Abortion, Every Day (12.20.23)

Florida activists say they have enough signatures for a ballot measure

Click to skip ahead: In Criminalizing Care, some ways you can help Brittany Watts. In the States, good news in Florida, bad news in Illinois. In the Nation, Catholic leadership is struggling with how to handle the string of abortion rights losses. Republicans are still running scared from Kate Cox in GOP Panic. Keep An Eye On the anti-abortion movement’s so-called pre-natal campaign. More in Care Denied on how health and life ‘exceptions’ don’t work. And I leave you with a couple of quick hits in Stats & Studies.

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Criminalizing Care

I’m so glad to see Brittany Watts’ case continuing to get national attention: CNN covered her story this week, and Slate interviewed law professor Mary Ziegler about the legal implications of the case. For more background, you can read my Monday newsletter.

I know everyone has been looking for ways to help Brittany, so I have some action items for you today, in addition to the GoFundMe I’ve mentioned previously.

The terrific organization If/When/How has an action page on the case, with toolkits for those who live in or outside of Ohio. They include ways to contact the local prosecutor, the governor, sample tweets, scripts and more. The idea is to put pressure on the prosecutor’s office to drop the case. So if you’ve looking for a way to channel your anger—this is it!

In more criminalization news, a sorta-update from Texas: I told you yesterday that the Amarillo City Council was considering enacting an abortion travel ban—an ordinance that makes it illegal to help someone leave the state for care. The all-male council spent two hours debating the ordinance and different versions of the rule, yet didn’t come to a decision. I’m glad to hear, at least, that one woman in the audience booed the council members.

In the States

Florida pro-choice activists say they’ve collected enough signatures to get an abortion rights amendment on the 2024 ballot. Floridians Protecting Freedom expect to submit 1.4 million signatures before the end of the year. (They need 891,000 to get their measure in front of voters.)

Now we just have to wait for the signatures to be verified, and for the state Supreme Court to approve the ballot language. Remember, Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody has petitioned the justices to reject the amendment based on its ‘viability’ standard—part of the broader attacks on ballot language we’re seeing from Republicans in multiple states.

We’re also waiting on a ruling from the Florida Supreme Court on a challenge to the state’s 15-week ban. That decision will determine what happens to a more recently-passed 6-week ban that hasn’t been enacted yet. (I know, it’s a lot to keep track of—that’s why I’m here!)

If that 6-week ban is enacted in Florida, access in the South would be completely decimated: In addition to impacting millions of people in the state—Florida has as many people in it as the populations of Greece and Sweden combined—out-of-state patients would also lose access.

Wisconsin’s abortion ‘ban’ just got one step closer to the state Supreme Court. A Republican prosecutor has appealed a judge’s ruling that found the 1849 law isn’t actually a ban at all, but a feticide law.

A refresher: In July, County Circuit Judge Diane Schlipper ruled that the law only applies to an attack on a pregnant woman that ends her pregnancy—not abortion. Schlipper wrote at the time, “There is no such thing as an ‘1849 Abortion Ban’ in Wisconsin.” Her ruling cleared the way for Wisconsin Planned Parenthoods to resume abortion care, and Republicans have been fighting back against it ever since.

With this appeal, the expectation is that the case will get to the state’s highest court—a court that just recently came under liberal control. Elections! They matter!

As Illinois sees a huge uptick in out-of-state abortion patients, the Planned Parenthood there has opened a new clinic in Carbondale. As you may recall, Carbondale has seen several new clinics open recently because of the city’s proximity to anti-abortion states like Tennessee. (There’s been a lot of discord in the city as a result.)

Less terrific news out of Illinois: The state law prohibiting anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers from lying to women is done for. The Deceptive Practices of Limited Services Pregnancy Centers Act would have banned centers from using lies and misinformation to prevent women from getting abortion care—which is pretty much their entire strategy.

Anti-abortion groups claimed that the law was an incursion on their free speech rights. This is the same defense the anti-choice movement is using to fight against buffer zone laws. It’s a strategy they’re relying on more and more.

I don’t know why Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul agreed to scrap the policy (outside of the ongoing lawsuits), but apparently he came to an agreement with anti-choice groups. It’s incredibly disappointing. Raoul says he’ll still go after the centers using the state’s consumer fraud law.

