This Week in Abortion: #WeCount, Ballot Measure Road Blocks, and a Spreadsheet
This Week in Abortion: #WeCount, Ballot Measure Road Blocks, and a Spreadsheet
A collection of good reads, events from the week, and policy insights.
Welcome back to This Week in Abortion - Your weekly substack roundup of good reads, news updates, and policy insights on abortion. In the news this week are the #WeCount Report, anti-access ballot measure moves, and a prison sentence.
But first, a long time ago my husband and I were debating if and why football has so much religion attached to it. This was in the before (kid) times so, naturally, we debated inputs and he built a spreadsheet. I had forgotten all about it until Harrison Butker’s over-the-top commencement speech made the news.
The data show that football is a religious sport. That’s not surprising, but it’s interesting to see it even in these rough numbers. Compared to baseball (if someone wants to add basketball, message me), key players (quarterbacks and pitchers) on the whole come from more religious, Christian, states and are more comfortable publicly asserting their beliefs. The data is from 2018, but it remains fun dive.
Good Reads
Primaries are really important elections. (Ask me why, I dare you!) If you are in Georgia May 21 is also the only chance you’ll have to cast a vote for a Supreme Court candidate in a race that Jeff Amy explains has become a fight over abortion access.
Settle in with a cup of coffee before reading this piece by Alana Semuels. It’s a long but detailed and well-written article on IUD/long-acting reversible contraceptives and the tendency for doctors to recommend them over-enthusiastically - with classist and racist outcomes. According to Semuels, “doctors in states with restrictive abortion laws are redoubling their emphasis on the use of LARCs,” which is both a natural response based on where the field is right now but/and yet another form of institutional control over our uteri.
Eleanor Klibanoff writes about Jonathan Mitchell and his legal crusade in Texas against abortion, which includes “targeting individual women.”
The latest #WeCount report is out, which is the most comprehensive, timely, quantification of abortion care in the country. See some key points below and read a longer summary on Axios.:
Overall there were more abortions in 2023 than in 2022.
Illinois, Florida, and California saw the most surges in demand for abortion in the 18 months post-Dobbs. That’s of course going to change for Florida now that it is operating under a 4/6-week ban.
It seems like shield laws that protect providers in pro-access states who treat patients in anti-access states were helpful. Half of all telehealth abortions were provided under these protections.
“Increased numbers of abortions in states that permit abortion likely represent a combination of two main factors: people traveling from states where they cannot access care, and increased abortions among residents of states where abortion remains legal.”
As the report itself notes, “measuring abortion access and use is fraught with challenges.” But, what they are sharing is, if anything, likely an undercount.
Top News and Events
An anti-access South Dakota group is actively scamming citizens of the state in the hopes of getting them to remove their names from a petition for a pro-access ballot amendment. That’s not my characterization, that’s how the (Republican) SD Secretary of State describes it.
It looks like Missouri legislators were successful in their attempt to filibuster a bill that could have made changes to the state’s ballot initiative rules and made it difficult to pass a pro-access ballot initiative in November. There are still a few couple more days in the session, but I’m hopeful that the bill’s backers won’t get their act together.
Arkansas is still building that anti-access monument.
Arizona is operating under a 13/15-week ban until at least Sept 26, and hopefully up until the election. It’s complicated, but check in with the AP if you are curious. Then, we’ll see what voters have to say when they consider a pro-access ballot measure.
Lauren Handy was sentenced to five years in prison for invading and blockading a reproductive health clinic in Washington in 2020. See the AP for the facts in the case, and then head over to Breitbart for a view from the anti-access side.