This Week in Abortion: New Yorker Article, Ohio Miscarriage Case, Legislation Begins

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. 

It’s the busy season. State legislators are warming up their engines and bill fillings are starting. This newsletter is not going to track everything. Instead, I will do my best to highlight the most noteworthy bills - i.e. those that push something new or demonstrate a trend. 

Let’s go!

Good Reads

• The Nocturnist Podcast tells the stories of frontline clinicians and other healthcare-related professionals. They produced a great series last year about providing abortion care in a post-Roe world. Listen Here.

• Stephania Taladrid’s recent article in the New Yorker recounting the life and death of Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick is powerful. (First-time readers can get free access.) Without Texas’s ban on abortion, Glick would have still lacked health insurance, been in a high-risk, underserved population, and sought care at a Catholic hospital - one that would likely never have given her the full picture of the options available to her. Texas’s ban just threw fire onto the flames that were already engulfing Glick because she happened to be a poor person in America. Jill Filipovic expands on some of this in her newsletter.

• As a follow-up to the article, I suggest revisiting Frances Stead Sellers and Meena Venkataramanan’s article from 2022 about reproductive care and the growth of Catholic hospitals along with Fred Clasen-Kelly’s story covering a decade of hospital consolidations (religious and secular).

Top Abortion Updates

• 👍 Brittany Watts, who was arrested last year after a miscarriage, will not be criminally charged for “improper disposal of a corpse.” For more, watch a discussion between PBS’s Amna Nawaz and Mary Ziegler on the case and trends in the criminalization of pregnancy before and after Dobbs. 

• 👍 Melissa Brown reports that more women are joining the lawsuit against Tennessee's ban.

• 👍 Florida’s pro-access ballot initiative has all the valid signatures it needs. Now, it goes to the state’s Supreme Court for approval. According to Ballotpedia, “Florida is the only state where a state supreme court must review the language during or after the signature drive.”

• 👎 Rachel Bluth writes about the difficulty full-service health clinics face even in “progressive” jurisdictions like Beverly Hills, CA, that passed resolutions in support of access. Last month I wrote about Greenville, SC, shutting down a clinic because there were too many protests. Beverly Hills is essentially doing the same thing.

• 👎 Alixel Cabrera writes that a bill recently filed in Utah would allow pregnant women to ride in the High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane in the state. These appeared in a few states last year and will likely circulate even more this year. These HOV bills are not good, they are another step toward state-determined fetal personhood. Adam Edelman covered this concern in detail last year when Virginia considered similar legislation. 

• 👎 In Idaho, a legislator introduced a bill that would replace the term “fetus” with “preborn child” everywhere in the state’s existing laws. It’s part of the same state-determined personhood strategy as HOV bills. 

• 🤨Here is a head scratcher: Florida law requires that parents are notified and give consent before a minor can get an abortion. As an alternative, minors are allowed to go to court to get approval. But last week, according to reporter Jim Saunders, a Florida appeals court dismissed an appeal by a minor seeking an abortion because the parents were not in court. (In legal speak there was no “adverse party”) Kind of defeats the whole point of the alternative legal route that’s in the law.

The Wider World of Healthcare and Uteri

• 👍 Deborah Yetter reports on a Republican bill in Kentucky that greatly expands access to federal and state aid for families. Beth Kenefick wrote in a prior newsletter about the need for more such support, especially in states that have bans. I find this Kentucky bill particularly interesting for its inclusion of rules around the use of AI. It states that the technology can be used to identify potential fraud, but can’t be used as the exclusive basis to reject applicants or remove benefits, etc. Seems like a forward-thinking addition and worth taking a look at for anyone working in regulatory policy. 

• 👍 Not to be outdone, New York is now contemplating extending the state’s guaranteed paid parental leave to include the prenatal period - similar to Washington D.C.