Abortion, Every Day (6.9.23)

In the States

The pro-choice ballot measure initiative in Florida is moving right along: Only a month after launching a campaign to put the abortion issue in front of voters in 2024, Floridians Protecting Freedom have gathered 100,000 signatures. That number far exceeds their expectations: Amy Weintraub of Progress Florida, one of the organizations in the coalition of groups working on the measure, told Orlando Weekly that they had expected to gather just 3,000 signatures by the end of May.

“We’re really, really excited about the outpouring of support and work,” Weintraub said. In order to get the measure on the 2024 ballot, they’ll need to collect 900,000 signatures by February 1. You can donate to Floridians Protecting Freedom here.

In more ballot measure news: We’ve been watching South Dakota activists gather signatures to put abortion in front of voters, and South Dakota News Watch has a great explainer of what’s been happening these last few months.

The piece also looks at claims made by Republican state Rep. Jon Hansen that proposed amendment is “far more extreme than Roe v. Wade.” (It’s not.) Hansen, who just happens to be the vice president of South Dakota Right to Life, also takes issue with the idea that women would be able to have abortions after the second trimester if their doctor believes its necessary to “preserve [her] life or health.” Hansen is pissed off because the language doesn’t specifically exclude mental health—a cruelty I’ve written about quite a lot here lately.

But we know what the real issue is: Abortion is banned entirely in South Dakota against the will of the people. South Dakota voters have used ballot measures to reject abortion bans twice already in 2006 and 2008. And a 2022 poll showed that most voters oppose the state’s abortion ban. Chances are, if put to voters directly, they will restore abortion rights in the state. And Republicans just can’t have that. (Related: Dakota Free Press has some predictions about what Rep. Hansen will do if a pro-choice ballot measure is successful.)

Speaking of abortion bans passed against the will of voters: South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said this week that the state’s recently-passed abortion ban represent what South Carolina citizens want. (In fact, only 37% of voters support the law.) The state Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the ban later this month. McMaster believes that despite the Court finding the last 6-week ban unconstitutional, that this one will pass legal muster. “I believe it is constitutional and I know it’s a hard question everybody doesn’t agree with, but I think that this is a reasonably good approach and I believe the court should give it the okay to proceed,” McMaster said. (A reminder that South Carolina’s Supreme Court is the only state Supreme Court in the country with zero female justices.)

The conservative fight for fetal personhood continues on, this time in Colorado. Rep. Doug Lamborn has introduced the “Recognizing Life Resolution,” which would give embryos and fetuses equal protection under the law. We’ve been seeing similar (though less explicit) moves in other states—from offering tax credits for fetuses to requiring child support be paid from the moment of conception. OBGYN Dr. Kristin Lyerly, speaking about a package of bills recently proposed by Wisconsin Republicans, says, “It’s just so sneaky and rotten and painful. By giving a fetus personhood, you are actually taking away the pregnant person’s personhood.”

Speaking of Colorado—just a few days ago, I flagged that an anti-abortion activist was suing the state over its buffer zone outside of abortion clinics. The case claims that it’s a free speech violation to prohibit activists from getting up in patients’ faces to harass them. I warned that in a post-Roe world, we’d been more and more cases like this. Right on cue: An anti-abortion group is suing Clearwater, Florida over the city’s recently-adopted buffer zone. The federal lawsuit claims that the law violates anti-abortion activists’ First Amendment rights and “targets the speech of people with a pro-life viewpoint.”

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial board has responded to Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s claim that restoring abortion rights would cost billions of dollars with the exact right characterization: “One attorney’s description of Bailey’s position as being ‘banana-grams’ is perhaps giving it too much credit.” Lol. (The Associated Press also has a piece on what’s been happening in Missouri with Bailey and the ballot measure.)

Abortion rights are front and center in Virginia, where not only is Gov. Glenn Youngkin planning on reviving his 15-week abortion ban proposal, but Democrats are battling it out over the issue. The Washington Post reports on a race for the House of Delegates where one candidate is accusing the other of not being pro-choice. And then there’s the candidacy of state Sen. Joe Morrissey—no longer being backed by Virginia Democrats because he identifies as ‘pro-life’ as says he’d support the governor’s 15-week ban.

I suppose the good news is that everyone seems to realize how important pro-choice candidates are—hopefully this means we can put the ‘big tent’ bullshit that so many Democrats were obsessed with to bed.

Love to have good news: The Maryland Board of Public Works approved $1 million in funding for a two and a half year stockpile of mifepristone. And in Illinois, Democrats are pushing legislation that would stop data from license plate readers from being used in abortion-related cases. Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias says, “No one seeking abortion care in Illinois should be harassed in any fashion.”

