Abortion, Every Day (5.10.24)

Yes, of course the GOP wants a federal ban

Click to skip ahead: In Enshrining Harassment, more on the GOP bill to collect pregnant women’s data. In the States, news out of Texas, Alaska, Ohio, Idaho and Louisiana. Ballot Measure Updates looks at Florida and Minnesota. In GOP Lies, Republicans want us to believe that they propose a national ban. In the Nation, will Dems still care about abortion rights when there’s not an election to win? And in Stats & Studies, more on the new doctors who don’t want to move to anti-choice states.

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Enshrining Harassment

Yesterday, Abortion, Every Day broke the news that Senate Republicans want to create a government-run website that would collect data on pregnant women. It’s exactly as bad as it sounds. You can read the full story here, but the short version is that pregnant women who visit this supposed “national clearinghouse” of information would be prompted to hand over their contact information. Later, they’d be contacted by someone from the Department of Health and Human Services who the legislation says will “follow up with users on additional resources that would be helpful for the users to review.”

Now, if you’re thinking that the government probably isn’t quite staffed enough to contact every pregnant woman who visits this website, you’re probably right. My guess is that if a bill like this were to pass, a Republican administration would contract out this job to crisis pregnancy centers. A terrifying thought, I know, but it seems likely to me.

One reason that came to mind was this piece from Pregnancy Help News that outlined a workshop given by an employee of Heartbeat International, the country’s largest network of crisis pregnancy centers. The title of the workshop? “You CAN Reach the Abortion-Determined.” (Yeah, you’re in for a ride.)

Presenter Ginna Cross told the audience that to reach “abortion-determined” women, crisis pregnancy center workers need to be “aggressive,” use “brutal honesty,” and “not be afraid to talk about sin.”

Cross also admitted, “the abortion-determined client is not going to walk through our doors on her own volition.” In short? They’re teaching people how to actively harass women who want abortions. And that’s who Republicans are talking about putting vulnerable American women in touch with. I’ll have more on this legislation—and it’s connection to crisis pregnancy centers—next week.

In the States

It’s always nice to start with good news, especially when it’s coming out of Texas. The Austin American-Statesman reports that an ordinance to make Clarendon a “Sanctuary City for the Unborn” was unanimously voted down by the city council. Council members said that they didn’t believe abortion was a city issue, but a state one.

A local editorial also accused anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson and his cohorts of “hijacking the city agenda, forcing people to take sides, creating stress where it is not warranted…”

Unfortunately, this comes at the same time that anti-abortion activists have collected more than 10,000 signatures in Amarillo, Texas—an effort to force the city council to reconsider a travel ban ordinance. Dickson carted in some out-of-town activists to help collect signatures and put up billboards in the town reading, “Thwart Biden, prohibit abortion trafficking.”

Speaking of a good news/bad news situation, let’s talk about Alaska. This week, a bipartisan majority of the state Senate approved legislation that will require insurers to cover birth control without a co-pay and allow them to get up to a year of contraception at a time. (Something that’s especially important for folks who live in more rural areas and need to travel to get to a pharmacy.)

All great stuff. The bad news? The legislation was amended to remove any mentions of emergency contraception, and an exemption was added so that religious employers could deny workers birth control coverage. As is always the case, attacks on access are impacting the most vulnerable among us. And Republicans think we won’t notice that even in efforts to expand access to birth control, they manage to limit it.

The Alaska legislation will now return to the state House for a vote.

An Idaho physician is pissed at Republican Attorney General Raúl Labrador, who has been making the rounds claiming that hospitals are lying about having to airlift patients out of the state. Dr. Andrew Wilper writes in the Idaho Statesman that Labrador has launched “an unacceptable attack on the medical profession’s integrity.” He also writes that the AG’s “casual disregard for legal and ethical norms” doesn’t give doctors a lot of faith in his promises that women can get life-saving care in the state.

I reported earlier this week on the proposed rape and incest exceptions to Louisiana’s abortion ban—and how Republicans voted them down, even when they applied to children. In related news, ABC News has a story about the bill’s sponsor, Democratic Rep. Delisha Boyd, and why the legislation is so important to her. Boyd’s mother was a child rape victim, assaulted by a man almost twice her age; that’s how Boyd was conceived.

The Democrat says that the trauma of giving birth so young turned her mother to drugs, and that she tied before her time. “It was a life for a life…You’re then telling me to consider her life less important than my life,” Boyd says. Heartbreaking stuff, but important to remember that for lots of lawmakers—this isn’t just political, but personal.

