“While Trump and his cronies seek to grant broad licenses to discriminate, California is showing that we stand for reproductive freedom and economic justice for all.”
Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego) said religious employers have discriminated against some workers’ health-care decisions in California. AssemblyAccess / YouTube
Texas has seen some of the nation’s most regressive abortion restrictions in recent years. This series chronicles the fall-out of those laws, and the litigation that has followed.
For some California workers, abiding by a religious code of conduct can spell the difference between gainful employment and a pink slip. Many California churches, religious groups, and anti-choice organizations require workers to sign statements of faith or codes of conduct as a condition of employment, as the California Family Council, a policy arm of the Family Research Council, noted.
But legislation heading to Gov. Jerry Brown’s (D) desk would render these types of agreements invalid, and bar employers from retaliating against a worker for reproductive health decisions. The bill cleared the Democratic-led state senate and assembly last week in floor votes.
Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego), the bill’s sponsor, said the legislation stops religious employers from infringing on a worker’s right to make personal decisions about birth control and pregnancy.
“Women in this country have been fired for getting pregnant while unmarried, for using in-vitro fertilization and for other personal reasons related to their own reproductive health,” Gonzalez Fletcher said in a statement. “No woman should ever lose a job for exercising her right to decide when, how, or whether to have a family.”
AB 569 protects workers from discrimination or retaliation for using any medication, medical service, or device related to reproductive health. Sponsored by NARAL Pro-Choice California and California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, the bill comes a few months after President Trump moved to expand religious imposition by signing an executive order, flanked by the Little Sisters of the Poor, who sued over the Affordable Care Act’s birth control benefit.
“While Trump and his cronies seek to grant broad licenses to discriminate, California is showing that we stand for reproductive freedom and economic justice for all,” Amy Everitt, state director of NARAL Pro-Choice California, said in a statement.
Gonzalez Fletcher said religious employers have discriminated against some workers’ health-care decisions in California. In one case, San Diego Christian College required a financial aid specialist to sign paperwork saying she wouldn’t have premarital sex. The college then fired her when she became pregnant, taking that as evidence that she had violated the code of conduct, as KTLA reported. In another case, the Archbishop of San Francisco tried unsuccessfully to require teachers to sign a code of conduct saying they wouldn’t use birth control or attempt artificial insemination.
Sixteen faith-based groups signed a letter supporting AB 569, but opponents argue the bill’s employment protections infringe on so-called religious freedom.
“Every organization that promotes a pro-life message must be able to require its employees to practice what they preach,” said California Family Council President Jonathan Keller. “It is unconscionable for any politician to attempt to abridge this sacrosanct religious liberty by inserting themselves into the employee-employer relationship.”
A similar measure passed in St. Louis, Missouri, is now facing a court challenge from religious groups, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatchreported.
An analysis by the state Senate Judiciary Committee indicates the California legislation is constitutional under the U.S. Supreme Court interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause in a key 1990 decision. In that case, Employment Division v. Smith, the high court held that a neutral law is constitutional as long as it doesn’t single out a religious behavior and is not motivated by the desire to interfere with a religion.
My questions about my grandmother’s death, of a self-induced abortion, haven’t changed since I was twelve years old. What feels new, in the Trump era, is the urgency of her story.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY KATE DALOZ
As a child, I knew only that my grandmother had died when my mom was still a baby. The one time I asked what had happened to her, a bolt of panic flashed across my mother’s face. “A household accident,” was all she said.
I was twelve years old when she finally told me the truth. Some friends and I had got into a long after-school discussion about abortion, prompted by the gruesome posters that a protester had staked in front of the Planned Parenthood in our Vermont town. I had already begun reading my mother’s Ms.magazines cover to cover, but this was the first time I’d encountered a pro-life position. When I hopped into my mom’s car after school, I was buzzing with new ideas. I had almost finished repeating one friend’s pro-life argument when I saw the look on Mom’s face. That’s when she told me: the “household accident” that had killed her mother had, in fact, been a self-induced abortion.
