Three states will have their trigger bans take effect this week: Tennessee, Idaho and Texas. Tennessee’s law will have no exceptions for rape or incest; anyone who provides an abortion in Idaho will face five years in prison; and in Texas, where abortion is already illegal without rape or incest exceptions, the law will increase penalties for providers to life in prison.
There is still a chance that Idaho’s law is blocked before it takes effect; today a U.S. judge seemed open to stopping the ban from being enforced, noting that it could discourage doctors from offering abortions to women whose lives were in danger.
In Indiana, where the state’s abortion ban will go into effect next month, crisis pregnancy centers are looking to expand. A spokesperson for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists told the IndyStar that CPCs are “incredibly dangerous.” From Dr. Nisha Verma:
“These patients have often shared with me that they received inaccurate information intended to discourage them from seeking abortion care, and experienced delays in accessing the actual medical care they needed. [They] use deception and stigma to try to control people’s decisions and lives.”
(Also in Indiana, there is an abortion access teach-in at Indiana University this Friday.)
In Florida, six women shared their abortion stories with the Tampa Bay Times and spoke about how—as is the case with nearly all women who have abortions—they didn’t have any regrets. One woman said, “I thought this was going to be a big trauma,” because of the way that abortion had been portrayed in popular culture. “That was the only representation of abortion I had seen.” Like the others sharing their stories, she said, “I was fine.” (Also in Tampa, where the mayor said she won’t direct police to arrest people over abortion, the city council voted to protect the privacy of those seeking abortion.)
A recount of the vote in Kansas came back with the expected results: Voters want abortion protected. Overwhelmingly.
Last week an advisory committee to the Texas Supreme Court ruled unanimously to keep the state’s parental consent law in place—which means minors seeking abortions will still be able to seek a judicial bypass.
A woman in Nebraska was denied medication to complete her miscarriage by an Omaha Walmart pharmacist. Even when her doctor called the pharmacist to explain, the pharmacist refused. The doctor blames Roe being overturned: "It leads to fear and it leads to suspicion and it leads to confusion. And the person who suffers is this poor woman who miscarried.” When questioned by a local reporter, Walmart said it wouldn’t comment on a specific patient.
California wants to make vasectomies free. Lawmakers there are considering a bill, the Contraceptive Equity Act of 2022, that would stop insurance plans from imposing out-of-pocket costs on male sterilization, condoms, and contraceptive sponges.
The PBS in Denver talks to trans men who have had abortions; also in Colorado, Senate candidates are battling it out over abortion, with the Republican nominee—per usual—doing his best to downplay his opposition to abortion.
There’s good reason Republicans want to distance themselves from extreme anti-abortion views (even when they’re their own). In Pennsylvania, for example, voters are turned off by GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano over his position on abortion. Even those who voted for Trump in the past or consider themselves ‘pro-life’ are having a hard time stomaching his anti-abortion politicians. And in Nevada, the GOP candidate for Senate is taking recent hits because of his past dismissive comments about abortion rights.
Wisconsin doctors are speaking out about how they’re dealing with the state’s ambiguous abortion law. Dr. Shefaali Sharma tells the story of a patient pregnant with her third child, who came to see her just a few weeks after Roe was overturned. The woman begged her, “If it comes down to me or the baby, I need you to pick me. I have two babies at home that I have to take care of.” (Sharma assured her that she would.) Imagine having to have these kinds of conversations with your doctor because you don’t know if the law will allow your doctor to save your life.
On the national front:
Women are registering to vote in record numbers since Roe was overturned. Which is great news.
The New York Times looks at the anti-abortion strategy of fetal personhood; and Vox explains the Reproductive Freedom for All Act and the activist critiques of it (and the Dem strategy on abortion, more broadly).
Incarcerated people are going to be hardest hit by abortion bans: Dr. Carolyn Sufrin, an OBGYN and the director of the Advocacy and Research on Reproductive Wellness of Incarcerated People program at Johns Hopkins University, says, “Previously there was at least some sliver of legal recourse there for an incarcerated person, but that no longer exists for people who live in states where abortion is or will be severely restricted or illegal.”
CBS News gets into how the elections of attorneys general across the country have been impacted by the debate over legal abortion; and the Center for American Progress gives advice on how attorneys general can help protect abortion rights.
TODAY has a segment on one woman’s experience with a judicial bypass for abortion when she was a teenager, and the implications of parental consent laws; POLITICO looks at how doctors have become some of the most vocal activists against abortion bans.
The Washington Post highlights some of the horror stories that have emerged post-Roe and how “the human toll of denying abortion to people who want or need one can be, and often is, appalling.” The paper also looks at how abortion has come to play a central role in a special election in upstate New York.
I told you how hundreds of Google workers signed onto letters demanding that management stop collecting data from women seeking abortions, and that they stop promoting crisis pregnancy centers. One of those workers spoke with Democracy Now:
“This is a healthcare crisis that Google needs to figure out what can we do to provide the right kind of information to people when they need it, and now, at this point, figure out how do we obfuscate, encrypt and hide that information about you because you expect privacy.”
Bloomberg gets into the different ways that employers can cover abortion-related travel, as more and more companies start to include abortion-supportive care in their health packages; and The Wall Street Journal looks at the “booming” business of selling abortion pills. It’s a pretty frustrating choice of framing: Rather than talk about how women are desperate for what should be legal health care, the idea here is to make those helping women get abortion medication seem like opportunistic money-grabbers.
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