This Week in Abortion: Navigating Abortion Language
This Week in Abortion: Navigating Abortion Language
A collection of good reads, events from the week, and policy insights.
Welcome back to your weekly roundup of good reads, legal updates, and legislative tracking on abortion. If you are short on time this week, skip to the legal section and read about the Texas hearing and the Nebraska arrest. These cases represent the real consequences of criminalizing pregnancy and reproductive healthcare. In addition, in this week’s feature we are covering the power of words in abortion policy.
Reminder, Ohio voters have until August 8 to SAY NO to an amendment that would make passing a pro-access ballot initiative in November more difficult. If that voter is you, get out there now, not later.
Good Reads
In Politico, Alice Ollstein summarizes critiques about a rule change to HIPAA (medical privacy) regulation meant to protect the records of those seeking an abortion.
The comments on the rule change are public and available here. There is a lot from access advocates, but also plenty of rants over Satan and baby killing.
Kentucky holds elections for Governor this fall and the two candidates are on the campaign trail. We hate the political punditry thing of declaring every race a key election - but, really, This is a Key Election! It’s a test of messaging heading into 2024.
So far Republicans are hiding behind children with the now familiar messaging about parental rights. And, candidate Daniel Cameron, is also leaning into “protecting the unborn.”
If that kind of talk wins this November, get ready for a whole lot more.
Something Fun! Alaina Demopoulos from The Guardian highlights some of the best OBGYN social media influencers. We enjoyed Dr. Jennifer Lincoln’s informative video on male birth control!
State and Local Events of the Week
👍 New Jersey Gov. Murphy signed a bill authorizing a Maternal and Infant Health Innovation Authority that will focus on reducing birth-related deaths.
Creating public authorities is always a tug of war between the benefit of dedicated attention and the cost of likely duplicative resources. For example, the New Jersey Monitor says, “The new agency will be steered by a 15-member board that includes seven members of Murphy’s cabinet and eight members of the public that he will appoint. The public members will be paid $20,000 annually.”
Hopefully the agency can prove it’s worth and in doing so help identify ways to lift up the rest of the country.
👍 Connecticut Gov. Lamont (Democrat) signed a package of reproductive health bills, including a shield law to protect providers from prosecution by other states and a bill aimed at protecting patient privacy.
Legal Updates
😒 Women affected by Texas’s abortion ban gave testimony during hearings in a critical court case this week. We strongly encourage a read of this article from the Texas Tribune.
The case is important because it’s the first time in a generation that women have testified about the effects of abortion regulation. Their stories make it clear that abortion is healthcare. The case will not cancel the full ban, but it may force the state to give doctors more flexibility and protection when it comes to caring for women with high-risk pregnancies.
The case also represents one of the few actionable strategies to improve quality of life and care in anti-access states.
👎 In Nebraska, Celeste Burgess was sentenced to 90 days in jail and two years of probation for burning and burying a fetus after a medical abortion. The case against her included private Facebook messages that she and her mother exchanged. Her mother pleaded guilty and will face sentencing for helping her.
Jezebel explains that controversial circumstances like Burgess’s are often handpicked to make distasteful things more acceptable. In this case, late-term abortion is controversial, and because it’s controversial it makes us more willing to accept the idea that a person could be locked up for ending a pregnancy. Once we have accepted that, our idea of what is normal and what is unthinkable has shifted. (For policy enthusiasts: Yes, this is the Overton Window.)
👍 A judge put a pause on the abortion ban signed in Iowa last week. Hopefully the law will stay on hold while it winds its way to the Supreme Court. NBC’s Shaquille Brewster provides a good summary of what’s to come in the video below. All of the current justices were appointed by a conservative governor.
👉 Lorna Roxanne Green pleaded guilty to federal arson for setting fire to Wyoming’s only full-service abortion clinic in the days before the clinic weeks before it was meant to open. The fire kept the clinic closed for a year; it finally opened in April.
🤷The ballot initiative process in Missouri moved another step.
We jumped the gun on celebrating this a few weeks ago, so updating you all again now. This week, the State Supreme Court ordered the Attorney General to stop holding things up and approve the initiatives. But, once the initiatives are approved, other challenges can still be brought.
For now, we are going to stop guessing on when signature collection will actually start.
