The Week in Abortion

2.19.24 - 2.23.24

“Extrauterine Children” in Alabama

The biggest story this week in abortion rights was the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos are “extrauterine children” and that families whose embryos were destroyed in an accident could sue for wrongful death. The justices decided that the law “applies to all unborn children, regardless of of their location.”

In addition to destroying access to fertility treatments in the state (one large health system already stopped providing IVF), the ruling laid the groundwork for a much broader and scarier precedent: the idea that fetal personhood trumps constitutional rights. Remember this quote from Chief Justice Tom Parker?

“A good judge follows the Constitution instead of policy, except when the Constitution itself commands the judge to follow a certain policy. In these cases, that means upholding the sanctity of unborn life, including unborn life that exists outside the womb.”

As Robin Marty, Director of Operations for the West Alabama Women's Center and author of The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, pointed out to me—Alabama is already violating constitutional rights all over the place when it comes to fetal personhood. Pregnant women have been jailed in ‘protection’ their fetuses, and Attorney General Steve Marshall has been threatening to prosecute anyone who helps someone leave the state for care. “What other constitutional rights are they planning to ignore in the name of protecting these so-called “children?,” Marty said.

The fallout from the ruling has been huge—public outrage is high, and Republicans are running scared from the ruling (or trying to change the subject). The Senate’s GOP campaign arm advised candidates to come out in support of IVF, but it’s clear that a lot of Republicans are torn between what they know is an incredibly unpopular decision and the anti-abortion groups that support their campaigns.

It was probably Nikki Haley, though, who mucked up her response the worst. First the Republican presidential hopeful told ABC News, “Embryos, to me, are babies.” Later, Haley told CNN, “Alabama needs to go back and look at the law…We don’t want fertility treatments to shut down.”

You may remember that Haley made a similarly bizarre statement earlier this week about the Texas law and Kate Cox’s case. She told The Dallas Morning News that she thinks Texas should change its law so that women who have doomed pregnancies can get care, but didn’t acknowledge the fact that the 15-week ban she’s supporting has no exception for fatal fetal abnormalities.

Some other news related to the ruling that hasn’t gotten any airtime, as far as I can tell: The powerful anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America claimed that the Alabama ruling “does not mean fertility treatment is prohibited.” But their ‘research’ arm, the Charlotte Lozier Institute, submitted a public comment to the CDC this week advising them to report and regulate the embryos used in fertility treatments.

As I’ve written so many times before, reporting mechanisms are a central art of the anti-abortion movement’s strategy: They want every abortion reported, every so-called abortion complication submitted to the state, and now every embryo accounted for.

There’s also more analysis on Alabama in Slate, and “Morning Edition” at NPR spoke to If/When/How Attorney Elizabeth Ling.

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If you missed Abortion, Every Day on the Alabama ruling, read it below:

Alabama's Fetal Personhood Ruling

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Anti-Choice Hypocrisy

One of the most frustrating things about the anti-abortion movement is the way they’ve successfully positioned themselves as ‘pro-family’ and ‘pro-children’ despite their continued support of policies that tear families apart and hurt young people. This week that hypocrisy was on full display in Tennessee, where every House Republican voted in support of forcing raped 12 year-olds to carry pregnancies to term.

After Democrat Rep. Gloria Johnson introduced a bill that would have allowed children under 13 years-old to obtain abortion care, Republicans in the state resoundingly killed it. (One even implied that 12 year olds would deliberately wait until they were eight months pregnant to “abort a child.”)

The thing that struck me about this move was that it came at the same time that Republicans in the state are advancing an ‘abortion trafficking’ bill—legislation they claim they’ve proposed to help children. It’s such transparent bullshit.

Keep An Eye On: ‘Med Ed’ Bills

If you missed my column this week on ‘Med Ed’ bills, consider checking it out. This is the anti-abortion movement’s latest legislative strategy: bills that make it seem as if Republicans are working with doctors to ensure women can access health- and life-saving abortions, when in reality they do quite the opposite.

Even the fact that they’re using the term ‘Med Ed’ is telling—the anti-abortion movement loves to disguise their extremism and misogyny in innocuous and credible-sounding language.

The anti-abortion movement’s inaugural legislation came in the form of a South Dakota bill: the legislation mandates that the state health department publish an informational video to explain the state’s abortion ban. The idea is that doctors and other health care providers could look to the video to understand when they can legally provide care.