Her hands were tight on the steering wheel as she spoke. I realized later that it wasn’t the topic of abortion itself that made her so uneasy—she was a nurse and a Roe-era feminist who usually responded straightforwardly to even the most embarrassing health questions. Rather, her anguish arose from sharing a truth that she’d been brought up believing was too terrible to speak.
Sitting beside her in the passenger seat, I struggled to absorb the meaning of what she’d told me. I had only just grasped what abortion was a few hours earlier, and was still trying on this new pro-life idea. “O.K.,” I said, “but what about the uncle or aunt I never had?” Mom whipped toward me, face taut with a rage and fear that I somehow understood had nothing to do with me. “What about the mother I never had?” she said.
Until recently, everything my mom knew about her mother fit into one three-ring binder. Inside were letters, documents, and photos that my mother had collected over the years. After the election last fall, as an Administration hostile to women’s reproductive rights settled into the White House, I asked her to send the binder to me, and did some sleuthing of my own. I got in touch with aging relatives and family friends, who offered crumbling bundles of my grandmother’s letters, carefully preserved for decades. My questions about her life and death hadn’t changed since I was twelve years old. What felt new, in the Trump era, was the urgency of her story.
My grandmother, Winifred Haynes Mayer, was born in New York City, in 1912, to an upper-middle-class family. Her father, a doctor, spent time in France during the First World War, helping set up orphanages, and returned to the U.S. in love with a Frenchwoman and seeking a divorce. Win and her brother were raised in the Bronx by their mother, Nyesie, a nurse.
Nyesie was determined that her daughter receive a college education, and in 1929 Win enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. There she majored in English, helped found a literary magazine, and, in her senior year, met my grandfather, Eddie. Win was lean and athletic, with high cheekbones and windblown hair. In photographs, she always looks as though she’s just returned from a brisk stroll.
Win and Eddie married in 1939. She got pregnant immediately but miscarried after her doctor prescribed some medication, possibly for morning sickness. In a short letter to her mother, dated “Thursday, I guess,” she wrote, “I lost the little kangaroo early Wednesday morning and am now lying in an empty and ethery tearful state of mind.” Nyesie wrote back, with some words crossed out, “I wish so much that I were near enough to be useful to you.”
My uncle Peter was born in 1941. (“He is a very funny looking little squirt but we like him,” Win wrote Nyesie. “Are there any chipmunks in our family?”) Soon after the United States entered the Second World War, Eddie was recruited by the newly formed Office of Strategic Services, and the family moved to Alexandria, Virginia. They rented a small apartment from some friends, Katrina and Chandler Morse, whose rambling house was a gathering place for a community of O.S.S. families.
Sooner or later, they knew, Eddie would leave for London. But the dates and duration of his deployment kept changing, and the uncertainty began to wear on Win. With Eddie away on a three-day business trip, she noted, “I am getting a foretaste for which I do not particularly care.” When he finally departed in April, Win was seven months pregnant with my mother, Judy. Eddie would not meet his daughter until she was six months old.
Katrina, their friend and landlady, needed the apartment for her sister-in-law and infant niece, so Win moved away, to a nondescript block of Army housing. She spent the summer of 1943 caring for her two children alone in the thick Virginia heat. Her letters to Nyesie convey a parent’s mix of joy and fatigue. “Judy is a sweet, juicy little girl as ever,” she wrote. “She howls from 7 till 8:30 which is very dull because by then I am fed up with children and want only to sit on the front porch in the cool of the evening.”
Eddie’s letters indicated that he’d likely be returning in November, but that month came and went with no sign of him. Then, just before Christmas, Win’s neighbor ran over to relay an urgent message from Katrina—she’d heard, through the O.S.S. grapevine, that Eddie was on a flight home. Win quickly cleaned the house, and then rushed with the children to the grocery store. When she called Eddie’s office from the A. & P., they told her he was waiting at the train station. “So we all dashed in to meet him!” she wrote to her mother. “T’is wonderful to have our family whole again.”
