Efforts to legalise abortion for first time since 1998 hinge on pushing through changes before conservative legislators take office in May
Salvadoran women protest for the abortion ban to be overturned during a one-day strike to defend women’s rights on International Women’s Day. Photograph: Alex Peña/Getty Images
Moves to overturn El Salvador’s ban on abortion could be thwarted unless lawmakers work quickly to push through changes before a more conservative group assumes office in May.
Abortion is banned in all circumstances in El Salvador, and women accused of undergoing the procedure can be charged with aggravated homicide and sentenced to up to 50 years in jail. However, a bill proposed last August would legalise abortion in some cases.
Salvadoran legislative deputies serve three years, and if the bill does not pass in the next month, it is doubtful the issue will be taken up by the incoming conservative majority. The total ban on abortion came into force in 1998.
“It’s time-critical,” said Johnny Wright Sol, from the conservative Arena party, whose proposed bill would legalise abortion in cases where the life of a mother is endangered or a minor has been raped. He said the window between now and 1 May, when the new lawmakers take up office, represents “probably the best opportunity the country has had to pass this”.
The bill is not backed by Wright Sol’s party, but its proponents believe it could attract the required 43-vote majority.
Before 1998, abortion was legal to protect the life of the mother, or in cases of rape or where a foetus was unviable. The following year, the constitution was amended to recognise the principle that life begins at conception. Under the new rules, women could be sentenced for abortion and medical professionals jailed for assisting them.
“We have a very paternalistic culture and machismo is quite prevalent in our society. I do believe it’s a cultural thing,” Wright said. “Our future is at stake with regards to how we see women in our society.”
Dozens of women are currently in jail in El Salvador accused of having abortionsand charged with aggravated murder when they experienced miscarriages or still births. Many of these women have received sentences of 30 or 40 years in prison.
Last month, Maira Verónica Figueroa Marroquín became the latest woman released from jail. She had served almost half of a 30-year sentence for suffering a late-term miscarriage.
Carmen Teodora Vásquez spent more than 10 years in jail after being convicted of aggravated homicide when she had a miscarriage in 2007. “The Salvadoran laws are so drastic,” she said. “We need to change the law. What is happening in El Salvador is unjust. As women, we are never listened to.”
In addition to Wright’s bill, liberal party leader Lorena Peña is pushing a proposal allowing terminations if the life and health of the mother is at risk, in cases where the foetus is not viable, and in all cases of rape. However, her bill is less likely to attract the support of centrists, and her party only has 31 seats in the 84-member body.
Neither Wright nor Peña ran for re-election in the March polls. Wright is leaving his party and forming a new one, while Peña is serving the third and final consecutive term allowed under her party’s rules.
“If [the reform] is not approved in April, we must try again later,” Peña said. “I am convinced the debate cannot stop now. There cannot be another decade of silence regarding this issue.”
According to figures published last month by the US-based Guttmacher Institute, Latin America and the Caribbean has the highest annual rate of abortion in the world. For every 1,000 women in the region of reproductive age, 44 have had abortions, compared with 17 in northern America, 36 in Asia and 34 in Africa.
Each year, roughly 7 million women living in developing countries are treated for complications due to unsafe abortions, and an estimated 47,000 women die.
Latin America has some of the harshest abortion laws in the world, but liberalisation efforts are beginning to bear fruit. Last year, Chile reversed its total ban on abortion to allow terminations in limited circumstances. In Argentina, congress is to vote on allowing terminations in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. In Brazil, women’s rights advocates have submitted a legal brief to the supreme court calling for terminations to be allowed in the first 12 weeks or pregnancy.
Reporting for this story was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation as part of its Adelante Latin America Reporting Initiative
A federal lawsuit argues that hackers violated the federal law designed to protect reproductive health-care facilities when they hacked an online abortion funds fundraiser.