Ohio abortion rights activists are hard at work trying to repeal Republican restrictions now that abortion is protected in the state constitution. (And as I mentioned this week, conservative lawmakers are doing everything they can to keep those restrictions in place.) The latest challenge, brought by abortion rights groups and attorneys including the ACLU of Ohio and Planned Parenthood Federation of America, seeks to undo anti-abortion laws that limit access to abortion medication.

The groups want to repeal Ohio’s ban on telehealth abortion services, do away with the state’s limits on how into pregnancy patients can use mifepristone, and reverse a law that prohibits advanced practice clinicians—like physician assistants, nurse practitioners and certified nurse midwives—from providing medication abortion. From Jessie Hill, an attorney at the ACLU of Ohio:

“Medication abortion is safe, effective, and accounts for nearly two-thirds of abortions in the United States. These arbitrary, medically unnecessary anti-abortion restrictions profoundly limit Ohioans’ ability to exercise their constitutional rights. We urge the court to strike them down.”

Remember, groups are also trying to repeal the state’s 24-hour waiting period.

Quick Hits:

• I cannot believe that this sort of fact-check is necessary, but the Colorado Sun makes clear that no, you cannot have a ‘post-birth’ abortion in Colorado;

• Also in Colorado, the state is seeing a massive increase in out-of-state patients, especially from Texas;

• Axios tells Florida abortion-seekers what steps to take to get care;

“Those same people who are anti-choice are the ones who want to cut welfare. They’re the same ones who don’t want to provide food stamps. They’re the same ones who don’t want to expand birth control options.”  ~ Maternal fetal medicine specialist Dr. Leilah Zahedi-Spung in Mother Jones

Ballot Measure Updates

A new poll shows that support for Florida’s abortion rights amendment is at 61%, just over the 60% needed to protect abortion in the state constitution. The numbers, from the Florida Chamber of Commerce, also found that 29% of voters oppose the measure while 10% are uncertain.

But the activists behind the effort tell NBC News that the measure has no chance of passing if they don’t get more donations to keep the campaign going. From Andrea Mercado, executive director of Florida Rising:

“Florida is the third largest state in the nation, so to reach our population and to win 60% of the vote is going to require all hands on deck. And it will be expensive to make sure that 60% of voters in November vote yes on Amendment 4.”

Anxiety (and excitement) over Amendment 4 has obviously increased now that Florida has enacted a 6-week ban—it’s a way for voters furious over the ban to restore women’s freedom.

CBS News looks at the pro-choice ballot measure effort in Minnesota, where lawmakers want an Equal Rights Amendment to protect abortion rights. Republicans opposing the move are using an argument we’ve heard in multiple other states—that abortion should be on a different ballot measure than every other right in the proposed ERA. From Republican Rep. Marion Rarick:

“It should be two separate questions. A separate question—whether or not all people are created equal, which was in our founding documents of this country versus enshrining abortion…Those are two completely different questions that are now put together in one constitutional amendment for the people and it's not clear."

This is what Ohio anti-abortion groups tried to do when they brought a lawsuit against Issue 1, claiming that abortion rights was different than the other issues cited in the measure, like protecting pregnancy and miscarriage care. Last month, anti-abortion activists in Nevada made the same claim—arguing that a pro-choice measure violated the state’s single-subject rule. Remember, this isn’t just a political strategy, but a rhetorical one. Conservatives want to divorce abortion from other kinds of healthcare.

GOP Lies: National Ban Edition

As we get closer to November, Republicans are getting more and more nervous about abortion rights. And they should be! The stories coming out of anti-choice states of women being denied care continue to horrify voters, and the polls reflect as much. That’s why we’re seeing the GOP do its best to back off the idea of a national abortion ban—using Donald Trump’s ‘back to the states’ cop-out as distraction.

This week, for example, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told POLITICO that he didn’t anticipate putting forward or passing a federal abortion ban. Johnson claimed that we need a political ‘‘consensus” on the issue, and that “there’s a lot of work to do to build a culture of life.”

But here’s the thing: Johnson didn’t say he wouldn’t bring forward a national ban, just that Republicans weren’t planning on it. It was a very typical, middling answer that pivoted to Trump’s talking points. Johnson said, “this is in the states’ purview now.”

In other words, it wasn’t anything new. Yet the media coverage of Johnson’s interview did exactly what Republicans hoped it would—accepted the premise that the GOP is done pushing for a national ban.

