Wisconsin’s solicitor general, Misha Tseytlin penned a piece for SCOTUS blog defending a bill that requires the state’s abortion providers have admitting privileges to a hospital within 30 miles of their clinic or discontinue performing the procedure.

While the law was ruled unconstitutional by a federal appeals court in November, Attorney General Brad Schimel has said he plans to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the decision.

The Supreme Court agreed to take a case challenging a more extensive Texas law that includes a similar admitting privileges provision. The case will be argued in March. Tseytlin’s column for SCOTUS blogdiscusses both states’ laws.

Tseytlin argues the admitting privileges requirements were enacted “in order to ensure that abortion doctors are well qualified and to promote continuity of care.”

In its 2-1 ruling, the federal appeals court found the medical grounds for the legislation were “nonexistent.” The panel concluded the “requirement of admitting privileges cannot be taken seriously as a measure to improve women’s health.”

“Opponents of abortion reveal their true objectives when they procure legislation limited to a medical procedure — abortion — that rarely produces a medical emergency,” Judge Richard Posner wrote for the majority. “A number of other medical procedures are far more dangerous to the patient than abortion, yet their providers are not required to obtain admitting privileges anywhere, let alone within 30 miles of where the procedure is performed.”

That opinion, Tseytlin wrote, cast “aspersions on the motivations of the Wisconsin legislature and, by extension, the people of Wisconsin.”

Tseytlin argued that in challenging requirements such as Wisconsin’s and Texas’s admitting privileges laws, abortion providers are seeking a “novel level of judicial protection.”

He likened those laws to federal ones requiring licensed physicians be the ones to perform the procedure and banning partial-birth abortions.

Abortion rights advocates argue so-called TRAP laws — Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers — ultimately drive women to people like House of Horrors abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell by making it increasingly difficult to seek a safe, legal abortion.

“It is Republicans who have targeted reproductive health care with ‘special’ scrutiny, proposing restriction after restriction designed to burden women and their doctors,” said Jenni Dye, research director for One Wisconsin Now. “While Republicans here have rolled back regulations for corporations, they have simultaneously sought to regulate nearly every aspect of women’s access to reproductive health care. It is unfair, it is dangerous, and it has to stop.”

Dye said if Tseytlin doesn’t want abortion providers to seek relief from such laws, Republican lawmakers should “stop giving special scrutiny to women’s reproductive health care.”