This Week in Abortion: Marches, a Hearing, and more state policy trends

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.

This week along with some great reads and videos, there are links to the March for Life and the Senate Democrats’ hearing on the State of Abortion Rights. Plus good news out of Missouri and a continuing trend in blue and swing states of anti-abortion forces searching for workarounds to outright bans on abortion. 

Good Reads

• The organizer of tomorrow’s March on Baton Rouge, Nancy Davis, wrote about her struggle to get an abortion as a Louisiana resident in 2022. The fetus did not have a skull, in the best-case scenario, it would have died within minutes. Davis still had to seek care outside the state. I appreciated her reminder that Planned Parenthood is more than abortions, it provides critical, full-service, reproductive healthcare.

I'd been utilizing Planned Parenthood services in Baton Rouge since I became sexually active, you know, 17 or 18. There were times when I didn't have insurance, and they would still give me the care that I needed and deserved — cervical exams, STD testing, birth control. So when this situation came about and I was researching and I saw Planned Parenthood of New York, I felt comfortable going to them.

• CBS’s Tracy Smith interviewed Kate Cox and her lawyer - an attorney from the Center for Reproductive Rights. Cox was denied an abortion in Texas despite the fetus having a diagnosis of Trisomy 18 that would likely be fatal even with intervention. I previously shared Cox’s own written account. This interview goes into even more detail about her struggle.

 

• In the fall we celebrated Mike Johnson’s apparent move away from the anti-abortion measures that House Republicans had been pushing for through the annual budget process. Alice Miranda Ollstein and Meredith Lee Hill write about how that move has gone amid Johnson’s continuing negotiations with Senate leadership.

• The New Yorker has another good read this week in Moira Donegan’s review of The Trials of Madame Restell and Madame Restell two accounts of the life and work of an abortion and reproductive care provider in the mid-1800s.

It took her a few moments to realize that she was looking at a group of police. After the raid, Wright says, Restell insisted that she be allowed to eat her lunch before going to jail. She sat before Comstock and the police officers and downed a plate of oysters, one by one.

• If you’ve got some time this weekend, you can watch Friday’s March for Life rally on C-Span. And, the Senate Democrats hearing on the State of Abortion Rights here. 

Top Abortion Updates

• 👍 Missourians for Constitutional Freedom is starting to collect signatures for its pro-access ballot initiative. Anna Spoerre writes that after some discord early on, most pro-access groups in the state are on board with the effort. The initiative would add the right to an abortion up to viability to the state’s constitution. There is still a steep hill to climb in order for the initiative to get to the ballot, namely hundreds of thousands of signatures 172,000 valid) by May 5th. You can learn more about participating in the effort here. 

• 👍There is a step back from the anti-access movement this year as we head towards a presidential election at a time when fully banning abortion is just not popular. This is becoming especially obvious in blue states and swing states. 

  • Tim Carpenter writes that in Kansas a bill imposing a near-total ban drew objections from anti-access groups. Kansans for Life is instead focused on making a fetus an independent person under the law (fetal personhood) and adding regulations to abortion procedures. 

  • Annmarie Timmins covers a New Hampshire bill that “would replace the state’s 24-week abortion limit with a ban on abortions after 15 days.” Local anti-access group Cornerstone Action, vocally opposed the bill.

• 👎None of this means anti-access groups are backing down. They are just taking a less direct approach, through fetal personhood laws and other means. For example, in her write-up on a recent Wisconsin bill, Jessica Valenti points out that the “exemptions” contemplated in the anti-access bill would require C-sections in place of abortion during most medical emergencies. 

The Wider World of Healthcare and Uteri

• 🤔 Automated analysis is getting more and more integrated with medicine. Michelle Andrews at KFF wonders whether paying extra to apply it to your mammogram is worth the extra cost.  

• 👍 More support, this time bi-partisan for pregnant women and families in Kentucky. It’s both a seemingly good bill and fits with the general Republican move away from emphasizing efforts to ban abortion.