Abortion, Every Day (6.15.23)

Major anti-abortion groups demand embryos be given lawyers

In the States

Tomorrow is going to be a big day in Iowa for abortion rights: The state Supreme Court is expected to come down with a decision on Friday over whether a 6-week ban—blocked since 2019—can now take effect. Iowa Public Radio points out that five of the seven justices on the Court have been appointed by Gov. Kim Reynolds. If the abortion ban is upheld, it would go into effect three weeks after the decision. I’ll keep you updated as I find out more.

Texas has passed new legislation that Republicans say will ‘clarify’ the state ban by allowing doctors to give women life-saving abortions. First of all, please note the word ‘clarify’—we’ve been hearing it a lot when it comes to implementing abortion ban changes that don’t actually do shit. (National Review uses the same term today!)

Gov. Greg Abbott signed the legislation yesterday, which is being touted as a bipartisan effort to make sure that doctors know it’s a-okay for them to not let women die. This comes in response to the state being sued by 15 women who say that the state’s abortion ban put their health and lives in danger.

But here’s the thing: This law is not ‘clarifying’, nor—despite Republican claims—does it allow doctors to perform life-saving abortions! The only thing it allows is for doctors to make an affirmative defense after they’re sued or criminalized. If ‘affirmative defense’ sounds familiar, that’s because Tennessee had the same law that essentially required doctors providing life-saving abortions to break the law and then defend why it was necessary later.

In short, it’s a bunch of bullshit. It’s a way for Texas Republicans to claim that they did something to protect women’s lives without doing anything (the fact that major anti-choice groups were okay with the legislation should tell you all you need to know), and allows them to continue to make the argument that doctors who denied women care simply misunderstood the law.

You’re going to love this. (And by ‘love’, I mean you’re going to want to throw your laptop across the fucking room.) North Carolina Rep. Tricia Cotham—the former-Democrat who switched parties and gave Republicans the votes they needed to ban abortion in the state—now says she never had an abortion. Cotham gave a whole-ass speech about her abortion in 2015, saying, “This decision was up to me, my husband, my doctor, and my God. It was not up to any of you in this chamber.”

Now, however, she is claiming she never had an abortion and how dare we call it that:

“I had a miscarriage, and a miscarriage in medical terms is called a spontaneous abortion. And instead of saying—first of all, they should not be talking about my miscarriage, that is just very painful and wrong. But they are repeating this message that I had an abortion. And that is false. And that is completely frustrating and they keep on doing it and that’s below the belt.”

Unbelievable. (This, by the way, is the same woman who pissed off that she didn’t get endorsed by Planned Parenthood after she gave this 2015 speech.) Cotham’s comments remind me of the way that Republicans across the country are trying to redefine abortion. They want abortion to be anything they disagree with. Anything else—and certainly any care that they themselves get—is definitely not an abortion.

By the way, a new North Carolina poll shows that only 23% of voters support the new abortion ban.

We’ve been talking a lot about the increase in threats and violence against abortion clinics, and this latest news out of Wyoming is a chilling reminder of just how bad things are getting. Wellspring Health Access in Casper (the clinic that just reopened after being destroyed by an arson attack) reports that one of their patients was held against her will at an anti-abortion center.

Apparently a patient was on her way to her appointment when she was intercepted by activists who took her to an anti-abortion center and locked her in a room. Wellspring representative Lauren Rankin told the Cowboy State Daily, “They were telling them fear-mongering things about abortion. Eventually, the patient’s (significant other) had to physically move them and unlock the door for them to leave.” The woman was finally able to go back to the (real) clinic and end her pregnancy. She chose not to make a police report, so there’s no much law enforcement can do—but this is really scary, and bad sign of how things are escalating.

Speaking of clinic violence: Two men—one of whom is a Marine—were arrested for a Molotov cocktail attack on a California Planned Parenthood clinic last year. They’ve been charged with using explosives or fire to damage property; thankfully no one was hurt in the attack.