It wasn’t to last. Eddie’s commanders had decided that his project would require him in Europe indefinitely; once deployed, under the best scenario he’d have short leaves every six to eight months. “I really don’t think the Lord would have had to try boils to find the limit of my endurance after that,” Win wrote. That winter, a preoccupied tone crept into her letters to Nyesie: “I . . . heard from Beth that Winston had been killed over Munster . . . and that his widow has had twins, a boy and a girl,” she wrote. “Birth and death follow each other so swiftly these days that one has no time for the appropriate feelings about either of them.” A few weeks later, Win learned that she was pregnant again.
This pregnancy, unlike the others, is never mentioned in her surviving letters. Nyesie came to visit the first weekend in April, and it’s likely that Win asked her in person for help in obtaining an abortion. This would not have come as a shocking request. Nyesie was part of a large social circle of progressive doctors and nurses, and she would have known which of her colleagues might be willing to perform a “D. and C.” in violation of the law. In the nineteen-thirties, she had arranged an abortion for her son’s wife, an actress. The couple had gone on to have two daughters.
Nyesie agreed to help Win. The next weekend, Win left her children in Virginia and travelled to New York. But, at the last moment, for reasons that have been lost, the arrangements Nyesie had made fell through. Win then turned to another New York physician she hoped might be able to help—her father. He refused. Eddie later told my mom that Win’s French stepmother had offered her this advice: “Frenchwomen take care of these things themselves.”
Back in Virginia the next Sunday, Win went with Eddie and the children over to Katrina’s house. The weather was cool and gray but the peach trees were in full bloom. Katrina wrote to her husband, who was stationed in London, “The maples are covered with their funny yellow-green flowers and the grass is that beautiful soft lush spring green.” Win left no record of what she was thinking or feeling that weekend as the others tilled the garden while the children napped in a hammock. But when I imagine her these are the things I think about: of how provisional and precarious early pregnancy feels, even when welcomed with more joy than fear; of how everything during that time narrows in toward the dark knot at your center, the turning point of your whole future; and of desperation, the kind that manifests not in panic but in a calm practicality. Of how plain the way forward can feel in those moments when other options have evaporated.
That Tuesday, April 18, 1944, Eddie went to work as usual. At noon, Win gave the children lunch and put them down for their naps. Then, as though it were any other task that needed to be completed during her few hours of solitude, she went into the bathroom. The sharp object she took with her—a knitting needle?—is another detail that has been lost. That evening, Katrina was coming home from the Washington Nationals’ opening day. “As I walked across the porch into the house from the game . . . the phone was ringing,” she wrote to her husband. “It was about 6:45. I let the phone ring while I went and let the dogs out who had been shut in our bedroom all afternoon. As I picked up the phone Eddie Mayer’s voice came to me saying, ‘Katrina—can you come right over. I think Winnie is dead.’ ” Eddie had arrived home from work to find his wife crumpled in the bathroom. Nine-month-old Judy was still in her crib, crying, but two-year-old Peter had been out of bed and wandering around the apartment for hours.
“The true cause as stated by the autopsy is ‘death due to shock as a result of an attempt to force a miscarriage by mechanical methods,’ ” Katrina wrote to her husband. “But the party line which we are following and telling every one is death caused by an embolism.” My mother would not learn what really happened for more than two decades. In lieu of an explanation, adults offered confusing half-truths that conveyed no clear message apart from their own guilt and shame. Once, Nyesie sat her grandchildren down in the living room to tell them the story, mixing the truth of the abortion with the lie of the embolism in a way she apparently thought that they could handle. My mom was five years old at the time. Almost seventy years later, she recalled the scene to me in detail: how she was sitting on the floor, looking up at her grandmother on the couch, backlit against the living room’s bay windows. “What I understood was that there was a baby and a bubble,” my mom told me. Her grandmother offered no follow-up, and the children had long since learned not to ask questions. Peter, who was seven years old, decided that his mother had died of cancer. But my mother heard something different: she knew that she had been a baby when Win died. It took her decades to shake the conviction that she’d been the cause of her mother’s death.