I’m really worried about these ‘free speech’ challenges; while it seems ridiculous to claim that you have a First Amendment right to lie to women or scream in their faces outside of clinics, these suits are clearly gaining steam.

The Guardian has a piece on Democrats’ wins in Virginia and how they’re largely attributable to abortion rights. They look at one battleground district in particular, House district 65, where delegate candidate Josh Cole hyper-focused on abortion rights. I just want to flag something Cole said:

“Of course, we did talk about kitchen-table issues when we’re on the doors and different things like that, but our message was simple. We need to trust women and we need to protect a woman’s right to choose and we need to make sure that the government doesn’t interfere with that.”

The simplicity of this is so important. No mention of weeks or ‘exceptions’, just a straight-forward message that the government has no place in our medical decisions.

Kate Cox is still top-of-mind for those in Texas (and around the country). Her story isn’t just a reminder of the cruelty of abortion bans—but that’s there no safe or ethical way to legislate pregnancy. Public radio station KERA, for example, points out that the state Supreme Court’s decision on her case didn’t offer any more clarity on the law—just confusion. And Austin American-Statesman columnist Bridget Grumet writes that Cox’s case and others like it aren’t a “glitch” in state policy:

“They illustrate a core fallacy with Texas’ abortion bans, that pregnancies are either healthy or imminently deadly, that the line between the two is clear, that no meaningful risks to the patient’s health fall in between.”

In other words: What happened to Cox was exactly how the law was meant to work.

Finally, a North Dakota judge says he’ll rule soon on a challenge to the state’s abortion ban, which only allows abortion in cases of “serious” health risks or death. The Red River Women’s Clinic and other doctors are asking the judge to block the state from going after providers who use “good-faith medical judgment” to help sick patients.

As is the case in so many states with similar bullshit exceptions, North Dakota doctors feel like they need to wait until their patients are on death’s door before they can give them care.

Quick hits:

• EMILY’s List has endorsed Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger for Virginia governor;

• The Springfield New Leader on the gubernatorial candidates in Missouri and where they stand on abortion;

• WyoFile on Wyoming’s maternal health gap;

• And Arizona’s Democratic party chairperson, Yolanda Bejarano, tells The Guardian that abortion rights are central to their 2024 strategy.

In the Nation

The Senate confirmed the last of the military officers held up in Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s now-defunct block of promotions over the Pentagon’s abortion policy, officially bringing his ‘protest’ to an end. 

Tuberville held strong for months, but finally relented after pressure from his Republican colleagues both on the Senate floor and behind closed doors. The Senate confirmed over 440 military nominees as a bloc, and voted on the remaining 11 senior generals and admirals.

Vice President Kamala Harris was on MSNBC last night talking about her upcoming “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour. She says abortion will be a “binary” choice for voters between a country with a national ban and one without. (The Washington Post also has more on Harris’ speaking tour, and how pro-choice activists are feeling a bit abandoned by President Joe Biden.)

Meanwhile, American Catholic leadership is trying to sort out how to handle the recent string of abortion rights losses—especially after Ohio, where the Church spent millions of dollars in opposition to Issue 1. The Associated Press reports that some Catholic anti-choice activists are advising Church leadership to pivot towards ‘softer’ strategies—like support for abortion ban exceptions and anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers.

As is the case in the anti-abortion movement more broadly, not everyone is one board with that tactic; some want the church to support bans no matter how voters feel.

Something else caught my eye in this AP piece that I think is important. President of the conservative advocacy group CatholicVote, Brian Burch, let this slip:

“Burch said state legislatures with anti-abortion majorities should avoid punishing women who get abortions. But he approves of penalties against medical personnel who provide abortions, and favors new laws that could punish people for pressuring a woman to get an abortion.”

What kind of ‘pressure’, exactly, would be illegal? Because I’m willing to bet that they’re not just talking about coercive control or domestic violence situations.

Would it be illegal ‘pressure’ to tell your pregnant teen daughter you think she shouldn’t have a baby? Would it be unlawful pressure to send someone a url of an abortion clinic?

We know that the anti-abortion movement likes to define this sort of thing as broadly as possible—and that they’re using similar language tricks to target abortion funds. (Aiding and abetting, for example, or ‘trafficking’.) Also, so much for the anti-abortion movement’s big worries about free speech!