Good news out of South Dakota: A judge has blocked portions of the policy that prevented abortion rights advocates from gathering signatures in key areas. The decision came after pro-choice group Dakotans For Health, which is petitioning to get abortion on the ballot, sued over a new Minnehaha County rule that stopped them from collecting signatures in front of certain municipal buildings. The group said that the decision “sends a powerful message that attempts to curtail basic freedoms will not be tolerated.”

A new poll shows that most people in Utah oppose a law mandating that abortions only be performed in hospitals. The law, which is currently blocked, acts as a back-door ban—making it impossible for anyone to receive care because nearly all of the abortions in the state are performed or prescribed in clinics. Just another reminder of the way that restrictions are being passed against the will of voters.

Oregon Republicans ended their walk-out today over abortion- and trans- rights legislation. It’s not clear yet what ‘compromises’ they came to with Democrats over the bills, but we do know that there was talk of watering down the protections for minors.

Quick hits:

• The Florida Supreme Court could release a decision on the state’s 15-week abortion ban at any point now;

• A new Connecticut law allows pharmacists to dispense birth control;

• The News & Observer on how abortion laws could impact North Carolina’s 2024 elections;

• And more on the effort in Massachusetts to protect abortion patient location data.

In the Nation

The White House is hosting Democratic lawmakers from anti-choice states to discuss abortion policy, and strategies for trying to restore or defend reproductive rights. “It’s important to bring them in and to tell them ‘hey we have your back, that we see you, we appreciate the fight that you have been doing and we are partners with you on moving forward,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.

One of the major post-Roe consequences has been that doctors aren’t just unable to give the standard of care to their patients, but that in many states, they can’t even get the training they need in order to know how to provide that care. That’s why we’ve seen such a drop-off in residents applying to OBGYN programs in anti-choice states—why learn in a place that refuses to adequately teach you?

New legislation introduced by Sens. Tammy Baldwin and Patty Murray aims to help: the Reproductive Health Care Training Act would allocate $25 million a year for the next five years to provide funding to medical students who need to leave their state to learn how to provide abortions.

Democrats are also pressuring companies like Walmart and Costco to carry mifepristone, with more than 50 lawmakers sending a letter to pharmacy CEOs. Democrats also reintroduced legislation to protect contraception this week—a much-needed counterbalance to the conservative war on birth control (more on that below).

Meanwhile, Republicans are pushing a funding bill that would block federal dollars from going to abortion or gender-affirming care at VA health centers. They also don’t want service-members to be able to get paid leave if they need to leave their state for abortion care.

Quick hits:

• The Washington Post on the connection between attacks on abortion rights and trans rights;

• Fast Company on how Slack’s lack of end-to-end encryption could put abortion patients at risk;

• And the executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, Oriaku Njoku, talks to The Chronicle of Philanthropy about what it’s like to raise money for abortion post-Roe.

Care Denied

We’re seeing more and more of these stories come out every day. A woman in Kentucky was denied an abortion despite her fetus being diagnosed with anencephaly, a fatal fetal abnormality. Heather Maberry was 20 weeks pregnant when she got the news, and was told that despite the prognosis the law prevented her from getting care. But she couldn’t bear the idea of carrying the pregnancy for another 17 or 18 weeks: “I said, 'I physically can't and mentally can't continue carrying her knowing that she's never gonna breathe, we're never going to have a life with her.’”

Maberry was able to get financing from abortion funds, who helped her with the cost of procedure and travel to Chicago, where she had the abortion. Without their funding, she would have had to pay $6,000 to $7,000 out-of-pocket. She doesn’t blame her doctors, she says, but the politicians.

“I mean most of them are men. They are never going to have to carry a child. They're never going to have to be in the position, they're never gonna be the one that was carrying that baby and had to go through hell.”

Stats & Studies

In the wake of yesterday’s Gallup poll showing record-high support for abortion rights, conservative pundits and publications are doing their usual tap dance. The National Review, for example, focuses on a drop in support for legal abortion after the first trimester—from 69% to 37%. But what NR doesn’t mention is that just a few years ago the percentage of Americans who said they supported abortion after the first trimester was just 28%. That’s nearly a ten point jump in just a few years, after decades of support for second trimester abortion remaining relatively stagnant. (Also peep that jump in support for abortion no matter when in pregnancy!)

