Abortion, Every Day (8.1.23)

New poll: 15-week bans are just as unpopular as 6-week bans

In the States

There’s lots of confusion in Indiana, where the state’s abortion ban goes into effect today, but isn’t enforceable until the state Supreme Court certifies its ruling. While abortion is still technically legal in the state, it’s now near-impossible to obtain: Planned Parenthood clinics have stopped offering abortion care.

In a column for the Indianapolis Star, Rebecca Gibron, president of the regional Planned Parenthood, writes that they “will not be silenced,” and that they’ll “continue to provide non-abortion essential health care.” The organization will also help patients connect with abortion funds and get out-of-state care.

Meanwhile, the ACLU of Indiana is asking the Supreme Court—which ruled in favor of the ban—for a rehearing, and to reinstate a temporary block while that case is heard. I outlined the details of the Indiana law here: the short version is that despite all the bullshit about ‘exceptions’, this really is a total ban. I’m so sorry, Indiana.

In better news, pro-choice judge Janet Protasiewicz is being sworn into the Wisconsin Supreme Court today. That means the legal challenge to the state’s abortion ban is likely to be successful, and that the ban could be struck down. (I don’t want to make any definite statements and jinx it!)

In more good news, early voting in Ohio’s special election—which could raise the standards on ballot measures—shows a massive turnout. The Ohio Capital Journal reports that in the first week of early voting, 16,000 voters were casting a ballot every day; now that average is more than 18,000 per day. Nearly 250,000 absentee ballots have also been sent out since July 11; the board of elections told ABC News that it “reflect[s] a dramatic increase in voter activity over the August statewide primary election of 2022.” That’s great news for us, obviously. (It’s so telling that Republicans count on low turnout to win.)

Also in the state: For all of Ohio Republicans’ whining that the pro-choice ballot measure is being funded by out-of-state interests, a new financial report shows that anti-abortion groups have spent nearly $9 million to oppose the measure—with the majority of the money coming from the DC-based Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. Because of course it is.

A few things happening in Idaho today that are worth noting: The first is that a group of 20 attorneys general have filed an amicus brief challenging the state’s so called ‘abortion trafficking’ law—which makes it a crime to help a minor get an out-of-state abortion. Led by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, the AGs argue that Idaho can’t criminalize behavior in other states, and that interstate travel is protected in the Constitution.

The amicus brief also points out that Idaho’s law goes beyond just banning travel for abortion care, but that it also allows for the prosecution of anyone who ‘recruits’, ‘harbors’, or ‘transports’ minors:

“Consider this example. A teenage girl in Moscow, Idaho, calls her aunt in Pullman, Washington, less than ten miles away, to say she is pregnant and feels she cannot safely tell her parents. If the aunt tells her niece about a clinic in Pullman that offers abortion care and counseling, is that ‘recruitment’? What if the aunt texts her niece a web link to the clinic’s informational material? Or if the niece books an appointment and the clinic’s office manager emails her a preappointment information sheet? If the aunt pays for her niece’s bus ticket to Pullman, is that ‘transportation’—or, as the Idaho law would have it, ‘trafficking’?”

Also in Idaho: Abortion, Every Day reported back in April that state Attorney General Raúl Labrador was broadly interpreting the state’s abortion ban to criminalize doctors who simply refer patients for out-of-state abortions. Health care providers sued in response, and while Labrador walked back his statement, he did so only slightly—refusing to say directly that he wouldn’t prosecute doctors.

Yesterday, a judge in Idaho laid into Labrador for going out of his way not to assure the courts and medical community he wouldn’t target medical providers, and blocked him from prosecuting anyone who refers patients for abortions out-of-state.

A new law in Montana that ostensibly provides legal protection to doctors who don’t want to provide abortions is actually much more dangerous than that. Carly Graf at KFF News writes that the law “will gut patients’ ability to take legal action if they believe they didn’t receive proper care due to a conscientious objection by a provider or an institution, such as a hospital.”

The legislation, which is far broader than ‘conscience’ laws in other states, would also prohibit healthcare workers from being assigned to abortion-related cases—even if just to refer a patient for care—unless they had previously consented in writing. Liz Reiner Platt, director of Columbia Law School’s Law, Rights, and Religion Project, says, “Patients are being denied the standard of care…because objections to certain routine medical practices are being prioritized over patient health.”

