dallas after their privileges were suddenly revoked when the hospital sent them a letter saying that providing abortions constitutes "disruptive behavior" and that doing so damages the hospital's reputation.

Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a press release that the doctors' case demonstrates how "Texas has put the constitutional rights of its women in the hands of biased hospital administrators," and how the care options for women in the state will continue to shrink.

Louisiana Representative Katrina Jackson says the law in her state "is about the safety of women". When abortion providers in Texas were required to get admitting privileges, Mark Crutcher, president of Life Dynamics, sent out postcards "warning" hospitals that "Elective abortions are not healthcare and have nothing to do with the practice of medicine." And Mississippi Gov Phil Bryant, after signing his state's bill mandating hospital privileges, said the legislation was important in "protecting the health and safety of women" and that he would continue "to work to make Mississippi abortion-free".

Sound familiar? "People need to connect the dots and realize that 'women's safety' is the thin veneer of the real agenda to outlaw abortion," Parker says. "The 'safest' abortion to them is the one that never occurs - and that’s what these people mean to do."