The other thing that NR glommed onto was the idea that these numbers are skewed because Gallup didn’t mention exceptions—they assume, and they’re likely correct, that those numbers would chance if respondents were told about specific exceptions to the ban. That’s why it’s so important that Democrats and pro-choicers start to message in earnest about how abortion exceptions aren’t real. This is going to be Republicans’ go-to, and we need to make sure Americans know the truth about so-called exemptions.

More in Stats & Studies…

• NARAL Pro-Choice America has a new report out on disinformation on abortion medication

• Center for American Progress with abortion legislation trends over the last year

Abortion v. Tech

A new report shows that Google made over $10 million just in the last two years from ads for anti-abortion centers. The report, from Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), also shows that the vast majority of anti-abortion ads on Google lie to users by falsely abortion to cancer, promoting ‘abortion reversal’, or failing to admit that they don’t offer abortions. Shireen Rose Shakouri, deputy director at Reproaction, says, “Google needs to live up to their promises and stop helping the anti-abortion movement spread disinformation and hate.”

Meanwhile, HuffPo reports that Twitter suppressed a campaign video because it mentioned abortion rights. When North Carolina state Sen. Rachel Hunt, who is running for lieutenant governor, wasn’t allowed to promote or advertise a recent campaign video, her team reached out to Twitter. An employee told them that it was blocked because of “the mention of abortion advocacy.” They intimated that the policy may change soon, but “for now, though, you still won’t be able to message around that topic.” Just terrific.

Keep An Eye On

“Equal protection.” This is something I’ve written about before—the anti-abortion claim that embryos and fetuses deserve equal protection under the law. It’s a terrifying prospect—not just because it would enshrine fetal personhood, but because it’s the same argument being used by anti-abortion activists and legislators who want to make abortion classified as a homicide.

Another reason to be on top of this: Today, basically every anti-abortion leader and organization in the country signed onto a letter, published in the National Review, calling for “equal protection for children in the womb.”

Not only does the letter call for constitutional protections for fetuses, it wants child endangerment laws to apply to pregnancies (remember yesterday’s story out of Ohio?); demands that embryos and fetuses be given “legal representation” and appointed guardians during legal battles; and states that embryos created via IVF be classified as people and therefore will no longer be allowed to be discarded.

Again, this call was signed on by major anti-abortion organizations—including Students for Life, 40 Days for Life, Live Action, Concerned Women for America, etc. It is a clear marker of what they’re after. The only question is: Will we all take them seriously?

Anti-Choice Strategy: Birth Control

Feminists have warned for years about the way conservatives have been laying the groundwork to ban contraception. While some groups, like Students for Life, outright say they believe all hormonal birth control is akin to abortion, most dodge questions about contraception because they don’t want Americans to know just how radical they are. But as we close in on a year after Roe being overturned, conservatives are starting to publicly dip their toes in the anti-birth control waters.

Take Concerned Women for America (CWA):The hyper-conservative women’s group just released a ‘fact-sheet’, Contraception v. Abortion that claims to clear up the “confusion” between the two. The document doesn’t list what forms of birth control the organization believes are abortifacients—that would be too much of a PR nightmare—instead, it explains that pregnancy begins at the moment of fertilization. Not implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus, they say. It’s a key distinction, because conservatives claim emergency contraception and IUDs disrupt implantation and are therefore abortifacients.

Instead of saying that outright, CWA throws has a wink-wink-nudge-nudge footnote that takes you to information about emergency contraception. This is how they make birth control illegal—not by banning it all at once, but by slowly redefining what ‘contraception’ means and chipping away at access bit by bit.

And of course, all of this policy work comes at the same time that conservatives are sowing cultural distrust in birth control as well. Right-wing publications are on the war-path against hormonal contraception, claiming that it hurts women. (Conservatives have even launched entire publications dedicated to that message!) Take this latest piece from the Federalist—which changed its original headline (below) after realizing they were probably being too explicitly creepy by highlighting how teenagers shouldn’t take contraception.