“It took all my courage and energy just to bring up the subject the few times I did,” my mom recalled. As a junior at the University of Hawaii—the farthest-from-home college she could find—she wrote her father a letter, demanding at last to know the truth. It arrived the same day Eddie found out that his own mother had died. “I’m so grateful for your having written,” he wrote. “It’s as tho I’ve been pulled back from a terrible brink of loneliness & lack of communication & hopelessly tumbling over the edge into the void.” But it wasn’t until he visited her a year later that she dared to bring it up again. She was the exact age that Win had been when Eddie first met her, and they bore a startling resemblance. As my mom remembers it, “I was driving my car from the Waikiki side to the Kailua side of Oahu when I told him that I wanted to know how Win had died.” In clipped sentences, he told her the truth. She reached over to grab his hand, but he shoved it back at her. Eddie lived for another forty years, but they never spoke about Win’s death again.
It was in the feminist movement of the nineteen-seventies that Mom found, for the first time, other women who were determined to talk about abortion—not in hushed tones but as a matter of health care and family planning. Three years after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, when I was a few months old, she finally sent away for her mother’s death record. Under “cause of death,” the coroner had written in a sloped hand: “Attempt at criminal abortion, self-inflicted.” The word “criminal” refused to sink in. “That night, for the first time in many years, I vomited several times,” she told me. “Somehow I knew I wasn’t sick, but was having a life purge.”
Winifred Haynes Mayer’s death certificate.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY KATE DALOZ
Several months before the election, my own seven-year-old daughter asked me how her great-grandmother had died. Already, there’d been reports of a rise in self-induced abortions in states where access had been restricted. Despite years of thinking about Win’s death and how to talk about it, I was caught off guard by her question. We were on the street. I was wrestling car keys out of my purse with one hand while trying to keep a grip on my toddler son with the other. Like my own mother before me, I hesitated.
To understand Win’s story—what had happened to her, what she had done, and why—my daughter would need a number of moral and biological concepts that were not yet in place in her young mind. Still, I wanted to offer her a simplified version of the truth that could remain stable for her as she got older. I wanted to assure her that, even though this was a story she needed to grow into, she should always feel free to ask questions, and that I would answer as honestly as I could. And I wanted to break my family’s long-standing silence surrounding Win’s death, because silence only helps to perpetuate the fallacy that outlawing abortion has ever stopped women from attempting it.
If I couldn’t immediately explain to my daughter how Win died, I decided, I could at least explain why. “She needed help really badly and no one would help her so she died,” I told her. Then I added a reassurance that I’m not sure I’d feel confident offering today. “It’s not a thing that would happen to us now,” I said. “If we ever needed that kind of help, we would get it and we would be safe.”
Abortion funds and youth nonprofits help young people navigate the legal system to get judicial approval for abortion, push repeal of parental notification laws, and support youth advocacy.
Young people are at the forefront of advocating for an Illinois measure that would ensure equitable access to abortion regardless of insurance. Laurel Posakony / Twitter
Religious imposition laws are designed to shield private individuals and businesses from complying with nondiscrimination laws based on a religious objection to that service.
Since January, hundreds of anti-abortion bills have moved through state legislatures across the country, but historically, some of the most longstanding restrictions have targeted young people seeking abortion care. Minors face many barriers not always related to age, such as medically inaccurate sex education (or none at all), lack of birth control, and limited resources. But with a new round of parental notification laws, minors’ abortion access may be narrowing to the point of near-impossibility.
In the state of Indiana, a bill that would require minors to get parental consent prior to having an abortion was signed into law until a federal judge blocked it from taking effect this June. In West Virginia, a provision allowing doctors to grant waivers to minors seeking abortions due to health risks was repealed in April, leaving minors to either obtain a parent or guardian’s consent or a judge’s approval. And Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall filed paperwork last month to appeal a July decision that blocked the state’s requirement that minors undergo a trial-like hearing to obtain a judge’s approval for an abortion.
“Young people, minors, are definitely the demographic facing some of the most serious restrictions on their bodily autonomy, and these laws regard their bodies as their parents’ property,” said Amanda Bennett, the client services manager at Jane’s Due Process in Texas. “Here in Texas, where there’s so few abortion clinics, the problem is really exacerbated.”
Jane’s Due Process is a nonprofit that supports reproductive justice for minors by offering help with navigating the process to obtain judicial bypass, the legal waiver that allows them to have abortions without parental consent. As of 2017, 37 out of 50 states have parental consent laws for minors seeking abortion. The 1979 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Bellotti v. Baird ruled that minors do not need parental consent to obtain the procedure, but granted that as long as they have the option of obtaining judicial bypass for the procedure, such parental requirements are feasible.
