JACKSON (AP) — A physician at Mississippi’s only abortion clinic is praising the end of a legal fight over a state law that threatened to close the facility by setting a hospital-privileges requirement the clinic couldn’t fulfill.

However, Republican Gov. Phil Bryant still says the law he signed in 2012 — now blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court — was designed to help women.

Mississippi was one of several states with laws saying physicians who work at an abortion clinic must obtain privileges to admit patients to a local hospital. Mississippi’s law never fully took effect because of a protracted court battle.

The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a similar law in Texas, and on Tuesday refused to hear appeals involving admitting-privileges laws from Mississippi and Wisconsin.

Dr. Willie Parker travels from Birmingham, Alabama, about once a month to do abortions at Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Mississippi’s capital city. He and two other out-of-state physicians sought admitting privileges in the Jackson area, but their applications were rejected.

“There were hospitals that wouldn’t entertain them at all or they told us because we provide abortion care, we were not consistent with their mission,” Parker told The Associated Press in a phone interview Tuesday.

 

Parker said he believes the real goal of admitting privileges laws is to limit access to abortion, and he praised the justices’ decision not to hear the Mississippi case: “It’s the ultimate affirmation that we had always hoped for.”