Abortion, Every Day (7.10.23)

In the States

We’ve been waiting for the Florida Supreme Court to come down with a decision on the state’s existing 15-week ban—a ruling that could pave the way for the recently-passed 6-week ban to go into effect, and for abortion access in the South to be further decimated. Well, on Friday, the Court announced that it is scheduling a hearing in the case for September, giving us a better sense of the possible timeline moving forward.

Some background: Florida has a 15-week abortion ban that’s being challenged by abortion providers, but state Attorney General Ashley Moody wants the justices to upend decades of legal precedent saying that the right to privacy in Florida’s constitution protects abortion. If the Court ruled that the state constitution doesn’t protect abortion rights via privacy, it would open the door for the enforcement of the newer 6-week ban. The Court right now is super conservative, thanks to appointments by Gov. Ron DeSantis, and one of the justices—Charles Canady—is actually married to a co-sponsor of the 6-week ban. (Former Chief Justice Barbara Pariente called for his recusal recently.)

A reminder that if the 6-week ban goes into effect, millions of people will lose access to abortion—the state has as many people in it as the populations of Greece and Sweden combined. And Florida voters decidedly do not want this ban: 75% oppose the legislation, including 60% of Republicans. That’s in part why pro-choice advocates are in the process of collecting signatures to get abortion on the ballot as soon as possible. (To find out more about the ballot measure, check out Floridians Protecting Freedom. ballot measure.)

We’ll keep you updated as more news comes in on this one.

Meanwhile, Iowa Republicans are holding a special session tomorrow to try to ban abortion. Gov. Kim Reynolds called the session in response the state Supreme Court declining to reinstate a 6-week abortion ban—this is their attempt to push another one through that they hope will withstand legal scrutiny. (If you want to know more about the bill that Republicans introduced in the state late last week, I have a breakdown of the legislation in “The Week in Abortion.”)

You can read a bit here about how the special session is expected to go down, but the main thing to know is that the bill is likely to pass—Republicans have majorities in both chambers—and Planned Parenthood has made clear they will bring a legal challenge if and when that happens.

Planned Parenthood is also planning an expansion of services and staff both within Iowa and in Minnesota clinic locations close to the Iowa border. (The assumption being that if Iowa Republicans are successful in passing a ban, those border clinics will be seeing a massive increase in patients.) A reminder that the organization is asking people to join them in protesting the legislation tomorrow. From Mazie Stilwell, director of public affairs:

“We are calling on all Iowans to show up at the Capitol on Tuesday, to be contacting their legislators who work for them, to be making clear their position on the fact that Iowans are simply not interested in the ways in which politicians are trying to claw their way into the exam room.”

Early voting begins tomorrow in the special election in Ohio that will determine whether ballot measures in the state will be harder to pass. Republicans want to raise the standards to require 60% of the vote instead of a simple majority, and would mandate that proposed measures get signatures from every county in the state (as opposed to half) to even get on the ballot to begin with.

The editorial board of The Columbus Dispatch blasted conservative lawmakers as “power-hungry hypocrites” today, calling Issue 1 “one of the most significant questions Ohio voters will be asked in generations.”

“This election is special in ways that go beyond the date ballots will be counted. It speaks to Ohio's heart and whether or not undemocratic forces will be successful in corrupting it with very big lies. Ohioans deserve ‘a government of the people, by the people, for the people.’”

The good news is that it looks as if Ohio voters are well-aware of what this August election is all about—and that they’re eager to be able to vote on abortion rights. As we reported last week, abortion rights proponents in the state delivered nearly twice the amount of required signatures to get the issue on the ballot—and petitioners report a tremendous amount of enthusiasm from the people they spoke to. One such activist told Columbus Underground, “What amazed me is that even late in this process, there were people who were coming up to us and saying, ‘I have been looking forward to signing this, thank you for being here.’”

Related: NPR in Ohio has a segment on Issue 1 where they spoke to people both in favor of and opposed to the proposal.

This is really interesting: A judge in Wisconsin has ruled that the challenge against the state’s 1849 abortion ban can continue because the law, she said, isn’t actually an abortion ban at all. Dane County Circuit Judge Diane Schlipper ruled that the nearly 175-year old law is actually “a feticide statute only”—meaning it only applies to an attack on a pregnant person that ends the pregnancy, and not abortion. Schlipper wrote, “There is no such thing as an ‘1849 Abortion Ban’ in Wisconsin.”

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed a lawsuit against the ban soon after Roe was overturned, arguing that the law was too old to enforce. So this is an interesting turn of events! The expectation is that the case will end up in front of the state Supreme Court, where pro-choice judge Janet Protasiewicz will take a seat next month.

