Reproductive freedom is in jeopardy. States must take a stand.
OPINION | This is no longer a drill
Essay by Andrea Miller, president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health and its Action Fund. Views expressed are the opinion of the author.
Just six months into the Trump administration and the union is far from united when it comes to reproductive health and rights.
Several states around the country continue to push laws that seem as though they were plucked straight from “The Handmaid’s Tale,” while other states willing to resist the hostile federal landscape are gaining ground by protecting and even advancing access to abortion and contraception.
As a prime example of the former, Arkansas wants to implement a law that would require a woman who experienced sexual assault to get the consent of her attacker before getting an abortion.
It’s one of the four laws Arkansas passed this year that were the subject of federal court hearings this month, marking another low in a year when states have sought to ban abortion after six weeks, forcibly delay a woman for 72 hours before getting an abortion, and make it harder for rural residents to access abortion. The list quite literally goes on and on.
On the federal level, the Senate sought to slash Medicaid, severely limit maternity care coverage, and block millions from accessing affordable reproductive health services at Planned Parenthood. We have a new anti-choice justice sitting on the Supreme Court and a president who has vowed to repeal Roe v. Wade at the first chance he gets.
This is no longer a drill — access to abortion in the United States is in extreme jeopardy.
In Texas, lawmakers — having learned nothing from their loss in the Whole Woman’s Health Supreme Court case — passed laws that ban a common type of abortion, threaten to shut down more clinics, and mandate the burial of fetal remains.
And in Missouri, lawmakers insist that employers should be able to discriminate against women who use birth control, are pregnant, or have had an abortion. Across the country, state legislatures are on a crusade to limit women’s access to a full range of reproductive health care.
But, history has shown that when a woman decides to end her pregnancy, she’ll figure out how whether or not abortion is legal, and regardless of if she has access to a clinic or doctor’s office.
In fact, in Texas, abortion rates among teenagers have increased by 3.1%, despite the fact that the state passed clinic closure laws that shut down half of Texas’s abortion clinics.
Where there is a will to take control of their reproductive health, women will find a way.
States have the opportunity to help women do so safely, affordably, and with support.
And many have.
In fact, the National Institute for Reproductive Health’s 2017 midyear policy report shows a significant increase in proactive reproductive rights legislation.
Throughout 2016, 146 proactive bills passed at least one committee in a state legislature; so far in 2017, 202 already have done the same. This year, nine states have introduced legislation to protect abortion rights locally as a bulwark against the threat to abortion access posed by the new presidential administration. Delaware was the first of these to actually enact such a law, and Oregon included this protection in its Reproductive Health Equity Act of 2017.
Oregon’s bill, passed earlier this month, also goes further to require insurers to cover reproductive services — including abortion. If Gov. Brown signs the bill, every Oregonian, no matter their income, citizenship status, or source of insurance, can get a safe and legal abortion for free. The Illinois legislature has sent a similar bill to Gov. Rauner. Both measures stand in stark contrast to federal efforts to further eviscerate abortion coverage.
And in eight other states, both blue and red, lawmakers have introduced versions of a “Whole Woman’s Health Act” to repeal the sham barriers to care that the Supreme Court struck down last year.
These actions are a good start, and credit goes to the advocates and lawmakers who have worked together for years to build the power and appetite for proactive work, and to those whose increased activism has shown lawmakers that our ability to determine our reproductive lives — including having access to abortion — is not negotiable.
In this increasingly abortion-hostile federal political climate, states and localities have the opportunity — and the obligation — to step up and act to protect their residents from the archaic idea that women should not be the ones in control of their own bodies, decisions, and life paths.