The purpose of the hack, according to the complaint, was to intentionally disrupt the fund’s work in helping to provide financial assistance for abortions. michaeljung / Shutterstock
Religious imposition laws are designed to shield private individuals and businesses from complying with nondiscrimination laws based on a religious objection to that service.
More than 20 years ago, the U.S. Congress passed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act to address escalating threats, harassment, and violence targeting abortion providers and their patients. The law has typically been used to provide civil and criminal remedies for actions like blockading clinics or sending threats to providers. But a reportedly first-of-its-kind lawsuit filed last week in Massachusetts federal court argues the law should apply to online hacking as well.
The lawsuit, which also includes claims that the hackers violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, stems from a 2016 hack of the National Network of Abortion Funds’ (NNAF) National Abortion Access Bowl-a-thon online fundraiser. The complaint details an ongoing and sophisticated operation launched to derail the months-long event, which would ultimately cost the funds hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to the complaint. The purpose of the hack, according to the complaint, was to intentionally disrupt the fund’s work in helping to provide financial assistance for abortions.
The plaintiffs include the National Network of Abortion Funds and five of its members, including the Eastern Massachusetts Abortion Fund, Gateway Women’s Access Fund, Kentucky Health Justice Network, Northwest Abortion Access Fund, and the Preterm Access Fund.
According to the complaint, beginning in April a “malicious actor or actors” identified as John Does 1-15, disabled Bowl-a-thon participants’ fundraising sites through a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack and gained access to donor information. From there the defendants allegedly “impersonated plaintiffs and sent donors deeply disturbing racist, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic emails.”
As detailed in the court filing, shortly after hackers initially gained access to the fundraising platform, some Bowl-a-thon registrants began receiving emails alerting them to donations made by a user identified as “Adolph Hitler.” According to the complaint, the message from the user read: “I believe that the Aryan race is the Master Race; the purest human genetic strain currently available. Consequently, it tickles me to fund abortions for the lower races, such as the Negroes and the Jews. There is no longer any need to send these parasites to my concentration camps – they willingly slaughter their own young if given enough money to afford the ope [sic] I am indebted to feminism and this new opportunity it has provided to cleanse our future generations. Keep it up, NNAF!”’
The complaint also alleges that the Bowl-a-thon website appeared at one time to receive $66 billion in fraudulent donations during a DDoS attack before the website crashed altogether.
As a result of the attack, funds had their fundraising abilities compromised at what the attorneys claim is a critical moment in the stretch of the fundraiser. They also had to spend significant time and energy responding directly to the attack and explaining what was going on to their donors. All of these resources were diverted away from the funds’ core mission of helping patients in financial need access money to help pay for an abortion. And that, the attorneys claim, makes what the John Does did a violation of the FACE Act.
That claim should be a pretty easy one to substantiate in litigation, just given the facts of the 2016 attack: What other purpose would hackers have in crashing an online fundraiser for abortion access, but to try and thwart that access? There is none.
If the judge agrees with the FACE Act or the fraud claim, the litigation will proceed as usual, including a trial. The plaintiffs also hope that the discovery process will confirm the hackers’ identities.
“The damage that the attackers inflicted was intended for us to lose everything: our time, what resources we have, the trust of our supporters, and all of our energy to coping with the trauma, delays, and crisis of the hack,” said Jenni Kotting, communications director at the National Network of Abortion Funds, to Rewire.News in an emailed statement. “Too often, we see anti-abortion extremists make claims about protecting life, but this attack has surfaced the true motives of these anti-abortion attackers: racially motivated hatred and violence. They meticulously planned the attack so their message containing racist content about eugenics, anti-Semitism, and Adolph Hitler would go to as many people as possible. In this way, the attackers made abundantly clear how much anti-abortion extremism is infused with white supremacy.”
NNAF and its members’ FACE Act claim comes at a critical moment where online attacks against abortion providers are on the rise and when the law seems ill-prepared to remedy, let alone prevent, such digital threats. This lawsuit, though, could be an important first step in the courts finally addressing that online harassment.