Quick hits:

• The Washington Post and the Associated Press look ahead to what we can expect on abortion rights in 2024;

• The Boston Globe editorial board calls on the Supreme Court to do the right thing on mifepristone;

• And the DNC is putting up billboards in Iowa tying Nikki Haley to extreme abortion bans. (As they should.)

Keep An Eye On

In October, I wrote about the anti-abortion movement’s new campaign: a quiet but well-funded initiative focused on forcing people to carry doomed pregnancies to term. One of the key parts of that strategy is sowing distrust in prenatal testing, claiming that the results can’t be trusted and that there’s a nefarious and greedy prenatal testing “industry” seeking to take advantage of women. (Messaging sound familiar?)

Since I published that investigation, I’m seeing these talking points everywhere. In this local news piece about the pro-choice ballot measure effort in Arkansas, for example, the head of Arkansas Right to Life blasted the proposed amendment because it contains exceptions for fatal fetal anomalies:

“The doctors, in their best judgment, could be wrong. The test could be wrong. To end the life prematurely, that’s a double tragedy for those parents.”

Definitely something to keep an eye out for—especially because this kind of messaging can sound so innocuous.

GOP Panic

Republicans are still running scared in the wake of Kate Cox’s story going viral. (Sometimes literally.) They know that there’s nothing they can say, because Texas’ ban worked exactly as intended.

Most of all, the GOP is terrified that more stories like Cox’s will come out, and that they’ll drive voters away in 2024. And they should be scared! Poll after poll shows that post-Roe personal stories are hugely resonant at the ballot box.

That’s why Republicans are really not going to like seeing that local media outlets in states with abortion bans—like Tennessee and Mississippi—are asking whether what happened to Cox could happen there.

After all, Republican legislators have been skating on the fact that a lot of people don’t know the details of their state’s abortion laws. A poll in Tennessee, for example, showed that less than 20% of people know that the state’s abortion ban has no exceptions. So when a story like Cox’s starts a conversation about what Tennessee’s law actually is, nothing good happens for Republican lawmakers.

Abortion, Every Day in the News

I spoke to Samantha Bee for her new podcast The Defenders about the work I’m doing here at the newsletter. And in an extra bit of luck, I got to share episode space with the incredible Renee Bracey Sherman of We Testify! You can listen below:

Care Denied

STAT News has a piece about how abortion bans have impacted cancer patients, and it’s just as heart-breaking as you can imagine. California oncologist Katherine Van Loon recounts a pregnant patient telling her, “I have two children that need me, and if you have to make a decision, I need you to remember that. That my little girls need me, the two kids I already have need me.”

Since Roe was overturned, we’ve seen cancer patients have to leave their home states for abortions—with doctors too afraid to provide them care under bans that narrowly define what a ‘medical emergency’ or ‘imminent’ health risk is.

The American Society of Clinical Oncology released guidance for oncologists in states with abortion bans, advising that doctors should “[present] patients with options to terminate a pregnancy to treat the patient’s cancer.” But as evidenced in Kate Cox’s case and others, the laws scare doctors off—and these abortion bans don’t have patients’ real medical needs in mind.

Law professor Mary Ziegler writes this week, for example, that ‘exceptions’ were simply not designed to work for patients. “When the state’s interest in fetal life clashes with real health threats faced by women, patients will always find themselves on the losing side,” she says.

That said, the anti-abortion movement will never admit as much: In an Associated Press piece today on abortion ban ‘exceptions’ for women’s health and lives, anti-choice activists continue to claim that these fake exemptions are enough to protect people—even in the face of story after story proving otherwise.

Stats & Studies

Abortion, Every Day told you last month about a new study showing that nearly two-thirds of family medicine residents are training in states with some kind of abortion restriction, and that nearly one-third are training in states with heavy abortion restrictions or an outright ban. If you’d like to learn more, States Newsroom has an interview this week with one of the study’s lead researchers.

Finally, the Guttmacher Institute has a new fact sheet out with this jaw-dropping statistic: when it comes to state legislation in 2023, there have been 1,098 provisions introduced to restrict or ban access to reproductive rights. Whew.