New York Has Far to Go to Live Up to Its Promises to Abortion Refugees
On May 2nd, my mother and I joined thousands of other New Yorkers downtown to protest the Supreme Court’s impending junking of Roe v. Wade, a death knell for reproductive freedom that women will pay for with their lives.
On May 3rd, we gathered uptown to celebrate my niece’s third birthday — confronting the fact that this small child could grow into a woman with less bodily autonomy than her grandmother enjoyed.
But we’re New Yorkers, and Kathy Hochul, our first woman governor, committed our home as an abortion refuge. State lawmakers followed suit, and the recently concluded legislative session ended with the passage of bills to protect abortion providers from out-of-sate legal actions and privacy incursions.
These commitments and first steps are reassuring, but they are not nearly enough for New York to fully address protean national threats from Republicans and their appointees.
First, we must remove barriers to women comprehensively, equitably controlling their reproductive health.
Abortion access is well-established in New York law after the codification of Roe in 2019, but the same is not true for prescription birth control — urgent to address, as Justice Alito’s draft opinion seeds a reversal Griswold v. Connecticut, which protects the legal right to contraception. Republicans nationwide are already planning bans to come.
Two dozen states allow patients to go directly to pharmacists for hormonal contraception prescriptions and medication. Not New York. We require a provider’s prescription first, but 1.2 million New Yorkers live in “contraceptive deserts” without access to providers offering this set of contraceptive options.
The hurdles of cost and complication that New Yorkers seeking birth control must overcome contribute to our above-average unintended pregnancy rate, 55% versus 45% nationwide.
Giving New Yorkers easier, less expensive options to plan their pregnancies is a no-brainer; however, this bill has failed to pass the legislature for over six years, “bottled up” in the Assembly Higher Education committee chaired by the incumbent Assembly member I am challenging in District 66.
Reproductive healthcare also includes the right to safely carry a child to term. Here, we also fail.
Black New Yorkers face pregnancy-associated rates of death eight times higher than their white counterparts. This fatal imbalance reflects a severe shortage of birthing options in New York, one of few states with strict limitations on access to doulas and midwifery.
Second, we must understand that attacks on autonomy expand beyond abortion and contraception; so too must our empowerment of individuals to control our bodies and lives.
Also lurking in Alito’s opinion stripping away constitutional protections rooted in privacy is the potential reversal of Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 opinion striking down state bans on gay sex. New York must lead on sexual empowerment, but in that work, too, we have lagged.
We were one of the last states to legalize gestational surrogacy, telling gay New Yorkers to go to states like Texas to build families, where women were legally able to serve as surrogates.
Now, we have yet to decriminalize sex work, telling largely LGBTQ+ and Black and brown New Yorkers they must exist in the dark. How can we say we support their reproductive freedom if public acknowledgement of their sexual activity can lead to arrest or imprisonment?
Third, we must draw clear lines between New York’s ongoing failure to welcome newcomers and the harms we will soon inflict on red state refugees. To truly be a sanctuary, our state must be accessible — not just safe.
Proposals from Senators Biaggi and Cleare envisioned earmarking dollars to cover travel, lodging, and care for indigent abortion-seekers. Those programs, building on Councilwoman Rivera’s city fund, would have been critical given the increase in abortions performed in New York on those from out-of-state — but they did not advance.
Our lack of hospitality to abortion refugees, though, goes much further. As Jerusalem Demsas wrote after the Supreme Court leak, zoning restrictions that prevent New York from building new housing, causing skyrocketing costs, demonstrate the “inhospitality of rich, liberal states to the poor and working classes…”
As long as legislators refuse to legalize Alternative Dwelling Units, to reduce exclusionary zoning around transit, or to add new housing in New York City, we cannot say “refugees are welcome here.” That applies to refugees from Afghanistan, Ukraine — and Mississippi.
Last month was not the beginning of my mother’s abortion activism, just the latest chapter. As a pregnant woman in 1982, she decided to get on a bus to Albany with a group of strangers to rally for reproductive rights.
Roe v. Wade was well-established by then, but she already knew that American women could depend on past victories for future flourishing. The same is true of the Albany of 2022: we cannot rest on the laurels of past legislation.
Threats to our rights are multiplying. New York’s promises to women — and to all people who wish to control their destinies — are far-reaching. Today, those promises are still unkept.