There are 21 states where legislators have passed laws that restrict abortion coverage in insurance plans for public workers.
Wisconsin is the latest state to ban insurance coverage of abortion care for public employees. Win McNamee/Getty Images
Abortion is among the safest medical procedures in the United States. Yet, myths about its safety abound. False Witnesses reveals the individuals behind these lies.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) on Tuesday signed a bill prohibiting the state’s health insurance program from covering abortion care for state and local public workers.
Nicole Safar, director of government relations at Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin, said in a statement that Republicans in the state have made it a priority to take away health insurance coverage for women.
“This bill doesn’t prevent abortions, it compromises maternal health,” Safar said. “No one plans for their pregnancy ending in a medical emergency, which is precisely why insurance coverage is so necessary.”
Wisconsin is the latest state where legislators have banned insurance coverage of abortion care for public workers. There are 21 states that have passed laws restricting abortion coverage in insurance plans for public workers, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Lawmakers in several states have introduced legislation to restrict coverage of abortion care both in public and private health insurance.
Most recently, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in August signed a bill that prohibits a qualified health plan offered through a health benefit exchange, as administered by the federal government or created under the Affordable Care Act, from providing coverage for abortion care unless the abortion is performed due to a medical emergency.
Wisconsin’s AB 128, sponsored by state Rep. André Jacque (R-DePere), prohibits the Group Insurance Board (GIB) from contracting for or providing abortion services, except in the case of a medical emergency, a serious health risk to the pregnant patient, or in cases of sexual assault or incest.
Under current law, the GIB offers health insurance coverage to eligible workers under the Wisconsin Retirement System, which includes all state workers and state annuitants and may include local government workers.
Mark Grapentine, a lobbyist for the Wisconsin Medical Society, told the Capital Times that the organization opposed the legislation because abortion care is a legal medical procedure.
“Legislative action to bar the GIB from offering a health insurance coverage agreement that includes access to a legal procedure may not be in the best interests of plan participants who may need access to those legal procedures,” Grapentine said.
Opponents argued that the legislation was redundant because under the previous law, state health insurance plans only covered abortion care if a physician determined it to be medically necessary
Republican lawmakers have often made the claim that abortion care is never medically necessary, despite real-world examples of people who have needed abortion care for medical reasons.
Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, told Governing magazine that the legislation is intended to discourage pregnant people from terminating a pregnancy. “It is designed to steer a patient to continue a pregnancy rather than allowing the pregnant person to make the best health care decision,” Nash said.
A congressman is facing some well-earned backlash after a recent statement about abortion shocked even his most pro-life supporters. Idaho Senator Bob Nonini is currently running in the state’s lieutenant governor race, and during a panel hosted by CrossPolitic on April 2, Nonini suggested the death penalty should be considered as punishment for women who have an abortion.
“There should be no abortion, and anyone who has an abortion should pay,” the senator said according to the Associated Press. When moderators pressed him on the matter and asked if he considered the death penalty a possible punishment, Nonini reportedly nodded in agreement.
After news of his controversial statement broke, Nonini and his campaign seemed to be scrambling. Now, Nonini is claiming he never nodded in agreement to the suggestion of the death penalty – but is maintaining his staunchly pro-life stance. “Since abortion is murder, I believe we should consider penalties for individuals involved in these procedures,” Nonini said in a statement following the panel.
Ultimately, the senator suggested there was a flaw in the fact that women have never been prosecuted for having abortions. “Prosecutions have always been focused on the abortionist,” he said. Adding, “There is no way a woman would go to jail let alone face the death penalty. The statute alone, the threat of prosecution, would dramatically reduce abortion. That is my goal.”
The proverbial swing state has become the conservative vanguard for opposing abortion rights
Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine speaks during a press conference at the Department of Justice in Washington on Feb. 27.
