The mini-ALEC is known as Americans United for Life, or
AUL, and it too, gets Koch money to write model legislation, just like its big brother. The AUL is strictly focused on limiting women's freedom, and we have seen its success over the past decade. Not content with blowing up reproductive health clinics, or shooting doctors while at church, the anti-abortion movement is now fighting to destroy women's rights in the state legislatures. One law at a time. Coordinated and written by a single group: Americans United for Life.
Of course, the group only claims credit for a third of the laws passed that make a legal medical procedure expensive and difficult to obtain. But others who have looked at the different state laws are willing to give them more credit.
AUL doesn't really want us to know that they exist. They are very happy to operate under the radar, known mostly to other forced birthers, and to many legislators, especially those who rode to the statehouses on the tea party wave of 2010.
Remember the vaginal ultrasounds in Virginia? That was AUL. Or the attempted defunding of Planned Parenthood by the Susan G Komen Foundation? AUL was there. The Hobby Lobby case? Yep, they were involved. Just about every extremist attempt to limit a woman's right to control her own body can be traced to this tiny, quietly subversive organization that wants nothing less than to reverse Roe v. Wade and send us all back to the dark ages when women knew their place.
How they are doing it, and how well they are doing it, is below the fold.
Demonstrators on behalf of women's rights learn of the Hobby Lobby decision on their mobile devices, June 30, 2014
It does seem that whenever there is a law restricting an individual's right to vote, to join with others to form a union, to get an affordable education, to drink clean water or breathe fresh air, there is a Koch involved somewhere. So it should be no surprise to learn that
Koch money has found its way into the battle to restrict a woman's right to her own body.
The group has gotten a huge monetary boost from right-wing allies. In 2010, AUL’s legal arm, Americans United for Life Action, received $559,000 from the Center to Protect Patient Rights, a secretive non-profit group linked to the Koch Brothers that has injected nearly two hundred million dollars to in undisclosed donations to right-wing advocacy groups since 2009.
This new wave of uterine regulators have adopted the linguistic stylings of Karl Rove. Call a thing the exact opposite of what it is. Such as the Clear Skies Act that reduced pollution regulations. Or the
Healthy Forests Initiative that opened up the Ozark and Ouachita national forests for logging in previously protected areas.
The AUL has introduced model legislation with the expressed aim of protecting women. But that is only because, in Roe v. Wade ...
The Court held that, in regard to abortions during the first trimester, the decision must be left to the judgment of the pregnant woman’s doctor. In regard to second trimester pregnancies, states may promote their interests in the mother’s health by regulating abortion procedures related to the health of the mother. Regarding third trimester pregnancies, states may promote their interests in the potentiality of human life by regulating or even prohibiting abortion, except when necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.
Using that bolded sentence, the AUL has gone to town regulating the uteri of total strangers. The organization's website features a complete, downloadable guide for legislators who are too lazy or incompetent to write their own excessive government regulations regarding lady parts.
Proposed laws include:
The Woman’s Ultrasound Right to Know Act aka The Stuff-That-Wand-Way-Up-There Act.
Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act: Bans sex-selective abortions and abortions performed for genetic abnormalities. Because there has been such a rash of sex selection abortions. They must be stopped. Now.
Women’s Health Protection Act: Typical TRAP laws mandating ridiculous standards on the basis of safety, even though a first trimester abortion (90 percent of all abortions are first trimester) is one of the safest medical procedures that a woman can have.
Abortion Providers’ Privileging Act: Requires abortion provider to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital although it does not require the nearby hospital to grant said admitting privileges. Which one would think would be a fairly obvious requirement if the objective was, in fact, to protect the health of the woman.
If they were at all concerned about the health of women they would not want a return to pre-Roe v. Wade.
Those are pretty impressive figures. And the risk that a woman faces in terminating her pregnancy only increases the longer she waits to have the procedure. Overall, fewer women die as a result of abortion than die giving birth, by a factor greater than 10.
So with funding from right-wing plutocrats like the Koch brothers, the AUL has written a variety of laws that legislatures can use to strip a woman of the rights guaranteed to her under the Fourteenth Amendment, all in the name of her safety. (Giving the bills names that are the opposite of what they do hasn't hurt their passage.) Claiming that the laws are only to protect the health of a woman, in which the states have a valid interest as stated in the
Roe v. Wade ruling, is how they have made so much progress in so many states.
And they are making way too much progress. Since 2000, the number of states that the Guttmacher Institute considers hostile to reproductive rights had increased from 13 to 27 by 2013. As the number of states have increased, so has the percentage of women living under these restrictions, from 31 percent to 55 percent over the same time frame.
Conscience dictates that I come clean and admit that I don't believe for one minute that the AUL has the least little concern for any woman's health. Clearly, if the organization did, it would fight harder for safe, legal abortions.
But AUL revealed perhaps more than intended on the group's history page:
Justice Kennedy had based his Casey vote on the argument that women had come to rely on abortion to achieve equality in society. AUL’s legal team has been implementing a long-term strategy designed to dismantle this notion by educating legislators and judges about abortion’s harms to women, through a series of cases built upon AUL model state laws protecting women from such harms.
You see, Justice Kennedy was correct in his argument that women did rely on access to abortion to achieve equality. It was only through controlling her own body that a woman could hope for, or plan, a decent future. Effective contraception and safe, affordable abortions opened doors for women that nothing else could. It
is about equality. Because if someone else can control the uses to which your body is put, you are not an equal human being. You are an incubator, or worse.
The first time I read the following list I snorted, wondering what planet or era they were operating out of, thinking that there was no way any of this could get done in a nation where a 72-hour waiting period excludes weekends or holidays because a woman could not possibly be expected to think on weekends.
And perhaps none of this can come to fruition, but we should become angry enough to make the demand.
From the Guttmacher Institute, Ten Ways to Facilitate Access to Early Abortion:

- Launch a public education effort emphasizing the importance of early pregnancy detection and timely medical intervention for both prenatal care and abortion.
- Increase the number of qualified abortion providers by making abortion a routine part of medical training programs for obstetricians, gynecologists and other physicians and midlevel practitioners providing women’s health care.
- Allow midlevel practitioners to provide early abortion services.
- Eliminate waiting period requirements that, by definition, delay women from obtaining timely care.
- Make training in medication abortion available to primary care physicians and other health care providers who have not traditionally offered abortion services.
- Guarantee confidential access to abortion services for minors, while encouraging young women to talk about their pregnancy with a parent or, if that is not possible, another responsible adult.
- Restore Medicaid funding for abortion to help poor women obtain abor- tion services early in pregnancy.
- Ensure that private insurance plans cover abortion services and overturn state policies that limit abortion coverage in insurance plans for public employees.
- Increase penalties for making threats against abortion providers, patients and facilities.
- Overturn excessive and medically unnecessary regulations on facilities providing early abortion services.