We do have some shitty news out of Illinois, though: Anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson—who tries to get local governments in pro-choice states to pass anti-choice ordinances—has been making the rounds in the state. First, he got Danville, Illinois to declare itself a ‘sanctuary city for the unborn’—not so coincidentally, the site of a future abortion clinic in the town has been attacked twice since. Now Dickson is in Quincy, Illinois trying to do the same thing—he’s speaking there tonight about the city can pass an ordinance to ban abortion in opposition to state law.

In New York, Attorney General Letitia James is pursuing a case against a radical anti-abortion group, Red Rose Rescue, that trespasses abortion clinics and tries to convince patients not to end their pregnancies. (Remember the ‘abortion rescue’ people? This is the same thing.) James says the organization “has made it their mission to terrorize reproductive health care providers and the patients they serve.” Monica Migliorino Miller of Red Rose Rescue, however, told Reuters that the organization’s members are “quiet, loving and completely peaceful.” I’m betting the patients whose care they interrupt wouldn’t say the same.

Quick hits:

• Jezebel on the Oregon Republicans refusing to do their job over an abortion rights bill;

• Kansas is releasing its post-Roe abortion data this month;

• More info on the new abortion clinic opening in Maryland near the border of West Virginia;

• And in a rare bit of good local abortion news, the government of Amherst, Massachusetts is seeking to pass additional abortion protections.

In the Nation

I’ve written a little bit about how abortion rights advocates are using shareholder proposals to pressure companies to protect employees’ right to care and customers’ private data. If you want some more information on how this has been going down, Yahoo Finance has a quick video segment on what activists have been doing and how successful (or unsuccessful) they’ve been:

I’ve gotta admit, this made me laugh out loud. Remember when I told you last week about the UN-appointed experts who reported that U.S. abortion bans were putting women and girls at risk? Well, the conservative response is everything that I’ve hoped for and more: The right-wing organization, the Center for Family & Human Rights, blasted the expert findings by pointing out that “the U.S. is not a party to the UN treaty on the elimination of discrimination against women, but that did not stop the committee that monitors compliance” from criticizing our country’s abortion policy. It is not a flex to argue that the U.S. never agreed to not discriminate against women! These people are fucking hilarious.

In related news, two human rights experts argue in The Nation that we need to start calling abortion bans ‘torture’, and use an international framework to do so. Akila Radhakrishnan, president of the Global Justice Center, and Payal Shah, director at Physicians for Human Rights, write that “It’s past time that we acknowledge and treat [abortion ban] cases as torture and ill-treatment.”

Lawyers for abortion providers from three states went in front of a federal judge yesterday in their suit against the FDA. They argued that the plaintiffs should be shielded from any further restrictions on mifepristone, and that the agency’s Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) regulations are unnecessary and unscientific. From the suit:

“[By] making mifepristone seem uniquely dangerous, FDA’s continuing restriction of mifepristone stigmatizes medication abortion and contributes to the chaos anti-abortion activists now sow. Plaintiffs are continuously facing the weaponization of the REMS by anti-abortion activists around the country.”

Obviously, this is all happening at the same time that mifepristone is facing legal uncertainty across the country.

I want to flag this op-ed at The Hill from OBGYN Dr. Elizabeth Schmidt about what it means to create laws that have physicians questioning how sick a patient needs to be in order to legally qualify for an abortion. She writes about a patient whose water broke at 18 weeks—way too early for the fetus to survive—and how this patient didn’t want an abortion at first, despite the danger to her life. By the next morning, she changed her mind—but she had already developed severe sepsis. They were able to save her life, but just barely.

“That’s the medical truth about the concept of ‘sick enough.’ It doesn’t exist. Doctors waiting for ‘sick enough’ are pushing high-risk patients to the brink of death, and it’s possible—in some cases, likely—that we won’t be able to pull them back from that edge.”

Quick hits:

• The Atlantic on why Republicans’ claim about European abortion bans make no sense;

• The 19th on the “shield laws” for abortion and gender-affirming care being passed in pro-choice states;

• Former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards talks to The American Independent;

• Kelly Baden of the Guttmacher Institute writes at The Hill about how “anti-abortion politicians never intended to support women and children”;

• And a religious studies professor in Newsweek explains how not all Christians are anti-abortion.

Listen Up

We have heard from so many people about this episode of More Perfect from WNYC! And it lives up to the hype: the episode gets into the history of how ‘viability’ became a thing (hint: it had nothing to do with medical standards or terms) and how the concept harms pregnant people who need care. Definitely make the time listen.

Stats & Studies

The National Abortion Federation, which operates the National Abortion Hotline, reports that they saw a huge increase in the need for travel and lodging funding for those seeking out-of-state abortion care. Since Roe was overturned, the organization saw a 235% increase in plane or bus trips and a 195% increase in hotel room bookings.