Last week, the Trump administration announced plans to add a new question to the U.S. census. In 2020, the nationwide survey will ask people to mark down whether they are citizens—a seemingly minor change that will have far-reaching implications on legislative redistricting and, thus, U.S. politics and policy for years to come. For one glimpse of the ripple effect of redistricting on everyday life, look to Ohio, where legislators have passed a host of restrictive policies on abortion in defiance of voters’ actual views on the subject.
The state is generally regarded as politically purple, a proverbial toss-up in presidential elections. Donald Trump’s 8-point margin of victory in 2016 was the widest in nearly three decades. Before Trump, Barack Obama won the state twice, and George W. Bush won it twice before that.
But at the state level, Ohio has emerged as a conservative force on the issue of reproductive rights, putting itself at the vanguard of extreme anti-abortion legislation. In late 2016, the state Legislature passed what’s known as a “heartbeat bill”—a ban on all abortions performed after six weeks’ gestation, before many women even know they’re pregnant. If Gov. John Kasich hadn’t vetoed it in favor of a 20-week ban, it would have been the most extreme abortion restriction in the country. Earlier this month, a federal judge blocked an Ohio law that would have subjected doctors to felony charges if they perform an abortion sought because the fetus has a high probability of being born with Down syndrome. Ohio restrictions on medication abortions passed in 2011 have resulted in more doctor’s visits, more side effects, and greater need for medical intervention for women who choose this otherwise very safe route. And according to a 2013 law, a woman who wants an abortion in the state must submit to an ultrasound. If the ultrasound detects fetal pole cardiac activity, her doctor must ask if she’d like to listen to it or see the image.
Now, the Ohio state Legislature is considering a law that would require abortion clinics to give fetal tissue a formal burial or cremation. The bill mirrors those previously passed in Indiana and Texas, both of which were later blocked in court. Twenty legislators have also signed on to a total abortion ban, without even an exception to save the life of the pregnant woman. If passed and signed by the governor, women who get abortions and doctors who perform them could be charged with aggravated homicide, a capital offense. Few people in the modern anti-abortion movement are willing to argue that women should be put to death for getting abortion care. Twenty of them are serving today in the Ohio state Legislature.
There’s little evidence that Ohio voters as a whole hold such deeply held views against abortion. Obama captured the state twice, running as a proudly pro-choice candidate, while Bush also won twice running against a woman’s right to choose. The state elected a pro-choice U.S. senator, Sherrod Brown, in 2006, and an anti-choice U.S. senator, Rob Portman, in 2010, then re-elected Brown in 2012 and Portman in 2016. According to a 2014 Pew survey, Ohio voters are evenly split in their views of abortion rights, and 63 percent of Ohioans polled in 2015 said they’d be less likely to support a presidential candidate who wanted to ban all abortions. The same poll found that voters in the state opposed by a 14-point margin the recently passed law banning abortions related to Down syndrome.
So, how did Ohio become home to some of the country’s most extreme anti-choice legislation? The answer seems to be a combination of partisan engineering and a one-woman wrecking ball who has forced vulnerable Republican legislators to heel on the issue.
When I put the question to Kellie Copeland, the executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, she gave a rueful laugh and responded with one word: “gerrymandering.” Republicans currently hold supermajorities in both chambers, with about three-fifths of state lawmakers identifying as anti-choice. “The people in the Legislature, for the most part, they don’t look like the population, they don’t think like the population,” Copeland said. “The gerrymandering has been so bad in Ohio that I think it’s actually disenfranchised voters, because the politicians have picked their constituents instead of the other way around.” Even people in Ohio who oppose abortion rights don’t usually support full-on bans, she continued, especially without exceptions for rape, incest, and the health of the pregnant person. Their elected representatives, on the other hand, do.
