This Week in Abortion: News in Texas and New Studies

A collection of good reads, events from the week, and policy insights.

Thank you for your patience last week as I dealt with personal distractions. Don’t worry, I’m back with a vengeance, including a number of interesting studies that came out the past few weeks. And, some of the news coming out of Texas courts is crazy, just completely crazy.

Good Reads

• Anna Claire Vollers covers the state-by-state push to require providers to give patients information about abortion-pill reversal, which is not a real thing.

• A new study by Dr. Daniel Dench and colleagues compares jurisdictions without bans to jurisdictions with bans over the same time periods while controlling to the extent possible for differences in the populations and other characteristics of those states. They find, “as a back-of-the-envelope calculation…that [as of the first half of 2023] roughly one-fifth to one-fourth of people seeking abortions did not receive them due to bans.” This is part of a growing body of work showing that distance to care is a major - if not the major - factor in whether someone is able to access abortion services.

• In another study, Dr. Maeve E. Wallace and colleagues confirm that premature births are more frequent in areas with restricted or no access to maternity care. Another confirmation of the importance of distance to care in any context (whether it’s a state with or without a ban) as well as further evidence of a troubling trend in rural America - see the map below.

Reproductive health care deserts. From “Health care use and health consequences of geographic lack of access to abortion and maternity care.” doi:10.1111/birt.12792

Top Abortion Updates

• 👍 A woman in Texas was granted, by a judge, the privilege of getting an abortion for a risky, non-viable pregnancy. I’m giving the thumbs up because it’s good the judge saw the light. But, there is a lot of nastiness here. Please read Eleanor Klibanoff And Neelam Bohra’s coverage. Attorney General Paxton’s response to the injunction was to immediately threaten hospitals that might provide care to the woman. Baffling, unless you know Paxton. Visit fellow substacker Andrea Grimes for more on that piece of it. A related case was recently heard by the state’s Supreme Court, where Paxton’s staff took a similarly hardline approach.

• 👍 Tommy fought hard, delaying military promotions over the Pentagon’s policy of allowing service members and family to use official travel to get abortion care when it’s not available nearby. But, in the end, his GOP colleagues had enough. 

• 👍 A Wisconsin judge upheld her rejection of an ancient law that the state has been trying to use to ban abortions. The case is almost certainly headed to the state’s Supreme Court which is pro-access on the whole.

• 👍  According to David Ferrara, prosecutors dropped charges against a woman in South Carolina for having an illegal abortion in 2021. She faced a felony charge with a two-year minimum prison sentence, up to five years, and a $5,000 fine. She is one of five women in the state who have been accused of having an “unlawful” abortion since 2000.

• 👎 Here is a hilarious one from the same community. Greenville County, South Carolina, wants to shut down the only abortion clinic in the region because - thanks to protestor disturbances - there are too many calls to law enforcement. Watch below. You’ll laugh, and cry.

• 👎A critical - Bush-era - program that fights for AIDS/HIV prevention is not getting reauthorized thanks to anti-access demands that no funding of any sort go to any organization that provides abortion care. This means some specific programs may disappear and others will be subject to the (also stalled) annual appropriations process. 

• 👎 Tess Vrbin shared news that a ballot initiative in Arkansas that would protect abortion access up to “18 weeks” was rejected by the state’s AG. 

• 👎 It seems like the news in recent weeks has been full of women dragged to court for their own abortions or miscarriages. In Ohio, a grand jury will hear the case of a woman charged with improper disposal of a corpse related to the miscarriage of a nonviable pregnancy. Though this wasn’t an abortion, it’s an example of the many ways anti-access authorities will be working to find ways around the state’s new constitutional protections.🤷A man received a sentence of 18-months in federal prison for phoning in death threats to a California Planned Parenthood.

The Wider World of Healthcare and Uteri

• 👎  The number of babies born with syphilis is on the rise - scarily so. Jessica Glenza recently covered the trend.