Jane’s Due Process also refers minors to Fund Texas Choice for financial assistance for other services they may need, such as transportation or lodging. In 2016, Jane’s Due Process completed intake with 307 minors, although only 200 went on to work toward obtaining bypass; some minors with unintended pregnancies will have miscarriages, travel out of state, or even end up telling their parents or trusted adults further down the line.
The judicial bypass process starts with minors seeking abortions calling Jane’s Due Process’ hotline or completing its online intake form. Next, the organization arranges for an ultrasound and an attorney paid for by the state. Within five business days, a hearing is scheduled with a judge. A recent law requires hearings to take place in the minor’s county of residence rather than where they will have their abortion, and this has sometimes complicated the judicial bypass process, according to Bennett.
“Judges in counties [without abortion clinics] tend to be less equipped to deal with these situations, and the hearings can get messy,” she said.
Young people receive judicial bypass if the judge deems that the minor is mature and informed enough to make the decision, or if the judge finds that the minor’s family situation merits the procedure. In many cases, minors are able to obtain the waiver. But in July, a 12-year-old victim of rape and child abuse in Alabama was denied an abortion by a district attorney and only granted judicial bypass when a circuit court intervened.
Still, according to Bennett, even though most hearings with judges do result in minors being granted judicial bypass, this doesn’t change the inherent problems with the hearings, which are not dependably confidential. In examples from Minnesota and Massachusetts, according to StopPNA.org, “one young woman was sitting in a court corridor when her sister’s civics class came through; another saw a neighbor in the courthouse; a third encountered her godmother, who was employed as a court officer; another had to hide in the bathroom to avoid being seen by a family member who worked in the courthouse; and a young woman ran into her father right outside of the courthouse.”
Young people can also face hostile gatekeepers. Quita Tinsley of the Access Reproductive Care-Southeast abortion fund in Georgia recalled when “a young person called us after she had been to her local courthouse in Georgia to ask about judicial bypass. They lied and told her they didn’t know what she was talking about. They tried to act like it didn’t exist. We knew it existed, and we were the ones who had to help her navigate that process and get her a lawyer to be able to get her judicial bypass.”
Abortion funds know firsthand that the circumstances surrounding young people accessing abortion are already incredibly difficult. From 2010 to 2015, the National Network of Abortion Funds’ George Tiller Memorial Fund served a total of 481 young people under the age of 18. The majority of adolescents were geographically located in the South (50 percent) and Midwest (20 percent), and had to travel an average of 185 miles. The young people who called for funding were predominantly Black (59 percent) and ages 14-to-15 (36 percent) or 16-to-17 (56 percent). Of the 204 adolescents who reported information on the reason for obtaining an abortion, the primary driver (61 percent) was not having access to birth control. And for many young people, there were extenuating life circumstances, such as some form of government assistance, having multiple children, seeking an abortion due to being raped, and having partial or unstable living situations.
The average cost of young people’s abortions funded by the Tiller Fund was $2,800, three times what the patients could afford. The cost was magnified because more than two-thirds of the adolescents sought abortion care in the second trimester of pregnancy.
Bennett noted that while minors are matched with attorneys at no cost, there is no public funding for abortion in Texas. A recent study associated the defunding of women’s health and family planning clinics in Texas with higher rates of abortion in teens. It’s worth noting that there’s also a statewide crisis of poor sexual health education in public schools and households that contributes to unplanned pregnancies among people of all ages.
West Virginia FREE is another abortion funding organization that helps minors access abortion care. Working with the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, the last abortion clinic in the state, West Virginia FREE offers financial support for the abortion procedure, as well as transportation and lodging expenses for people who must travel out of state due to the state’s ban on 20-week abortions. The group also connects patients with an attorney from its judicial bypass network.
According to Julie Warden, West Virginia FREE’s communications director, only two waivers were used in 2015, and none in 2016. “It’s rare, but no less burdensome for the people who have to go through that process,” Warden said.