Veronica Jones, Chief Operating Officer of the group, said in a statement that the increase was not a surprise: “Abortion bans don’t reduce the need for abortion care—they just make it harder to access.”

To reach the NAF hotline and find out what options for abortion care and funding are possible, you can call 1-800-772-9100.

Keep An Eye On

Attacks on birth control. We know that anti-abortion groups oppose contraception, but they need to be sneaky about it. After all, coming out against birth control directly and explicitly just reveals them for the extremists that they are. And so activists have sorted out roundabout ways to attack contraception—mostly by claiming that they’re really just opposing abortion. (I’m looking at you, Hobby Lobby!)

Take this latest example: Since Roe was overturned, more and more colleges have been installing vending machines stocked with emergency contraception on their campuses. It’s a good, and necessary, idea—especially considering that the morning-after pill can be expensive and hard to find, depending on how far away your campus is from the nearest pharmacy. (Assuming they have it stocked at all.)

In response, anti-abortion groups are trying to conflate emergency contraception with abortion medication. In the conservative publication, the Washington Examiner, a representative from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America characterizes the vending machines as a “trend toward deregulation” that will lead to abortion pills being included in the machines next. Mary Owens says, “Eliminating medical supervision and providing dangerous abortion pills on college campuses is reckless, puts women in grave danger, and is not the answer to an unplanned pregnancy.”

No one is talking about abortion medication in vending machines (if only!)—but by using messaging like this, anti-abortion groups are seeking to confuse the issue. They want Americans to not understand the difference between emergency contraception and abortion medication. I predict that soon we’ll see people claiming that the vending machines do sell abortion pills, or that emergency contraception is an abortifacients. (Something activists already claim.)

And if that wasn’t bad enough, anti-abortion groups also say that the machines “perpetuate a sexually wanton culture that devalues human life and personal dignity.” Like, what?? The alternative they’re suggesting? “Natural family planning.” Of course.

What Conservatives Are Saying

For months, I’ve been warning about Republican efforts to redefine abortion as an “intention”—the latest example coming from Wisconsin. We know that this is a shrewd move by Republicans to save face. As more horror stories come out of women and girls being denied care, they want to reclassify treatment for miscarriages—and even abortions for child rape victims—as ‘not abortions.’ The hope is that the move will make them less hate-able. (Good luck with that!) The other piece of this strategy, though, is to make it easier to criminalize abortion: if abortion is an intention, prosecuting women just got a lot easier.

But conservative lawmakers want Americans to believe that this is all being done for the benefit of women. Wisconsin state Sen. Romaine Quinn says that the package of bills he introduced seeking to ‘clarify’ abortion is about debunking misinformation:

“I would argue that the pro-life community has always been about providing the care you need, and if it is an…unintentional consequence that you lose the baby because of that medical procedure, that is not actually considered an abortion.”

Republicans also claim the legislation is meant to “soften” the state’s abortion law. It’s so important that we’re paying attention to this kind of messaging—and pushing back against it. This is a strategic move to make Americans believe that Republican lawmakers are conceding something, even as they make their laws more dangerous.

You Love to See It

This is just great: The Yellowhammer Fund—an abortion fund serving Alabama, Mississippi, and the Deep South—is launching a bus tour across Alabama. The group will use the tour to give out reproductive health items like emergency contraception, condoms, pregnancy tests, period products, and diapers—all while spreading the word about the work that the fund does. Executive Director Jenice Fountain points out that people in rural communities are often left out or dismissed as as “lost cause.” Fountain says, “Post-Dobbs Alabama has meant that we have had to get creative in the way that we reach marginalized folks in Alabama.” Oh, and the rally that kicks off the tour? It’s called Fuck Your Abortion Ban. DELIGHTFUL.

In more news on activists we love…

For years, I’ve been writing about the fantastic work of Pregnancy Justice—work that made possible by the organization’s incredible founder, Lynn Paltrow. I’ve been quote Lynn in my articles for years because she is just that brilliant—and she’s been doing some of the most cutting edge thinking and work on reproductive rights and justice for decades. That’s why I was so happy to see that Irin Carmon at New York Magazine interviewed Lynn about her work as she steps down from Pregnancy Justice after more than twenty years.

Please read the whole piece, but I thought I’d leave you with one of my favorite quotes:

“I am optimistic enough to believe that people do not like having their rights taken away. And so I do think we will eventually win back our rights. But I hope it is about much more than abortion, that it’s about the underlying question: Are the people who get pregnant a subordinate second class of persons? Or are they full and equal citizens? And how do we make sure their health care is provided and respected and thought of as no different than the health care the people who can’t get pregnant are entitled to?”