Three years ago, when he was elected governor of Kansas, Sam Brownback promised to sign any anti-abortion bill that landed on his desk. He’s kept his word, signing a handful restrictive measures to force doctors to give medically unsound information to their patients, impose crippling licensing requirements on clinics and divert funds from health providers to crisis pregnancy centers, among other things.
Now, Brownback is facing a re-election campaign that looks decidedly tougher than most expected, and pro-choice activists are eyeing the race as they seek to reverse the momentum of anti-choice laws sweeping the states. Some early polls show Brownback trailing his Democratic challenger, a little-known state representative named Paul Davis who has voted against many of the anti-choice bills.
“Even if Governor Brownback is put on defense because of his abortion stance, that would matter significantly,” said Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America (and ablogger for TheNation.com). “There’s a perception that because Kansas is deep red, he’s safe as an anti-choice politician.”
Zoë Carpenter
Instead, pro-choice advocates will try to make positions like Governor Brownback’s a liability this year. NARAL plans to prioritize gubernatorial and states races where control of the legislature is closely contested, a decision that reflects that the decisive battles over abortion are now fought largely outside Washington. Nationally, the legal right to abortion remains intact. But women in many states are rapidly losing access on a practical level as state lawmakers force clinics out of business and require patients to jump through increasingly burdensome hoops.
States passed fifty-three laws restricting abortion last year, according to the twenty-third edition of NARAL’s report “Who Decides? The Status of Women’s Reproductive Rights in the United States,” which was released Tuesday. They include outright bans on abortion after as little as six weeks of pregnancy, as well as measures to impose crippling restrictions on providers, defund family planning centers, prohibit insurers from covering abortion and force women to undergo biased counseling or delays. Since 1995, states have passed more than 800 anti-abortion measures.
In many recent cases, conservatives have concealed anti-choice provisions within unrelated bills, and then pushed them through at the last minute or in special sessions. In North Carolina, legislators cut insurance coverage for abortion and tightened rules on clinics by inserting the measures into a motorcycle safety bill on the final day of the legislative session. Ohio Governor John Kasich signed a slew of stringent provisions into law after they were attached to the state’s budget bill. Texas lawmakers needed multiple special sessions to pass a sweeping anti-abortion package that included a ban on abortions after twenty weeks and regulations that forced a third of the state’s clinics to close suddenly.
Concerted efforts to disguise anti-abortion measures partially accounts for their success even while Americans remain broadly supportive of the rights affirmed in Roe v. Wade, said Donna Crane, NARAL vice president for public policy, at a press conference this morning. “They’ve learned that their opinions are unpopular, so they obfuscate them,” said Crane. […]
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