Yamani Hernandez, the executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, saw how difficult accessing abortion could be for youth when she was executive director of the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health (ICAH).
Hernandez noted: “Young people of color, undocumented youth, transgender youth, and others are already too often criminalized because of their very identities. Young people who have been neglected by the systems that are charged with supporting them are often hesitant to enter the court system. Too many youth experience stigma around their decisions at home, school, and in health-care environments. Legislators interested in targeting youth with these laws need to take a giant step back and reconsider the consequences of the obstacles they are setting up.”
Hernandez, current ICAH Executive Director Tiffany Pryor, and groups such as the ACLU of Illinois support youth and center their voices in the ongoing effort to end forced parental notification in that state. “Every young person is in a different situation when they seek abortion care,” Pryor said. “For reasons of safety, fear of homelessness or violence, abuse, and neglect, it’s not ethical to require parental notification.”
As anti-abortion lawmakers ramp up efforts to limit abortion access in the months to come, young people aren’t silent. They’re fighting back.
In Illinois, Pryor described local efforts led by youth. “Recently, young people at ICAH have organized and demanded Gov. [Bruce] Rauner sign HB 40, legislation that would allow every person, whether covered by private or government-funded health insurance, to have affordable and comprehensive health care, including abortion care.”
Paula Mejia, a young activist with ICAH, says of the HB 40 action in Illinois: “It’s been so incredibly rewarding to work with other young people who are passionate about issues of social justice. … We urge Governor Bruce Rauner to #SignHB40 and keep his promise to not interfere with reproductive rights. It’s already been passed by the House and the Senate of Illinois, and that’s why we say #MajorityforHB40.”
Another young person, Brie Garrett, says: “Health care is our human right, and everyone deserves to have access to opportunities and systems that help their lives. HB 40 helps lower-income people, people of color, women, and people who can get pregnant.”
In the abortion access movement, we often tout unapologetic abortion access for anyone who needs it. But until young people are heard loud and clear and supported in their reproductive decisions, abortion access for all will not be a reality.
Photo by Donald Kravitz via Getty Images. Altered by Broadly Staff
Even though the Miss America pageant has tried to adapt to modern sensibilities, emphasizing “female empowerment,” it remains committed to an antiquated ideal of femininity.
In September of 1999, the Associated Press reported on a shocking national development: The Miss America Pageant would lift its long-standing ban that disqualified contestants who’d been divorced or gotten an abortion.
Since 1950, the Miss America Organization (MAO) had required entrants to sign a contract stating that they had never been married or pregnant. Forty-nine years later, the organization’s newly appointed CEO Robert Beck sought to overturn that ban, instead requiring contestants to assure that they weren’t currently married, pregnant, or the “natural or adoptive parent of any child.”
The change reportedly came at the recommendation of an attorney, who advised that the policy could be in violation of New Jersey’s anti-discrimination laws. (The pageant is held annually in Atlantic City.) But despite this seemingly logical rationale, the proposed changes were met with swift and decisive backlash: “Miss America has a long history of high moral standards and traditions, and I’m opposed to anything that changes that,” Libby Taylor, the president of the National Association of Miss America State Pageants, told the AP. Several current and former contestants publicly lamented that lifting the ban would change the pageant for the worse, and somehow deprive Americans of good role models.
The individual state chapters of MAO sued their parent organization in an effort to maintain the ban, and the national organization acquiesced, delaying the policy change for a year. Then, two weeks later, Robert Beck was fired.
Although the Miss America Pageant wouldn’t confirm that Beck’s firing had anything to do with the abortion-and-divorce policy, speculation was rampant. “Beck was fired after one year on the job because he had the audacity to ask the board to get rid of the archaic ban,” read an op-ed published in The Central New Jersey Home News one day after his termination was announced . (Four years later, the AP reported that Beck was awarded $80,000 in severance after suing MAO over his firing. The Miss America Organization told Broadly that they have no comment regarding Beck’s termination.)
The pageant board later “shelved” the policy changes, according to the AP, and it’s not exactly clear where they stand now. A spokesperson for Miss America told Broadly that married and divorced women are still prohibited from competing in the pageant. “Miss America must be childless,” she said. When asked directly about women who have had abortions, however, she responded, “We do not ask.”
