This Week in Abortion: March for Life Coverage and the Taylor Shelton Lawsuit

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

Welcome back to your weekly roundup of good reads, news updates, and policy insights on abortion.

I’ve tried to fit in as much as possible today because I will be taking the next week or two off.  Don’t worry, I will be storing up plenty of content for my return.

Good Reads and Media

• Jayme Lozano Carver (Texas Tribune) tells the story of the fight over an abortion travel ban in the North Texas town of Amarillo. (5 min)

• Happy Groundhog Day, Garrett Downs (Politico) explains how anti-access riders are once again part of Congress's negotiations to secure a 2024 budget. (5 min)

• Rachel Cohen (Vox) writes about the complex relationship between the pro-access movement and the Democratic party, specifically around the question of whether to restore Roe or go beyond it. (8 min)

• States News now has a bi-weekly legislative roundup, a handy tool for tracking state bills.

• Raising up two pieces about the March for Life Rally last month. Molly Morrow (The Nation) and Carter Sherman (Guardian) spent time with attendees. Morrow covers some of the alternative, non-Christian voices at the rally while Sherman speaks to generally religious youth attendees who, in their words, are fighting “for the voiceless,” against the country’s  “greatest injustice.” (11 min)

Top Abortion Updates

• 👍 Taylor Shelton is the first person to challenge a state abortion ban without having an exceptional medical condition attached. Shelton and Planned Parenthood are asking South Carolina courts to clarify that the state’s recent “heartbeat” ban starts at nine weeks. I imagine the plaintiffs asked for this cutoff because it was the most likely to succeed in court - and three extra weeks is better than nothing. But, as Kaitlin Sullivan explains, even nine weeks isn’t a very clear-cut way to draw the line regarding when a full, beating heart is formed.

• 👍 In Illinois, Philip Buyno was sentenced to five years in prison and $327,000 in restitution for driving into and attempting to burn down a planned abortion clinic.

• 👍 A Massachusetts judge is allowing a lawsuit against a crisis pregnancy center (CPC) to go forward. The CPC is accused of false advertising after they misdiagnosed a patient’s ectopic pregnancy, leading to a life-threatening emergency. This good news comes as the effort to hold CPCs accountable has faced roadblocks elsewhere. Ex: In recent months, Illinois’s Attorney General agreed to drop enforcement of a law that, according to Mawa Iqbal “bars CPCs from using deception or misinformation to steer patients away from getting abortion care.”

• 👎 Tennessee once again failed to put basic exceptions into its total abortion ban. But, there is an interesting twist to watch for this Spring. According to Katia Riddle, Republican State Sen. Richard Briggs has been shopping his idea for slightly loosening the law in the case of non-viable pregnancies. It’s an uphill battle. 

• 👎 More fetal personhood bills are making their way toward becoming state laws.

  • In Iowa, a bill passed out of sub-committee that increases penalties for ending a pregnancy, “caused in the act of a forcible felony, such as murder, assault or sexual abuse.”

  • In Florida, a bill passed out of committee that would allow parents of an unborn fetus to recover noneconomic damages after a wrongful death.

Neither of these bills looks like they are about abortion. However, both bills use “unborn” terminology without specific definitions. The personhood strategy is a long-term play, a language creep that can eventually relegate pregnant people to secondary status relative to the fetuses they are carrying even in the absence of explicit abortion bans.

• 👎 As the Supreme Court gets ready to hear a challenge of mifepristone’s FDA approval, Meredith Wadman (Science) reports that the academic publisher Sage retracted two studies cited by the anti-access plaintiffs in the case. Hopefully, that retraction is taken into consideration by the justices, though I’m not holding my breath on it changing much.

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