New statistics out of Indiana show that the number of patients traveling from other states more than tripled in 2022. Indiana’s abortion ban has been blocked up until a few weeks ago, when the state Supreme Court upheld the law. The total abortion ban goes into effect on August 1—and these latest numbers show that it won’t just be people in the state who suffer, but those from neighboring states who have been relying on Indiana as an abortion safe haven.

Speaking of abortion safe havens: El País looks at “lessons from a sanctuary state” in a piece about Colorado’s abortion rights protections—and the way that activists are helping out-of-state patients. Adrienne Mansanares, executive director of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, told the publication that the state has seen a 33% increase in patients. “Women suddenly turned into immigrants wandering the roads of their own country,” she said. It’s a pretty striking thing to think about, the idea of medical refugees in the U.S. And as Mansanares points out, many of those traveling are leaving their homes for the first time:

“Some women have never been on a plane before coming here. Others do not have a credit card to check into the hotel. And most have families, and have to bring their children. We give them vouchers for food or money for gas.”

Pro-choice advocates in Washington are reporting similar issues to Northwest Public Broadcasting. Iris Alatorre of the Northwest Abortion Access Fund says that the group had a 61% increase in funding given to patients in the last year, who are traveling, need to take time off of work and sometimes arrange child care. “That’s an increase overall in the amount of money that is being spent on people accessing abortion care,” they said. Abortion providers in Washington saw a whopping 56% increase in patients from Idaho alone.

For the last few months, Abortion, Every Day has been flagging the fights in border towns—where conservatives activists are trying to ban abortion via local ordinances in pro-choice states. One of those towns is Bristol, which sits on the border of Virginia and Tennessee. (Literally: half the town is one state, half the town in the other. The Richmond Times-Dispatch has a huge piece on what’s happening in Bristol with abortion, and it’s a really important distillation of what we’re seeing across the country: Anti-abortion activists attacking clinics, even pressuring their landlords to kick them off leases; the growing anti-choice strategy of trying to get local laws to trump state ones; and the tension between neighbors as the abortion fight takes hold of the town’s culture and attention.

The article is definitely worth a read, and we’ll continue to pay attention to what’s happening in Bristol and other border towns. If you don’t have time to read the whole thing; The Richmond Times-Dispatch also released a video accompanying the piece:

Finally, in the wake of enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution, Michigan’s 2024 budget includes language that “prohibits appropriations from being used to… restrict an individual’s ability to exercise the right to reproductive freedom.” The mandate is a far cry from previous budgets that prevented the state Department of Health and Human Services from contracting with any groups that provided abortions or counseled on the issue. Love to see it!

Quick hits:

• Vox has an article looking at the different state strategies on abortion rights;

• Nevada Public Radio spoke to Congresswoman Susie Lee and Athar Haseebula, executive director of Nevada ACLU, about abortion rights in the state;

• New data shows that Vermont didn’t see a huge influx of out-of-state abortion patients since Roe was overturned (likely because the state is a bit harder to travel to than other pro-choice havens);

• And speaking of remote areas: Here’s an article about how medication abortion changed access for more remote areas of Massachusetts like Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard.

In the Nation

For months, we’ve been following Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s hold up of military promotions—a move in protest over the policy allowing service-members to travel and take time off for abortion care. The New York Times reports that Tuberville’s blocks are about to have a massive impact for high-level military appointments:

“More than half of the current Joint Chiefs are expected to step down from their posts during the next few months without a Senate-approved successor in place, leaving the president’s chief military advisory body in an unprecedented state of flux at a time of escalating tensions with China and Russia.”

So, a big deal! Republicans haven’t been supportive of Tuberville’s tactics exactly, but they haven’t come out against him in a strong way, either. In the meantime, a Pentagon spokeswoman says that the Alabama Senator is setting a “dangerous precedent” that “puts our military readiness at risk.”

In related news, Rolling Stone has an article about the policy, which also allows for abortions in VA health centers in cases of rape, incest, or when there’s a danger to the pregnant person’s health or life. The piece looks at the real-life impact of what it would mean should that policy be rescinded.

Over at The Guardian, Moira Donegan writes about free speech and abortion rights, using what happened to Dr. Catilin Bernard as an example. (The Indiana abortion provider was the target of a year-long harassment campaign by state Attorney General Todd Rokita after she spoke out about a 10 year-old rape victim.)

“If the notion that Rokita, a man who wants abortion policy to be able to pry into the uterus of a little girl, sincerely cares about patient privacy seems suspicious to you, that’s because the privacy fine was always a pretext for the ordeal’s real purpose: retribution, harassment and intimidation of a valuable and politically effective pro-choice voice.”