Feature: Navigating Abortion Language
We are at the beginning of a long struggle over how we define pregnancy and abortion and what is acceptable and not (see the Celeste Burgess case above). Words will be increasingly important to that struggle. From the obvious - do you call it abortion or murder - to the subtle - is a ban a “ban” or a “standard”.
Republicans and anti-access advocates are good at manipulating language - Not unexpected seeing as they were the most aggressive voices while Roe was the rule of the land. Below, we have attempted to provide a handy guide to navigating some of the most prevalent terms and the emotions they evoke.
Every time you see something that says “x weeks of pregnancy,” subtract at least 2 weeks.
Weeks of pregnancy are almost always tied to gestational age - the number of weeks after the first-day of a person’s last period. And, it should be obvious but we will say it here to be clear, if you are on the first day of your period, you CANNOT be pregnant. This is literally the message of your body telling you that you are not pregnant.
There is a lot of squishiness in terms of when you actually got pregnant. So, a ban after 6-weeks of pregnancy is more like a ban after a month of someone getting pregnant (i.e. 4 weeks), as the average person ovulates around day 14 of their cycle.
Bodies are weird. What about women who don’t have regular cycles? Even bans that are tied to a certain level of fetal development rather than gestational weeks can mean different things for different people.
When you boil things down to simple terms, tricks can be played. For example, North Carolina’s recent abortion ban originally limited medical abortion to 10 weeks gestational age, even though the ban was reported as a 12-week ban.
In general, subtracting two weeks will give you a better sense of the overall effect of bans. For our part, going forward we will be writing these as ranges tied to the actual rules. So a ban after 6-week of (gestational) pregnancy will become a 4-6 week ban.
Remember that it’s a BAN - not a standard, compromise, consensus, or anything else but a ban.
The anti-access folks don’t like the term “ban,” likely because it sounds oppressive and (we think) accurately describes what recent abortion restrictions do.
Look out for authors, politicians, or spokespeople using these terms and remind yourself when you see them what they really are.
Fellow substacker and advocate Jessica Valenti has a great piece on this specific messaging tactic.
Words are emotional. Be aware of what you are reading, how things are being phrased, and how you are responding to those words.
The Unborn.
We have talked before about how on an individual level the way a pregnancy is discussed and - yes - the value of a fetus, changes depending on the person who is sustaining that pregnancy.
While pro-access advocates (we’ll count ourselves in this) tend to lean towards medical terminology, anti-access advocates go to heart strings - “unborn child” appears some 51 times in North Carolina’s 10-12 week abortion ban, the word fetus appears twice.
Pro and Anti-Access vs Pro-Choice and Pro-Life.
There are a lot of reasons why we like using the terms Pro-Access and Anti-Access instead of “Pro-Choice” and “Pro-Life”
One of them is that it gets out of the abstraction of one side being for “life” while the other side is not. Another reason is that the basic legal ability to choose an abortion does not mean you can actually have one, as regulations can still shut it down as a practical option.
Common media lines
We often see phrases in the media like “6-weeks is before a woman may even know she’s pregnant”, “it is a ban but has exceptions for the health of the mother,” or “after viability” that we may take for granted or as truth without thinking critically about what they really mean. It’s important to remember the context around these types of phrases and that they do not exist in a policy (or technology) vacuum.
Rachel wrote a whole feature on the history of “viability” and the fuzzy line it represents, which we encourage you to check-out.
“Exceptions” may sound like a compromise position but often are not actionable due to other policies and almost certainly cannot capture every emergency or situation a person may need an abortion (for example, mental health is not often an exception even if the mother is suicidal).
Given the challenge with counting “weeks,” it seems fair to say that six weeks is before almost all women may know they are pregnant, for a multitude of reasons beyond that they were not meticulously tracking their cycle. The phrase seems to elicit a reaction that women have six weeks to know and think about the decision when in reality, it is more like four weeks from having intercourse and maybe one-to-two weeks from peeing on a stick, given an average cycle, no other mitigating conditions, and a fastidious tracking protocol. (In other words, not most women we know.)
Words are important. Taking a step back to reflect on what we are reading/hearing and what the author’s choice of terms means is important. We hope this is a helpful guide as you sift through information and make sense of the space for yourself.