The Miss America pageant, which has been criticized as a “modern relic,” was originally founded in 1921. At the time, contestants were judged based on “their general appeal in appearance, personality, conversations with the judges, and interactions with the crowds,” as the official Miss America website puts it, somewhat sheepishly. (“The pageant was a product of its times,” they later add.)
“Miss America must be childless.”
Since then, Miss America has tried to rebrand as the “nation’s leading advocate for women’s education and the largest provider of scholarship assistance to young women in the United States,” championing its role in empowering women. But critics remain skeptical, arguing that the Miss America Organization has spent nearly a century projecting an antiquated image of the ideal woman—one that’s necessarily coded as virginal and traditional.
Dr. Kimberly Hamlin, a professor of history and global intercultural studies at Miami University, has argued persuasively that the Miss America Pageant gained popularity starting in 1921 precisely because it challenged American women’s newfound political power. “In the 1920s, when the Miss America pageant as we know it began, women’s place in American life was rapidly changing,” Hamlin tells Broadly. ” Women were voting and running for office, serving on juries, working in an expanded number of professions, and enjoying new freedoms in many aspects of life.”
The first-ever winner of the Miss America pageant was Margaret Gorman, who was just 16 at the time. The Miss America website calls her “girlish and wholesome-looking;” Dr. Hamlin notes that she was “barely five feet tall when she was crowned.” A contemporary New York Times article praised her for looking “strong, red-blooded, able to shoulder the responsibilities of home-making and motherhood.”
“From the outset, the Miss America pageant has celebrated and popularized a more retrograde image of American womanhood,” says Hamlin, “even as it bills itself as a scholarship program for women and even though many contestants today go on to notable careers.”
It’s true that the pageant has changed with the times, and there have been several progressive contestants throughout the contest’s existence. Rebecca King, the pageant winner in 1974, was outspoken in favor of abortion rights during her reign, and in 1989—a full decade before the controversy over abortion and divorce—32 of 51 contestants identified as pro-choice. Still, the uproar over the proposed policy changes in 1999 underscores the fact that the pageant remains contingent on a very narrow view of idealized femininity.
Hamlin emphasizes that the pageant’s abortion rule was probably less of a political statement about the right to choose and more of a reflection of the organization’s preference “that contestants be virgins, at least plausibly”—which is, of course, troubling in its own right.
“Contestants are not supposed to be too sexy, or to be people who have obviously had sex before,” she adds. “Being a mother, being married, or having had an abortion is a pretty good indication that one is no longer a virgin.”
They were participating in a “red rose rescue” demonstration.
On Friday morning, at least two abortion clinics in the U.S. were targeted by anti-abortion protesters who stormed the clinics’ waiting rooms, refusing to leave. The protesters were eventually arrested by local police for trespassing.
HuffPost confirmed the arrests with Northland Family Planning in Sterling Heights, Mich. and Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic in Alexandria, Va. Two other clinics, one in Columbus, Oh. and another in Albuquerque, New Mexico were also reportedly targeted, but HuffPost has yet to receive confirmation.
According to Lara Chelian, the Director of Advocacy at the Sterling Heights clinic, there were four arrests made at her clinic.
Chelian said that about 20 anti-abortion protesters showed up outside the clinic on Friday morning ― something that is far from unusual. However, she told HuffPost that five of those protesters “stormed the [Northland Family Planning clinic’s] waiting room and refused to leave.”
One protester reportedly left when staff threatened to call police. The other four remained, and were later arrested.
“They must have posted bail immediately because the ones who are arrested are back [protesting] already,” Chelian told HuffPost on Friday afternoon.
Created Equal, an anti-abortion group whose members participated in the demonstration on Friday posted video footage on Facebook.
Participants of the demonstrations appear to have been performing “red rose rescues,” a concept that originated with Canadian anti-abortion activist Mary Wagner. The 43-year-old was released from a Toronto jail on Tuesday after serving six months while awaiting trial for previous arrests on abortion clinic grounds. Rather than being sentenced with jail time, she was given 30 months of probation.