This legislative session, both chambers comprise the largest one-party majorities in the state’s history. Republicans hold 24 seats in the 33-seat Senate and 66 in the 99-member House. The party first claimed a supermajority in 2012, but the bigger shift came in 2010, when the Democrats lost a whopping 13 seats in the House, handing control of the chamber to Republicans in the crucial election before the state maps would be redrawn. Anti-gerrymandering advocates place much of the blame for this power shift on REDMAP, a wildly effective Republican strategy that flipped a number of statehouses from blue to red ahead of the 2011 redistricting process by launching dark-money campaigns against no-name state legislators or those who’d assumed their seats were safe. When it came time to set the new Ohio state legislative districts in 2011, the Republicans were in control, and they drew the map to their liking.
According to a Dayton Daily News analysis, there were only 20 competitive state House districts out of 99 in the new 2011 map, and only seven competitive state Senate districts out of 33. The one Democrat on the board responsible for drawing the map said at the time that it “quarantined” Democrats into just one-third of the state legislative districts despite the fact that those voters made up around half the state’s population. (The state’s congressional map includes a gerrymandered district so famous it now has a name: the Snake on the Lake, which runs from Cleveland to Toledo on the shore of Lake Erie. In one spot, two portions of the district are connected only by a bridge over the water.)
“A natural consequence of really safe elections is … our state reps and our state senators only really have to worry about the primaries,” said Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio, an advocacy group that works on redistricting reform. “And if they only have to worry about the primary, they’re much more likely to go to the extremes, because they can easily be primaried on the left or primaried on the right. It leads to extreme dysfunction.” Turcer said Republican legislators in Ohio, safe in red districts and trying to fend off further-right primary challengers, have become preoccupied with pro-gun and anti-abortion legislation while neglecting important issues that better lend themselves to bipartisan solutions, such as improving schools and addressing Ohio’s infant mortality rate, one of the 10 worst in the nation.
Conservative activists have been eager to exploit that dynamic. The most conspicuous has been Janet Porter, a prominent right-wing activist who runs Faith2Action, an organization that has been so aggressive in its crusade that the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled it a hate group. Porter was dubbed “the architect of the ‘gay conversion’ campaign” by the New York Times in 1998 (she was Janet Folger at the time), and she was in the national spotlight again last year, when she defended Senate candidate and accused child molester Roy Moore on CNN by congratulating pregnant anchor Poppy Harlow on her “unborn child.” Moore would “stand for the rights of babies like yours in the womb,” Porter said, “where his opponent will support killing them until the moment of birth.”
Janet Porter, from Faith2Action, decorates before a rally for Roy Moore in Midland City, Alabama, on Dec. 11.
Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
In Ohio, Porter pushed for the state to become the first to ban the procedure anti-abortion activists call “partial-birth abortion.” She also wrote and aggressively lobbied for the “heartbeat bill” that kept popping up in the Ohio Legislature for years before making it to the governor’s desk in 2016. (Last year, she convinced Rep. Steve King of Iowa to introduce the same legislation in Congress.) Kasich’s veto of the “heartbeat bill” seemed to allay fears about a total abortion ban in the state, but Copeland, the Ohio NARAL director, cautions against dismissing the proposal as an impossibility. She believes lobbying from NARAL and other reproductive rights advocacy groups helped convince Kasich that signing the six-week abortion ban would have been bad for his future career.
But Kasich’s term is up in January, and a pitched primary for the Republican nomination to replace him has seen both front-runners moving further to the right. Ohio Attorney General Mike Dewine has been a vocal fan of Jeff Sessions, and Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor backed the successful bid of a far-right Trump supporter, Jane Timken, to replace the more moderate chairman of the state Republican Party. Both candidates appear to be battling over who can be the least accommodating of abortion rights. Taylor has already said she would have signed the six-week abortion ban; Dewine recently signed an amicus brief supporting the Trump administration’s efforts to force undocumented teenagers to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. “Some people aren’t taking this [total abortion ban] bill that seriously,” Copeland told me. “But when you look at it through that lens, I don’t know how you can’t.”
And even if the next Ohio governor thinks it politically imprudent to sign a complete abortion ban, the Republican Party could still pass it with its veto-proof majorities in the Legislature.
