This Week in Abortion: Looking on the Bright Side

Your weekly roundup of good reads, legal updates, and legislative tracking on abortion.

Welcome back to your weekly roundup of good reads, legal updates, and legislative tracking on abortion. Amid a wave of depressing news this week, we have tried to highlight the positives. For one, Rachel’s toddler is celebrating her birthday this weekend. She is ready to go to the playground in a ridiculously frilly dress from her grandmother that she is super excited about and she doesn’t understand why her mother isn’t planning on wearing one just like it (Mollie is wondering this too).

Good Reads 

• Julie Shumway writes about Oregon Rep. Charlie Conrad a “pro-choice Republican,” who recently voted in favor of a bill to expand access to abortion and gender-affirming care. 

• Even as it potentially runs out of money, a federally funded telehealth program shows a lot of promise as a way to bring care to pregnant women in rural communities.

• Researchers invited providers to share info on cases of clinical care that have deviated from the usual standard due to new laws since June 2022. With 50 responses, it’s not a fully comprehensive picture, but it’s a good and important step. You can read the report or the Washington Post article.

Events of the Week

👍 Add Missouri State Sen Eigel to the list of unlikely heroes. 

• On the last day of session Eigel, a Republican, prevented the legislature from raising the bar on citizen-drive ballot initiatives in order to champion his legislation to cut personal property tax.

• Thanks to his actions, advocates have a better chance of getting abortion protections on the ballot. 

👍 Connecticut's House passed a bill protecting providers who assist in abortions for someone out of state. It’s likely that the bill will become law soon. 

👍 Montana’s courts have continuously upheld the right to an abortion throughout the last year and did so again this week.

👍 Kansas’ governor vetoed tax credits for anti-abortion, crisis-pregnancy centers. Kansas legislators keep trying (and largely failing) to push restrictions despite voters’ rejection of an anti-abortion ballot measure last year.

👍 Democrat Heather Boyd won the Pennsylvania House Special election, this along with a Democratic Governor should at the least protect existing access in the state.

👎 South Carolina’s House passed a ban on abortions after 6-weeks.

• It’s not immediately clear what will happen when the Senate votes next week. Although a previous version of the bill passed in the Senate, it has been heavily amended and Reuters reports that some of its previous supporters now oppose it. Perhaps the “Sister Senators” will come to the rescue again.

• House members only passed the bill after slugging through 1000 amendment requests filed by Democrats.

👎 It happened, North Carolina’s legislature successfully overturned Gov. Cooper’s veto. 

• The law moves the availability of abortion in NC from 20 weeks to 12 weeks or 10 weeks for medicated abortions (which are the majority).  It also includes requirements for in-person visits and licensing restrictions. 

• While it doesn’t lessen the bad-news ban, as Axios covered, the law also does a few good things like increasing state worker parental leave and funding for contraceptives.     

👎 Nebraska passed a 12-week ban on abortions (from the first day of the last period).

• As you might expect, the law has only a narrow set of exemptions.

• The law also introduces the phrasing “preborn child,” meant to elicit an obvious emotional response.

Legal Updates

👍 Montana’s Supreme Court ruled that nurse practitioners and similar providers can perform surgical and medication abortions.

👍 Thanks to prior legal moves by the Biden administration, access to mifepristone should remain unchanged until the case hits the Supreme Court. This is very good because the federal appeals court hearing on the Texas case did not go well.

👍 An Ohio group has challenged the special August election that legislators created, through resolution, in order to raise the bar on ballot initiatives.

👎 California lost in its effort to require churches to cover abortion care of employees.