The problem, of course, is that these legislators and activists don’t believe abortion is ever necessary to save someone’s health or life. Instead of helping, laws like this one would divorce abortion from healthcare, and pressure doctors to deny care to women who have dangerous or nonviable pregnancies.

Read more about the trend below:

The GOP's Latest Weapon: 'Med Ed' Bills

Attacks on Democracy

Republicans across the country are hellbent on making sure that voters don’t have a say on abortion rights, and the latest example came to us this week from South Dakota.

Activists there have been gathering signatures for a pro-choice amendment, but the state GOP has been trying to stymie the effort at every turn. This week, Republicans in the state advanced a bill that would invalidate the proposed amendment if anti-abortion groups are able to convince even a handful of people to withdraw their signatures after the fact.

Adding insult to injury, the bill was introduced by Rep. Jon Hansen—who just so happens to be the vice president of South Dakota Right to Life. Under his bill, the amendment could go through the entire certification process just to be invalidated if a handful of people decide to withdraw their signatures.

The worry is that anti-abortion groups could pressure or intimidate citizens into removing their signatures—or that anti-abortion activists could sign in support of the measure, just to remove their signature later as a strategy to kill the amendment.

For more on the Republican attacks on ballot measures, click here and here.

State Updates

A couple of sneaky anti-abortion bills this week. First, in Kansas, House Bill 2813 and Senate Bill 527 would make it a felony to “coerce” someone to have an abortion by threatening physical or financial harm. The problem? These bills would make it a crime to pressure someone to have an abortion by threatening “any…adverse financial consequence.” It’s entirely unclear what that means—which is the point. (It’s also worth pointing out that “coerced abortions” are a new focus of the anti-abortion movement, who are desperate to pretend as if they care about abused women.)

The second slick bill we saw this week came out of Indiana: Republicans in the state demonstrated precisely how they’re planning to ban birth control—day by day, bit by bit.

HB1426 would make long-acting reversible contraceptives more accessible to Medicaid recipients, but as it was making its way through the state legislature—pro-choice activists noticed any language referring to IUDs was removed.

That’s because Indiana anti-abortion activists successfully lobbied legislators, claiming that IUDs are abortifacients. If you’re a regular reader, you know this is something I write about a lot: the anti-abortion movement is redefining certain kinds of birth control (like IUDs and emergency contraception) as abortions.

The hope is that they can ban birth control without admitting that they’re banning birth control—they just say they’re banning ‘abortion’!

Finally, an anti-abortion bill in Oklahoma outlines exactly what the anti-abortion movement wants to do nationally: from banning birth control and creating a state database of women who have had an abortions, to forcing doctors to perform c-sections instead of providing life-saving abortions. Read my full outline of the legislation—and what it means for the whole country—here.

Quick hits:

• In Wisconsin, Planned Parenthood is asking the state Supreme Court to overturn an 1849 law that was being used to ban abortions;

• A new poll found that 73% of Texans support abortion in cases where there could be a fetal abnormality;

• Utah Republicans want to repeal the abortion clinic ban they passed into law last year so that they can find a new way to ban abortion;

• And Georgia Democrats are introducing a long-shot effort to get abortion rights on the ballot.

Stats & Studies

Love to see it! This week, we saw rew research showing that telehealth medical abortion is just as safe and effective as in-person medical abortion care. The researchers found that 98% of telehealth abortions were effective, and that 99.8% were free from “serious adverse events.” Find out more about the study at ANSIRH.

I’m not surprised, obviously—but it’s nice to have even more evidence of the safety of abortion medication and tele-health. (Especially as SCOTUS gears up to hear a case on mifepristone and the regulations around the abortion medication.)

The timing is also pretty sweet, given that it was just a few weeks ago that two major anti-abortion studies cited in that mifepristone case were retracted by their publisher.

In the Nation

• The Supreme Court denied a request from three Republican-led states to join the case against mifepristone.

• In more Supreme Court news, Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador filed his opening brief in the case over the federal law that mandates doctors provide life-saving and stabilizing abortions. (As I wrote last month, “of course they want us dead.”)

• And if you missed this interview in The Cut with Center for Reproductive Rights lawyer Molly Duane—who represents Kate Cox and the women who are suing Texas—make sure to check it out.