Those majorities appear to be safe, for now. The League of Women Voters of Ohio found that only two of the 99 state House races turned out differently than the political index predicted in the 2012 race, and only three did so in 2014. In 2014, House Republicans got 57 percent of the total votes in the state but won 66 percent of the seats in the House. That 9-point vote-to-seat gap increased to 10 points in the 2016 election. An Associated Press report estimated that the map, as drawn, gave Republicans five more state House seats than they would have gotten with a neutrally drawn map. A 2014 report from University of Chicago law scholars named Ohio’s state legislative map as one of the worst in the country, an example of “uncommonly severe gerrymandering.” “The mapmakers, in many ways, have had more say in who gets elected than the voters in Ohio,” said Catherine Turcer of Common Cause Ohio.
That may change after the 2020 census, when new districts will be drawn. Turcer is currently traveling the state to gin up support for the Fair Districts = Fair Elections amendment, a redistricting reform measure that would require support from three-fifths of the entire Legislature, including 50 percent of the minority party, to certify a district map for the full 10 years. (Otherwise, it would expire after four.) In a rare feat of bipartisanship, the Ohio state Legislature approved the measure with near-unanimity, and voters will determine its fate on their primary ballots in May. In 2015, voters approved the reform initiative for state legislative redistricting; the new ballot measure will apply the same standards to congressional redistricting.
The 2015 ballot initiative was a monster success for Turcer and her peers—Ohioans approved the measure in all 88 counties, with 71.5 percent voting in favor overall. Turcer says she’s cautiously optimistic about the May vote, which, with its impact on congressional seats, will have national implications. “I’m hopeful, because no matter what, we are a purple state. And if we all vote as a whole on something, we look for bipartisan, reasonable solutions,” she said. “We’re tired of one party marginalizing the other. We’d like to participate in real elections.”
Those at the head of the discredited anti-choice campaign have tried for years to release surreptitiously recorded video from a National Abortion Federation private event.
The activists include David Daleiden, who founded the anti-choice front group known as the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), and Troy Newman, one of CMP’s founding board members. Eric Kayne/Getty Images
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday dealt another blow to the anti-choice activists behind the discredited smear campaign against Planned Parenthood when it declined to hear an appeal seeking permission to release videos under a gag order in the National Abortion Federation’s (NAF) lawsuit against the activists.
The activists include David Daleiden, who founded the anti-choice front group known as the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), and Troy Newman, one of CMP’s founding board members. The petition for a writ of certiorari, which the Supreme Court rejected, was filed on behalf of Newman—founder and president of radical anti-choice group, Operation Rescue—by the American Center for Law and Justice and President Trump’s personal attorney, Jay Sekulow.
It was the latest loss for the anti-choice activists in NAF’s lawsuit against Daleiden, CMP, Troy Newman, and others related to the videos that Daleiden and his associates surreptitiously recorded at one of NAF’s private events and later edited to insinuate that Planned Parenthood has profited from the sale of fetal tissue.
The videos have been blocked from release for nearly two and a half years, and thus far, efforts to release the videos have been stymied in court—first by the district court, then by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and now by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Daleiden, who founded CMP, began releasing the videos in July 2015 as part of something he called the “Human Capital Project,” which coordinated with Republican lawmakers to attack funding for Planned Parenthood. The purpose of the project was to demonstrate that Planned Parenthood employees were unlawfully profiting from fetal tissue donation and violating the “partial-birth abortion” ban. Daleiden insisted that the videos contained proof of Planned Parenthood’s misdeeds.
Almost immediately after the videos’ release, NAF filed a federal lawsuit against Daleiden, CMP, and his associates in federal court in San Francisco alleging civil conspiracy, racketeering, fraud, and breach of contract, among other civil and criminal allegations, stemming from the release of the deceptively edited video footage.
NAF sought a temporary restraining order blocking further release of the videos in order to protect its members from anti-choice activists’ harassment and violent threats.
