Facing a torrent of state laws restricting access to safe and legal abortions, supporters of a woman’s right to make her own childbearing decisions have been forced to play a defensive game — trying to block enactment of the laws, and, when that doesn’t work, challenging them in court. An important hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday could begin to move the dynamics of the fight in a positive direction.

The subject of the hearing is the Women’s Health Protection Act, a vital measure that would safeguard the reproductive rights of women all across the nation, regardless of where they live. (The measure is separate from another bill now pending to reverse the Supreme Court’s recent decision interpreting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to allow employers to limit the contraception choices of their female employees.)

The measure was introduced by two Democrats, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who will be leading the hearing, and Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin. Its purpose is to stop states from implementing laws billed as protecting women’s health and safety but actually meant to undermine their constitutionally protected right to choose. The bill would bar states from imposing uniquely oppressive “safety” rules on reproductive health care providers in a thinly veiled effort to drive them out of business. These rules impose limitations far exceeding those on other medical procedures and practices with comparable medical risks. They range from rules stipulating the exact width of an abortion clinic’s hallways to rules requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at local hospitals that are medically unnecessary and often impossible to obtain.

Nancy Northup of the Center for Reproductive Rights, who is scheduled to testify at Tuesday’s hearing in support of the bill, accurately terms these disingenuous restrictions “wolves in sheep’s clothing” devised and promoted by politicians, not the medical profession.