In a year of unprecedented attacks on women's freedom to make choices about pregnancy and contraception, there was a small bit of good news last week. Three more state legislatures adjourned. Which brings the total that can do no more damage this year to 19.
But the anti-choice victories already achieved in 2011 are surely drawing high-fives among the faithful. In April alone, according to the latest tally by the
Guttmacher Institute, nine states passed 33 new laws designed in some fashion to keep women from obtaining abortions. That's on top of the 15 new laws passed in seven states during March. Elizabeth Nash, who tracks legislation on reproductive rights for Guttmacher, told me the wave of proposed laws is greater than "any I have seen in my 12 years here."
You can see a list of what has passed so far here. And an analysis of the bills and amendments affecting reproductive rights that have been introduced in 2011 here. While many legislators have gone home, we haven't yet seen the end of the year's efforts to turn Roe v. Wade into a dead letter.
Not that the coerced-birth forces will be able to claim victory for all the hundreds of pieces of legislation their allies have introduced in each of the 50 states. Most of those bills will be defeated. For instance, it seems highly unlikely that Louisiana will pass the full frontal attack on Roe introduced last month by Rep. John LaBruzzo. His proposal would ban all abortions. No exceptions for rape, incest or even the life of the woman, much less her health. While that is the most draconian bill, proposals for abortion bans to replace Roe have been introduced in 20 states and have passed one chamber of the legislature in five of them.
But several newly proposed laws, from North Dakota to North Carolina, have been defeated in committee or on the floor of at least one chamber of a score of state legislatures. And even when they pass both chambers, a governor sometimes stands in the way of enactment. A week ago Friday, Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer vetoed a bill that would have criminalized abortion. Minnesota is considering an amendment to a bill that would not only defund Planned Parenthood but impose a gag order on any reproductive services operation that refers women to abortion providers or even mentions the word "abortion." Gov. Mark Dayton will no doubt veto that bill if it is passed by the legislature, just as he can be expected to veto the legislatively approved bill barring abortions in the state after 20 weeks of gestation.
But the foes of reproductive freedom are relentless. They move on from losses and repeat previous efforts with slightly changed language or some new roundabout approach. They have no interest in waiting for the never-may-come day that a majority of the Supreme Court changes its mind. Nearly from the moment Roe was decided, they have chipped away at women's right to choose, occasionally hammering off a big chunk of previously guaranteed rights, as they did with the 1992 Casey v. Planned Parenthood decision, which Scott Lemieux recently concluded is the source of so many of our current abortion woes.
Here are just a few examples of this year's attack:
• In Louisiana, where the legislative session began in late April, Abruzzo's is not the only anti-choice proposal on the agenda to make access to abortion more difficult. The state House of Representatives has just reenacted laws on informed consent, parental consent and a 24-hour waiting period. Last week, it passed the ridiculous Forced Abortion Prevention Sign Act. Action now moves to the Louisiana Senate. Louisiana is one of several states with laws already on the books that would immediately ban all abortions if Roe is overturned. Like other states, it prohibits abortion providers from obtaining malpractice insurance.
• In the final hours before adjourning last week, Kansas legislators joined five other states that have banned private insurance companies from offering coverage that includes abortion as a standard procedure. The only exception would be in cases where the woman's life is at risk. Missouri, North Dakota, Utah, Idaho, Kentucky and Oklahoma have passed similar bans. This is a pre-emptive strike on federal health insurance reform that will come into force in 2014.
Kansas also joined a growing number of states, like Minnesota, that have passed or tried to pass laws banning abortion after 20 weeks, using the disputed claim of "fetal pain." The law requires women to undergo an ultrasound of the fetus shortly before obtaining an abortion. The state now requires written parental consent for abortions on minors. Another new Kansas law requires that medical staff tell women seeking the procedure that abortion ends the life of a "whole, separate, unique, living human being."
Kansas participated this session in the nationwide assault on Planned Parenthood and became the second state, after Indiana, to cut funding for the organization, something Republicans in Congress tried but failed to do. The budget Kansas just passed places Planned Parenthood at the bottom of a list of eligible recipients for Title X money. That federal grant program provides funds for low-income patients and those without health insurance to obtain family planning and reproductive health services.
In Kansas, there are three Planned Parenthood clinics, and those in Hays and Wichita received $334,756 last year from Title X funds. The clinics provide health care services, such as breast exams, Pap smears, cancer screenings, tests for sexually transmitted diseases and birth control. They don't perform abortions. In fact, nobody can use Title X funds for abortions. But the Hays and Wichita clinics have referred women to abortion providers, and foes want to cut off money from organizations that do that or have anything else to do with the procedure.
“This amendment will be disastrous for thousands of Kansans, particularly those living in rural counties," said Peter Brownlie, president of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri. "By effectively eliminating Planned Parenthood as a Title X provider, patients may be forced to endure long wait times for live-saving cancer screenings and the possibility of having to drive hundreds of miles to the nearest low-income family planning provider,” he said. “This amendment is an attack on poor women, and it is repugnant.”
This isn't the first time the Kansas legislature has tried to redirect funding away from Planned Parenthood. But in the two previous budget years, Gov. Mark Parkinson line-item vetoed the attempt. This year, the coerced-birthers have Gov. Sam Brownback in their corner.
The assault on Planned Parenthood is especially galling and illustrative of the real meaning behind the propaganda term "pro-life." According to a 2009 report. It found that publicly funded family planning services prevent 2 million unintended pregnancies and 800,000 abortions nationwide each year. But then many in the coerced-birth crowd are delighted with higher numbers of unintended pregnancies because it makes more babies available for adoption.
• Before its adjournment, the South Dakota legislature passed and the governor signed a bill that requires the longest waiting period in the country, 72 hours. Before obtaining an abortion, a woman must visit a crisis pregnancy center for "counseling." The law requires that state-accredited centers be ones whose principal mission is to "educate, counsel and otherwise assist women to help them maintain their relationship with their unborn children" and that "they do not now refer pregnant women for abortions, and have not referred any pregnant women for an abortion at any time in the three years immediately preceding July 1, 2011."
So far no crisis center has applied for the state accreditation. After getting "counseling" that she cannot now get, a woman seeking an abortion must travel to the Sioux Falls Planned Parenthood clinic. Abortions are performed there by a Minnesota physician who flies in once a week because zero South Dakota physicians will do the procedure. Under the law, the woman must receive counseling from the physician who will do the abortion 72 hours beforehand. This means two trips to Sioux Falls, or a week's stay. As Nash says:
"They're saying the-three day waiting period is no big deal, but it is, particularly for women who aren't well off and can't take off work and have to deal with childcare. A lot of burdens are placed on a woman when she has to make these two trips."
In effect, South Dakota politicians have banned abortion without explicitly doing so. And they had to go through the back door to do so because South Dakota voters rejected the more direct (unconstitutional) approach in 2006.
• Kansas and North Dakota also have mandated state-directed "counseling," and seven other states have introduced such legislation.
• Texas just passed a law that not only requires women to obtain an ultrasound before obtaining an abortion, as do 20 other states, but also to hear a detailed description of the development of the fetus. Now on the books in Arizona is a law that requires a woman to undergo an ultrasound at least one hour before obtaining an abortion. Technicians must offer the woman the chance to hear a description of the fetus and listen to its heartbeat.
It's a sickening list that goes on and on. The range of attacks is broad and deep. While insurance coverage of abortion, restriction of abortion after a specific point in gestation and ultrasound requirements are the main areas being focused on this year, ridiculous waiting periods, mandating what passes for "counseling," requiring abortion clinics to follow the same procedures as hospitals, forbidding the tele-prescription of abortion medication and forbidding any funding to family planning organizations that provide abortions with private money are also on the agenda. The coerced-birthers are making more headway and faster than they have since they began their assault on free choice decades ago.
In the past, however, there's been a countervailing force at work. Take contraception, especially emergency contraception, for example. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia require hospital emergency rooms to provide information about emergency contraception to sexual assault victims, and 12 states plus DC require them to dispense the drug at a victim's request. Nine states allow pharmacists to dispense emergency contraception without a physician’s prescription under certain conditions, and seven states allow pharmacists to distribute it under a collaborative-practice agreement with a physician. Only five states allow individual pharmacists to refuse to dispense contraceptives (including emergency contraception) and only one allows whole pharmacies to refuse to dispense contraceptives. This year, however, no progress is being made to extend emergency contraception laws to additional states. Why is that? Why is the fight so confined to defense?
Amanda Marcotte has addressed the issue: “We’re understandably busy trying to fight incursions against the right to abortion, but because of this, we haven’t been doing enough to expand the right and put anti-choicers on defense.” And so has Lina Thorne:
While only 3% of all of Planned Parenthood's numerous and important services are abortions, the reason they are being targeted has everything to do with the right to abortion (contraception as well, which is inseparably connected for the anti-abortion movement). So where are the advocates in the public sphere, proudly pointing to the ways in which the right to abortion and birth control empowers women and breaks down the barriers to participation in society, advocates who angrily denounce the immorality of forced child-bearing? Where are OUR voices? There are blogs aplenty, making coherent and articulate arguments for reproductive rights, telling moving stories, and persuading people one-by-one to break through the propaganda offensive and see the true nature of the anti-abortion movement.
But the pro-choice movement by and large is still accepting the terrible terms set by the antis and negotiating for smaller and smaller pockets of access to this basic right.
Our failures in this arena — "our" meaning those of us who know sex isn't evil, women who engage in it aren't sluts and fetuses aren't babies — stem from an unwillingness to assign as much importance to reproductive freedom as we do to other issues. It also comes from a willingness to justifiably criticize some bad political and strategic choices on the part of leading pro-choice organizations like NARAL and Planned Parenthood, but not to fully engage with them, to debate with them, as allies. Yes, we stand with them in moments of crisis. But over the longer haul we do not, in solidarity, press forward their principal mission often enough or firmly enough.
That mission is our mission as progressives, leftists, liberals, whatever label you choose. And the only way to defeat the extremists now hacking away at reproductive freedom in state after state is to stop behaving as if that freedom is just a convenient add-on, something nice to have but not all that high on the list of must-fight-for priorities. Without reproductive rights, which means without unfettered access to abortion and all forms of contraception, our mothers, sisters, aunts, girl friends, wives and daughters aren't free. We need to be as persistent and relentless as the anti-choicers. We need to be pro-active not just reactive in this realm. As has become obvious this year, as on so many other issues, we need a 50-state strategy.