Judge Orrick issued the temporary restraining order in July 2015, and in February 2016 converted that order into a preliminary injunction in a scathing opinion in which he said the defendants had “engaged in repeated instances of fraud” and that the products of Daleiden’s Human Capital Project “thus far have not been pieces of journalistic integrity, but misleadingly edited videos and unfounded assertions.”
The injunction blocks CMP and Daleiden from publishing or disclosing “any video, audio, photographic, or other recordings taken, or any confidential information learned at any NAF annual meetings.”
For more than two years, CMP and Daleiden have battled NAF in court for the right to release these videos, claiming their infiltration scheme was simply citizen journalism—although many journalists have concluded otherwise—and that the injunction blocking them from releasing the videos is an infringement on their First Amendment rights.
NAF countered that Daleiden and CMP waived their First Amendment rights when they signed nondisclosure agreements, promising to maintain the confidentiality of information they gleaned from NAF’s meetings. Due to the threats of violence—including from people like Newman, who has argued that the killing of abortion providers is justifiable homicide—NAF has had to increase its security. One element of their security system requires every event attendee to sign confidentiality agreements.
“That defendants intended to infiltrate the NAF Annual Meetings in order to uncover evidence of alleged criminal wrong doing … does not give defendants an automatic license to disregard the confidentiality provisions.”
In his appeal to the Supreme Court—which was joined by more than 20 state attorneys general—Newman argued that the injunction blocks people from voluntarily sharing information concerning possible criminal, illegal, or unethical acts with federal, state, and local government investigators and the public.
But Republican-led investigations on the state and federal level found no wrongdoing on the part of Planned Parenthood. Judge Orrick also found no such wrongdoing: “The products of [the Human Capital Project]—achieved in large part from the infiltration—thus far have not been pieces of journalistic integrity, but misleadingly edited videos and unfounded assertions (at least with respect to the NAF materials) of criminal conduct.”
The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case leaves the injunction in place.
Reproductive rights advocates raised concerns about the further stigmatization of abortion care, and the impact the law could have on pregnant people who are diagnosed with mental illness.
“This bill does what 27 other states have done to gather information on these procedures without restricting access to them,” Holcomb said. Scott Olson/Getty Images
Evidence provided to Congress by state attorneys general and health departments proves that abortion is both extremely safe and highly regulated. Searchable by state.
Indiana Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb on Sunday signed a bill into law that mandates reporting requirements for abortion providers, and requires extensive and detailed information about patients and their health outcomes. That includes a requirement that medical professionals report any “psychological or emotional complications, including depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety, and sleeping disorders,” supposedly connected to an abortion.
Reproductive rights advocates raised concerns about the further stigmatization of abortion care, and the impact the law could have on pregnant people who are diagnosed with mental illness. Abortion opponents have often made claims that abortion can independently lead to long-term psychological effects. However, there is no medical evidence that abortion directly leads to mental illness.
Aimee Arrambide, a storyteller with the We Testify leadership program of the National Network of Abortion Funds, told Rewire.News that her ability to access abortion care was critical in her ability to seek treatment for bipolar disorder.
“Especially in light of legislation that tries to stigmatize abortion and blame abortion for mental health issues, my abortion actually allowed me to overcome and treat my mental health illness and become a successful person,” Arrambide said.
However, having an abortion can make it difficult to access unbiased mental health care. Candice Russell, another storyteller with We Testify, told Rewire.News that when seeking treatment for bipolar disorder, she has been shamed by mental health professionals for having had an abortion.
“I’ve gone through the process of being shamed by people who were supposed to be giving me accurate medical care,” Russell said. “It made a lot of my recovery very difficult.”
Christie Gillespie, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky (PPINK), said in a statement that the law creates unnecessary restrictions for abortion providers and is the “perfect example of government intrusion” into the relationship between doctors and patients.
“This law is not about enhancing patient safety, and does absolutely nothing to reduce unintended pregnancies,” Gillespie said.
Holcomb said in a statement that the legislative language is similar to laws passed in several other states.