In Iowa, Attorney General Brenna Bird says she has no plans go restart reimbursements for rape victims who need emergency contraception. You may recall that Bird stopped the program that helped sexual violence victims pay for the medication—a program that overwhelmingly treated children—claiming that the funds were temporarily paused while she looked at the budget. But in an interview this weekend, she said that the ‘pause’ will actually be permanent. Charming.

Finally, I think we could all use some good news: Illinois is investing more than $23 million in reproductive health care initiatives, including the Complex Abortion Referral Line for Access (CARLA)—a referral and navigation program for patients who need hospital-based abortion care. The program has a team of nurse navigators who help patients coordinate scheduling, funding, transportation, child care, and anything else they might need.

Yesterday, Gov. JB Pritzker said that CARLA—a partnership between hospitals, state agencies and the Chicago Abortion Fund—will “relieve the strain on our independent abortion clinics.” Pritzker also announced that the state is opening a $5 million grant program for reproductive health care providers in the state.

All of this comes just days after Illinois enacted a law prohibiting anti-abortion centers from spreading misinformation or using deceptive advertising. Good job, Illinois!

Quick hits:

• The Austin American-Statesman looks where Texas abortion patients are traveling to for care;

• ProPublica on how Ohio doctors are joining the reproductive rights fight;

• Bloomberg Law on the Alabama abortion rights groups suing the state AG over his threats to jail those who facilitate out-of-state abortions;

• And Jezebel with more on the wild story I told you about yesterday: How North Carolina Rep. Tricia Cotham is a GOP plant.

In the Nation

The White House says that their decision to keep Space Command headquarters in Colorado—instead of moving it to Alabama, as Trump planned—has nothing to do with Alabama’s abortion ban. White House national security spokesperson John Kirby says, “The deciding factor for President Biden in deciding to keep Space Command in Colorado Springs was operational readiness, pure and simple.”

U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who has been holding up military promotions and nominations in ‘protest’ of the Pentagon’s abortion policy, says that the decision to keep Space Command in Colorado “looks like blatant patronage politics.” As I’ve reported previously, Republicans have been trying to pass legislation that would bar the federal government from declining to buy or lease buildings based on a state’s abortion policy.

Meanwhile, abortion rights groups and LGBTQ organizations are asking the department of Health and Human Services to apply the recently expanded HIPAA protections for reproductive health care to gender-affirming care, as well. (This is the policy that the 19 Republican Attorneys General want to repeal because it would increase protections for patients getting out-of-state care.)

Casey Pick of The Trevor Project told Bloomberg Law that if someone leaves their state to get gender-affirming care, “that home state should not be able to drag back health information about what care an individual received somewhere else where that care was entirely legal.”

Finally, USA Today looks at the battle over a child tax credit—and how Republicans want to expand it to include fetuses. What they don’t mention, though, is that conservative lawmakers don’t just want to use the credit to enshrine fetal personhood (though that’s certainly a big part of it). They also want to use that legislation to establish a government-run website—a national clearinghouse of crisis pregnancy centers—that would collect data on the pregnant women who visit the webpage. Not very ‘family friendly’!

Quick hits:

• A former officer writes in Slate about how dangerous it is for Sen. Tuberville to hold up military promotions;

• More on the VA spending bill and abortion;

• And Essence on the Black women running for office to save reproductive rights.

2024

Yesterday, anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America attacked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over his refusal to explicitly support a national abortion ban, calling his equivocating “unacceptable.” Today, DeSantis responded:

“Different groups, you know, are gonna have different agendas, but I can tell you this: Nobody running has actually delivered pro-life protections. I have done that. I’ve stood up. I’ve said that I would stand for life, and we have done that, and we have delivered, and we’re proud of that.”

He’s so proud of that 6-week abortion ban that he won’t even mention it in pro-choice leaning states!

We know that SBA Pro-Life America prefers Mike Pence above all other candidates—they love a guy who wants to force women to carry doomed pregnancies to term—but apparently the group is also still holding out hope that Donald Trump will get behind their 15-week national abortion ban. As I’ve written before, Trump’s refusal to sign onto a federal ban makes me truly nervous: he knows abortion rights are popular, and he can use that to his advantage. (Especially among Republican women.)