From The Washington Post: “Johnson says he does not see national abortion ban next year.” The New York Post headline: “House Speaker Mike Johnson says he won’t push federal abortion ban.” And here’s Forbes: “No National Abortion Ban, Speaker Johnson Says—Even Under Trump.”

I’ve said it a thousand times: The only way Trump will be able to convince voters that he’s ‘moderate’ on abortion rights is if the mainstream media does his job for him and repeats Republicans’ messaging. And this is what I meant.

I felt the same frustration when I saw this headline from CBS News declaring that Trump wouldn’t sign a federal abortion ban. Because let’s be serious: Trump would absolutely sign a national abortion ban.

While Trump said once—in passing, while talking to reporters on a tarmac—that he wouldn’t sign a federal ban, the disgraced former president has mostly avoided the question or outright refused to answer. His most common response is that Republicans will never have the votes to get a ban to his desk. And in his interview with TIME, Trump wouldn’t say whether he would veto a federal ban should one pass. Why? Because he absolutely would sign a national ban!

Mainstream media outlets are so eager for their easy headlines and black-and-white takes that they’re misleading readers about what Republicans would actually do on abortion rights if Trump is reelected.

Take that CBS News piece, for example: The bulk of this article was good and important—it gets into the various backdoor bans Trump could pass using mechanisms like the Comstock Act. But the first sentence leads readers to believe that Trump has somehow softened on the issue:

“When Donald Trump announced his position on abortion last month—pledging to leave the issue to the states—groups that oppose the procedure and had pushed him to back a federal ban were disappointed. ‘At the end of the day, this is all about the will of the people,’ Trump said.”

You know I’ve been flagging how Republicans use the phrase “the will of the people” to distract from the fact that they’re passing bans against voters’ wishes. So by starting the article with that lie, and by using a headline that makes it seem like Trump is opposed to a national ban, an article that could have been great just repeated Republican propaganda. This is how we lose.

In the Nation

Democrats continue to bet on abortion rights—and women’s personal stories. In an effort to oust U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley in Missouri, for example, Democrat Lucas Kunce is running an ad campaign featuring a distraught woman talking about her struggles to conceive:

“Now there are efforts to ban IVF, and Josh Hawley got them started. I want Josh Hawley to look me in the eye and tell me that I can’t have the child that I deserve.”

You can watch the ad below. It’s powerful, for sure, but I won’t lie: I’m a little nauseated watching male politicians use women’s stories to win elections en masse these days when so few of them gave a shit about our rights before.

The Guardian reports that some abortion rights activists are feeling similarly put off by Democrats’ efforts to use excitement over pro-choice ballot measures to turn out votes for Dem candidates. Julie Cantillo, who helped gather signatures for Amendment 4 in Florida, says it seems “gimmicky.”

“This is about everyone having access to their human rights and healthcare. I don’t want to minimize it by saying this is a ploy to turn people out. That’s not why so many Floridians have been putting so much effort into this.”

I don’t begrudge Democrats using the most powerful messaging possible, I just hope that they’ll still be around fighting for abortion rights after November.

Heartbeat International, the world’s largest network of crisis pregnancy centers, is being sued along with other anti-abortion organizations over their claims on abortion “reversal.” CBS News looks at how attorneys general in states like New York and California are increasingly targeting the deceptive organizations for the way they mislead women. More of this please!

Quick hits:

• The 19th looks at the Democratic attorneys general working to protect abortion rights;

• Glamour asks if it’s time to delete your period apps;

• Ms. magazine outlines what Donald Trump would do on abortion rights if elected;

• And Boom! Lawyered has an explainer on ‘abortion trafficking’.

Stats & Studies

There’s been lots of chatter about the study I mentioned yesterday showing that new doctors are increasingly avoiding states with abortion bans. Both Axios and the Associated Press looked at the drop in residency applications from doctors (4.2%) broadly versus the drop in residency applications from OBGYNs, specifically (6.7%). Meanwhile, states without abortion restrictions had a 0.4% increase in OBGYN applicants. And Dr. Atul Grover, one the study’s co-authors, says the trend is looking even “more pronounced” than last year.

KFF Health News also dug into the study, publishing a podcast about the research. Beverly Gray, OBGYN professor at Duke University School of Medicine, points out that most new doctors are in their 20s, “the age when people are starting to think about putting down roots and starting families.” So the concern isn’t professional, but personal—no one wants to live somewhere that they’re not safe giving birth themselves.