Preparing for the post-Roe world
A sprawling new clinic opens, six-week abortion bans and Northern Ireland's progressive wins
Hello! It’s Thursday, Oct. 24—here’s what’s been going on.
In the News
A Planned Parenthood affiliate is opening a sprawling new clinic in Illinois this week that could serve 11,000 patients a year, anticipating the day when nearby states including Ohio, Missouri or Kentucky might ban all abortions (both Missouri and Kentucky are already trying to close their only abortion clinics). “In a post-Roe world, this is crucial to our mission,” a Planned Parenthood official said. The clinic is a physical representation of the view of many pro-choice and pro-life activists: that constitutional abortion rights won’t last much longer. It’s also an acknowledgment of the current reality, where access to a clinic, particularly across the South and Midwest, is sparse (this graph shows just how sparse).
Pennsylvania’s Republican legislature is hoping to become the seventh state to pass a so-called “heartbeat” abortion ban, criminalizing abortions performed after the pulsing of a cluster of cells that can develop into a heart can be detected, at about six weeks of pregnancy. The only exception would be the vague instance where a doctor considered the abortion “necessary.” The state’s Democratic governor has promised to veto the bill. All previous such laws have been challenged in court and blocked from taking force.
South Carolina is also considering a similar law—and this week lawmakers stripped the bill of exceptions for rape and incest victims. Many other states have passed bans without these exceptions, proof that the pro-life movement is converting politicians to their purist religious views of abortion—views that most Americans do not share.
Meanwhile, in Ohio, pro-choice groups are fighting a proposed new law that would force doctors to lie about the viability of unproven abortion reversal medication.
Florida looks poised to pass a law forcing minors to obtain parental consent before accessing an abortion—which such minors could avoid by asking for a judge’s permission (some kind of parental notification or consent laws exist in 37 states).
Here is a chilling read about how Poland has essentially stolen women’s embryos. Read it understanding that U.S. pro-life groups (and the Catholic Church internationally) oppose IVF and view fertilized embryos as fully human beings.
The Trump administration has a new anti-abortion representative in Geneva to the Office of the United Nations, a sign of the president’s continued commitment to anti-abortion foreign policy. The move garnered praise in pro-life media.
Legal nerds should read this piece about how the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals may have just undermined the ability for pro-choice groups to challenge the cumulative effects of state anti-abortion policy.
A new report says nearly 900 family planning clinics lost federal funding after the Trump administration created new rules aimed at undermining reproductive health groups that also offer abortion, including Planned Parenthood. A separate report from the Kaiser Health Foundation found a slew of new gaps in federal reproductive health funding, including zero funding to five states.
Northern Ireland has officially legalized abortion and gay marriage—legislation that survived a last-minute challenge and comes a year after the Republic of Ireland legalized abortion in a historic referendum.
And here’s a good rundown of the major funding investment to elect pro-choice women in five key battleground states in 2020 and protect abortion rights there. This is part of a recent resurgence of aggressively pro-choice politics after decades of Democratic complacency (my analysis).
Photographic interlude
Here’s something pretty: the sun rises on the Mississippi.
The 2020 SCOTUS case—two questions for the Court
Your weekly dive into a pivotal case, this week looking at the crux of arguments.
In January or February, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS to us abortion/law nerds, which now includes you) is expected to hear arguments in a potentially monumental abortion rights case: June Medical Services v. Gee. (Check out last week’s newsletter for a crash course in the case).
The Court is being asked to consider two key arguments.
Is Louisiana’s 2014 law requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals constitutional? This is the question that’s garnered by far the most attention. That’s because (as you may remember from last week) the law is identical to one struck down in the major SCOTUS case Whole Women's Health v. Hellerstedt in 2016. Basically, Louisiana, and judges on the Fifth Circuit, have argued that Louisiana’s law can both be identical to a law the Supreme Court has already struck down and constitutional at the same time. They state that the facts on the ground in Louisiana are different enough than in Texas that the law should stand (a view not shared by the district judge in the case).
Critics view that argument as a fundamental affront to the rule of law and an attack on respect for Supreme Court precedent. (Read this to learn more about why the Fifth Circuit’s decision to re-try the facts of the case has particularly outraged some observers). Anti-abortion conservatives have argued the case is a chance to refine the meaning of the Whole Woman’s Health decision. Others view it as an entirely political maneuver by those who finally think they have enough justices on the Supreme Court to end abortion rights.
Can Louisiana’s abortion clinics and doctors actually sue the state over abortion laws? This question doesn’t come from the clinics and abortion doctors who are the plaintiffs in the lawsuit—the ones who originally asked the Supreme Court to step in. This question comes from Louisiana, the defendant. When SCOTUS agreed to take this case, it agreed to both hear arguments about whether the law was constitutional and this second question. And it’s this second question that could potentially have an even broader impact on abortion in America. If the Court agrees with Louisiana, that would fly in the face of abortion decisions that have come before and “reverse more than four decades of precedent, compelling women to sue for themselves,” as Mark Joseph Stern writes in Slate.
Since Roe v. Wade, clinics and doctors have been able to sue over abortion laws on behalf of their patients because “there are too many obstacles of timing, resources and privacy for women to get to court to assert their own right to an abortion free of the regulatory obstacles that stand in their way,” notes Linda Greenhouse in the New York Times. She adds: “Take away doctors’ right to advocate in court on their patients’ behalf and most legal attacks on state-created obstacles to abortion conveniently disappear.” At least one justice, Clarence Thomas, believes clinics and doctors should not have this ability, and he said so explicitly when he dissented from Whole Woman’s Health.
Resources
For research on abortion and reproductive health in the U.S. and internationally, including abortion laws and regulations, see the Guttmacher Institute and Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH).
For information on abortion clinics and providers, see the National Abortion Federation, which has an incomplete list of providers nationally. Physicians for Reproductive Health works on policy, lawsuits and advocacy. The Reproductive Health Access Project helps primary care physicians provide complete reproductive care.
SisterSong advocates for reproductive justice for women of color, non-binary and minority folks. There’s also the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.
The Center for Reproductive Rights and the ACLU fight reproductive rights lawsuits.
NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood Federation of America advocate for reproductive health and rights.
(Let me know if you think you know a national organization that should be listed here.)