“This bill does what 27 other states have done to gather information on these procedures without restricting access to them,” Holcomb said.
Indeed, Indiana is the latest state to increase reporting requirements for abortion providers as part of a national effort by anti-choice activists to manufacture data to support the claim that abortion care is unsafe, despite the overwhelming evidence that abortion is a safe and heavily regulated medical procedure.
Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, told Rewire.News that extensive complication reporting requirements are a response to court decisions that struck down other laws restricting abortion that were justified with dubious evidence and data.
“This is abortion opponents trying to develop some kind [of] evidence to try to show that abortion is dangerous and that abortion requires restrictions,” Nash said.
Forty-six states require medical facilities and physicians that provide abortion services to submit regular reports to state agencies, and 27 states require providers to report post-abortion complications, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
The Indiana law will require physicians, hospitals, and abortion clinics to report to the Indiana State Department of Health each case involving a patient suffering from an “abortion complication” including infections, hemorrhaging, blood clots, and cardiac arrest.
Failure to report an abortion complication would be considered a Class B misdemeanor, which is punishable by up to 180 days in jail and a fine of up to $1,000.
SB 340, sponsored by state Sen. Travis Holdman (R-Markle), will also make various other changes to the state’s laws regulating abortion, including creating disclosure requirements for abortion clinic license applications, and mandating annual clinic inspections.
Richard Feldman, legislative chairman of the Indiana Academy of Family Physicians, told the Indianapolis Star that the reporting requirements would interfere with the doctor-patient relationship.
“We opposed this bill and felt compliance was onerous for physicians, especially in light of non-compliance being treated as a criminal violation including jail time,” Feldman said. “Further, the list of complications is astonishingly long and many are inappropriate in regard to current standards of care, research value, clinical relevance, or reasonable time frames for patient contact.”
Many of the provisions in these laws are similar to those found in model legislation by Americans United for Life (AUL), the self-described “legal architect” of the anti-choice movement. The organization creates copycat legislation and distributes the anti-choice proposals to state lawmakers, who then push the measures through legislatures.
The organization advocates for a federal law to create a national database of abortion statistics and for increased reporting requirements for states.
A detention center in McAllen, Tex., for undocumented minors.CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times
A federal judge in Washington issued a sweeping order on Friday that temporarily prevents the government from blocking access to abortion services for undocumented, pregnant minors who have been detained in federal immigration custody.
In issuing the preliminary injunction, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of United States District Court barred the government from interfering with hundreds of teenagers’ access to medical appointments, counseling, abortion procedures or other care, writing that the government’s practice of doing so infringed on the teenagers’ constitutional rights.
Judge Chutkan also allowed the case to proceed as a class action that will include four plaintiffs whose high-profile cases date to October 2017.
Since March 2017, the Office of Refugee Resettlement had instructed employees at federally funded shelters to not take “any action that facilitates an abortion without direction and approval from the director of O.R.R.,” court documents say. The Trump administration has argued that their policies do not create a so-called undue burden because undocumented teenagers seeking an abortion can obtain one by finding a sponsor or voluntarily deporting themselves to their home country.
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Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of United States District Court for the District of Columbia.CreditUnited States Courts
“This court does not find that either of these ‘options’ mitigates the undue burden that O.R.R.’s policy imposes on the young women in its custody,” Judge Chutkan wrote, calling the government’s proposal a “Hobson’s choice.”
While the Office of Refugee Resettlement and its director “are certainly entitled to maintain an interest in fetal life,” and even to prefer that pregnant teens in their custody choose one course over the other, federal officials “may not create or implement any policy that strips” the undocumented children “of their right to make their own reproductive choices,” Judge Chutkan, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, continued.
“With today’s rulings, we are one step closer to ending this extreme policy once and for all and securing justice for all of these young women,” she said.
It was unclear late Friday whether the Trump administration would appeal the ruling. The Justice Department did not immediately respond Friday night to email and phone messages seeking comment.
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