The New Republic reports on a memo from the Democratic Attorneys General Association outlining how the party can win elections in conservative-leaning states Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana. One of the key ways they plan to do it? Focusing on abortion rights. The memo argues that Democrats in each state need to lean into their opponents’ anti-abortion histories and highlight the way bans have hurt the states. Democrats across the country know that abortion wins elections—even in red states.

Stats & Studies

Republicans have been desperately pushing the idea that a 15-week national abortion ban is the ‘compromise’ Americans will get behind. That’s why they’re calling it a ‘consensus’ and spitting out talking points claiming that most voters want some sort of restrictions on abortion. So they’re really not going to like the latest New York Times-Siena College poll.

Not only does the poll show that 61% of Americans believe abortion should be legal all or most of the time—it reports that despite all that frenzied conservative messaging, a 15-week ban is just as unpopular as a 6-week ban!

When asked about a 6-week state-level abortion ban, 57% of respondents were strongly or somewhat opposed. That number only dropped to 53% when asked about a 15-week national ban. Similarly, 36% of respondents supported a 6-week ban, with approval only jumping to 38% when asked about a 15-week ban. So much for their grand plan!

The Care Crisis

Several new reports are out this week about maternal health post-Roe. As you can imagine, none of them paint a particularly optimistic picture. A report from ABC News and Boston Children's Hospital, for example, found that over 1.7 million women live in a county without access to abortion or maternity care, and that 3.7 million women live in a county without access to abortion and with “no or low” access to maternity care. In simpler terms? Millions of Americans women are being forced into pregnancy in places where they can’t even safely give birth.

The connection is not a coincidence, of course. Eugene Declercq, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health who studies maternal mortality, says, “The same states that are most likely to be restrictive are also states that have been providing minimal services for a long time to women.” We also know from an earlier study that mothers in states with abortion bans are three times more likely to die.

This map of ‘double deserts’—abortion and maternal care—is incredible telling:

The numbers for this report were drawn from another new study on maternal health in the U.S. from the March of Dimes. That report found that millions of women live in places with little to no maternal care, and that hospitals have lost over 300 maternity wards in the last few years.

Finally, a new report from Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health and George Washington University graded states on their maternal mental health: Forty states and DC got Ds and Fs. (The only state to get a grade higher than a C was California.)

Anti-Choice Strategy: Message Repetition

One of the first things you learn when you do media training is that you have a limited amount of time to get your message out. If you’re doing a cable news hit, you only have a few minutes to get your point across; if you’re giving a quote to a reporter, they can use anything you say, so you have to choose your words carefully. The way to beat those built-in hurdles is to repeat your message again and again. You don’t have to say it the exact way each time, but the point should remain the same.

That’s precisely what we’re seeing happen with anti-abortion activists right now. Consider the release I wrote about yesterday from Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America president Marjorie Dannenfelser deriding Ron DeSantis over his refusal to explicitly support a national abortion ban. I pointed out that Dannenfelser used the word ‘consensus’, three times in her statement—that wasn’t an accident.

When the Associated Press wrote about the story yesterday, they did a good job not taking Dannenfelser’s bait to call the ‘ban’ a ‘consensus’—which, as you know by now, is the language shift conservatives are desperate for. But because Dannenfelser used ‘consensus’ so many times in her statement, it was difficult for reporters to quote her without using it. From the AP:

“SBA President Marjorie Dannenfelser said the anti-abortion movement and Americans across the U.S. deserve a president who will ‘boldly advocate’ for a ban on abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy.

‘A pro-life president has a duty to protect the lives of all Americans. He should be the National Defender of Life’ she said. ‘Gov. DeSantis’s dismissal of this task is unacceptable to prolife voters. A consensus is already formed. Intensity for it is palpable and measurable…’”

This is something both for us to watch out for, and—as much as I hate to say it—mimic. One of the reasons that it feels like the mainstream media repeats anti-choice lies so much is that they are extraordinarily disciplined about repeating their talking points. We should be, too.