CNBC publishes an annual list of the top states for business, and now they’re adding reproductive rights to their judging metric. We know that there’s an inextricable link between abortion rights and the economy, and since Roe was overturned, businesses are trying to navigate how to protect their employees who live in anti-abortion states (and whether these companies want to stay in those states long-term).

A study from CNBC/Momentive Women at Work showed that 32% of working women aged 18-34 said they wouldn’t work in a state with abortion bans or restrictions, and that 15% of men said the same. We’ve been seeing similar numbers when it comes to college-bound young people, who aren’t eager to set up shop in a place where they can’t get the full spectrum of healthcare or human rights. You can watch a CNBC segment here for a bit more info, including interviews with governors who are touting abortion protections as a selling point to bring businesses into their states.

Quick hits:

• Teen Vogue with a piece about the harassment and threats directed at abortion activists;

• A doctor argues that physicians have a moral obligation to disobey abortion bans, writing at Truthout that “direct civil disobedience is the only measure that could immediately put a de facto halt to Dobbs”;

• Vox on how abortion bans will negatively impact the already-strained foster care system in anti-abortion states;

• Finally, here’s a really good Bloomberg column on how protections and support for those traveling for abortion care is different than what’s needed for those traveling for gender-affirming care. (Namely, because those receiving gender-affirming care need it continually, as opposed to abortion patients who make just one trip.)

Care Denied

CNN has the story of a 45-year old Louisiana woman who had to travel to Oregon for an abortion. The woman, who asked to be identified only as Victoria, said she was just glad that she was in a position where she could take time off of work and spend $1,000 for the abortion and travel expenses:

“It was so hard for me wrap my head around the fact that I was able to do this, but I’m one of the lucky ones and that there are so many women who are in much tighter positions. And, God, what are they going to do?”

Imagine feeling ‘lucky’ that you had to spend that kind of money to travel eight hours in order to get basic healthcare. Victoria said something else that really struck me: As a middle aged women, she’s been getting all sort of perimenopausal care and recently had a preventative double mastectomy and reconstruction because of a genetically increased chance of breast cancer. She says, “It felt so surreal to get this really high standard of care around my secondary sexual characteristics, but then to have that freeze, slam shut when it comes to reproductive health, it just felt abrupt.” Whew.

Mainstream Media Watch

We’ve been following the case of the Nebraska teenager and her mother who were arrested for self-managing an abortion; according to the Associated Press, the teen’s mother has pleaded guilty to “providing an abortion after 20 weeks of gestation, false reporting and tampering with human skeletal remains.” The teenager, who was charged as an adult, pled guilty in May to “removing, concealing or abandoning a dead body” and faces up to two years in prison.

A quick note about the way the media covers stories like this: You may remember that the pair were arrested after law enforcement got ahold of the teen’s Facebook messages. In this Associated Press piece—and in most of the articles I’ve seen about this case—it’s reported that the teen wrote in her Facebook messages “about how she can’t wait to get the ‘thing’ out of her body” and said “I will finally be able to wear jeans.” But here’s the thing: While she did say something about wearing jeans (which seems pretty on brand for any teenager), the teenager didn’t say she couldn’t wait “to get the ‘thing’ out of her body.” That sentence is nowhere in the Facebook messages; in fact, the language is actually a police officer’s interpretation of the teenager’s conversation.

So when media outlets had pages of messages to pick from, they both chose language meant to make the teenager seem callous and put words in her mouth that were actually those of a police officer—a police officer’s belief presented as fact. I don’t need to tell you why that’s so dangerous.

Keep An Eye On: Digital Rights

Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group, is calling on the Meta Oversight Board to review and change their policies around removing posts related to abortion on Facebook and Instagram. The group cites multiple cases where posts about abortion medication were taken down almost immediately:

“When an Associated Press reporter posted ‘If you send me your address, I will mail you abortion pills’ to corroborate the claims, the post was removed within one minute. When the same reporter posted again with the same language but about guns and marijuana instead of abortion pills, the posts were left up.”

Even posts that were not about sending people abortion medication, but just stating facts about their legal availability, were taken down. EFF cites an article from VICE, for example, that reported a Facebook post stating “abortion pills can be mailed” was removed, while a post stating ‘painkiller pills can be mailed’ was left up.

You can read EEF’s full comments to Meta here, but this is part of a broader speech issue around abortion and digital spaces that we’re going to see come up more and more. For example, Republican lawmakers are already introducing bills that would make certain abortion-related websites illegal, and we know that people’s social media messages have been used in abortion prosecutions. All of which is to say: It’s important that we’re being preemptive about this, so kudos to EFF.

You Love to See It

Missouri House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a strong abortion rights supporter, is running for governor and I could not love her campaign announcement video more: