The Guttmacher Institute, which researches and advocates policy designed to advance sexual and reproductive health, periodically provides a summary of the new laws affecting reproductive rights, including abortion. This year’s tally of new abortion restrictions wasn’t the worst in the past four years. Forty-seven were added in 2015. In 2011, 92 new restrictions were added, and 2013, 70 more. But the 2015 total is still more than twice the number of new laws enacted in 2014.
The Center for Reproductive Rights has also published a new report—State of the States: Fighting Back by Pushing Forward—that includes a tally of new abortion laws. The authors state:
Extremist politicians prioritized bills that interfere with the patient-provider relationship despite overwhelming consensus from medical experts that those bills are medically unnecessary and ultimately harmful. State legislatures enacted dangerous laws requiring medical providers to give biased counseling based in junk science. Sixteen organizations that oppose inappropriate political interference in the practice of medicine, including the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the National Physicians Alliance, criticized such bills in Arizona and Arkansas because they “requir[e] health care professionals to violate their medical training and ethical obligation to their patients.” These laws force doctors to This medically unnecessary and harmful requirement forces each patient to make two separate trips to receive the care that she needs and demeans her ability to determine the best decision for herself and her family. practice bad medicine. New measures were also enacted in Kansas and Oklahoma to criminalize doctors who provide safe abortion care with the most common and medicallyproven method of ending a pregnancy in the second trimester. Such laws force patients to undergo an additional invasive procedure, intrude in the patient-provider relationship and attack women’s health care and personal autonomy.
Since 2010, forced-birthers have pressured legislators in 43 states to pass more than 300 new restrictions on abortion. A few of these are hung up in court, but most are now law, part of a steady erosion of women’s reproductive rights that emerged soon after the Supreme Court legalization of abortion nationwide more than four decades ago.
All these laws have one objective in mind: making it more difficult and expensive for women—especially poor woman—to obtain this legal medical procedure:
“After 2013, many thought this had run its course,” said Elizabeth Nash, a researcher at Guttmacher. That year, the thinktank reported that lawmakers had hit a new milestone: they had passed more new anti-abortion restrictions in the last three years than in the entire preceding decade. “But 2015 tells us, no, we’re very much still in the midst of this wave of restrictions.” [...]
In a break from previous years, the laws most heavily favored by abortion foes in 2015 pose direct barriers to women seeking abortions. Earlier laws were aimed at causing abortion clinics to close. This year, two states, Arkansas and Tennessee, passed laws that force women wanting an abortion to make two in-person trips to the abortion clinic instead of one. The first trip, which must take place two full days before the second, is for anti-abortion counseling. Florida passed a similar, 24-hour waiting period that is the subject of a court fight. And North Carolina and Oklahoma established a 72-hour waiting period between a woman’s first call to an abortion clinic and her appointment.
This year’s winner for most new restrictions goes to Arkansas, which passed six of them: a ban on telemedicine abortions; an increase of the waiting period to 48 hours; a requirement that required abortion tell patients that medical abortions can be "reversed"; reduced public funding for abortion providers; and an end to the exemption contained in the parental consent law for victims of rape, incest, and sexual abuse. The new version requires minors to acquire a court’s approval for an abortion without parental consent, which can be a very difficult hurdle to overcome for the average girl under 18.
There were a few wins for reproductive rights advocates.
In May, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals delivered a mortal blow to Arkansas’s 2013 law barring abortions after 12 weeks gestation. The three-judge panel noted that advocates of the law had provided no evidence showing that a fetus of 13-weeks development can survive outside the womb. The Supreme Court has disallowed bans on abortion before viability, reaffirming that decision in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey ruling. Viability is typically 22-24 weeks. But the Eighth Circuit noted in the Arkansas case that the viability standard should be revisited because of the advance in medical science. State legislatures, not the courts, should be making such decisions, the ruling stated.
In July, the same three-judge panel also overruled North Dakota’s even more restrictive ban on abortions after six weeks gestation. Both Arkansas and North Dakota already had laws that prohibit abortions after 20 weeks gestation. In all, 10 states now have laws on the books banning abortions after 20 weeks. Those laws are premised on faulty science and their pernicious effects fall hardest on low-income women.
While the majority of proposed restrictions on abortion have not made it into law—and the courts have delivered a handful of victories affirming women’s reproductive rights—the number of new laws continues to grow, with the forced-birthers proving adept at innovating new restrictions and replicating the successful ones in other states. Here is the latest compilation of provisions in these laws from Guttmacher.