Wagner was photographed and filmed participating in the Sterling Heights demonstration on Friday
Chelian confirmed to HuffPost that anti-abortion protesters were indeed trying to hand out red roses to patients driving into the clinic, and one protestor outside the Sterling Heights clinic uploaded a Facebook selfie with another protester in which she appears to be holding a bouquet of roses.
Monica Migliorino Miller, an anti-abortion rights activist and writer who also participated in the Sterling Heights demonstration, said in a video she published on YouTube, “the red rose rescue is an act of charity on behalf of the mom scheduled for abortions and, of course, for the innocent unborn who are about to be put to death. Those who took part were willing to embrace the risks for these women and their babies.”
A new slew of state laws are aimed at making sure abortion coverage is banned from private health insurance plans—putting the procedure still further out of reach.
In September 1977, a 27-year-old woman named Rosie Jimenez died from an illegal abortion in McAllen, Texas. Her insurance, Medicaid, no longer reimbursed abortions and she didn’t have the money to pay for a legal the procedure out of pocket. Bereft of options, the student and single mother visited a local midwife who performed a “back alley” abortion at a fraction of the price. A few days later, Jimenez began hemorrhaging and vomiting due to a bacterial infection in her uterus. After seven days in intensive care at McAllen General Hospital, she died from organ failure and became known as “first victim of the Hyde Amendment.”
Two months before Jimenez’s death, a law that barred federal money from paying for abortion services through Medicaid went into effect. “I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman,” said the bill’s author, Henry Hyde of Illinois. “Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the … Medicaid bill.”
Jimenez’s story illustrates the impact of laws that restrict insurance coverage of abortion. Forty-one years after the passage of the Hyde Amendment, insurance coverage, public and private, remains a key battleground in the fight over abortion rights. Last month, Texas and Oregon passed laws that banned private insurance coverage for abortion and required it, respectively. The diametric opposition of these laws, signed on the same day, threw into sharp relief the role that insurance coverage plays in ensuring affordability and accessibility of abortion care for all women, not just the privileged.
On August 15, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed HB 214 into law, banning most insurance plans in the state from covering abortion, unless a woman’s life is in danger. Dubbed “Pro-Life Insurance Reform,” the measure means that private insurance plans, whether purchased through the Affordable Care Act exchange or provided through an employer, cannot cover abortion services. Regardless of insurance, Texan women have to cover the costs of abortion care out-of-pocket.
Two thousand miles away in Oregon, Governor Kate Brown signed the Reproductive Health Equity Act, which advocates are calling “the nation’s most progressive reproductive health policy.” Among other provisions, RHEA requires insurance companies to cover abortion care, as well as birth control, without charging a copay.
“For anyone who even dips their toe into this work, you soon realize that insurance coverage, or lack of coverage, is one of the biggest determining factors in whether or not someone can get an abortion,” said Katherine McGuiness, the Board President of the Network for Reproductive Options, or NRO, an abortion fund that serves Oregon and Idaho.
Abortions are expensive, which is why insurance coverage for abortion care is critical to making it accessible. The average out-of-pocket cost for abortionsbefore ten weeks ranges from $300-$800, while second trimester procedures can cost thousands of dollars. And those costs don’t include related expenses that a woman will accumulate while getting an abortion, such as travel, accommodation, lost work time, and child-care.
While the Hyde Amendment targets low-income women through the Medicaid program, coverage bans on private insurance impactanyone with limited resources. A middle income person who lives paycheck-to-paycheck, is saddled with student loan debt, has family members to support, or recently faced an unforeseen expense may also find $500 unattainable. Given that more than half of Americans have less than $1,000 in their savings accounts (including thirty-four percent with no savings at all), these restrictions affect a large swath of women and can force them to make untenable choices. In a study conducted by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) at the University of California, San Francisco, half of abortion patients said they spent more than one-third of their monthly income to cover the costs associated with their abortion, potentially foregoing rent, utilities, or even food.
Elizabeth Nash, Senior State Issues Manager at The Guttmacher Institute, said that in the 1990s, “nobody” covered contraception or abortion, but after a series of advocacy campaigns, private insurers began covering these services without much pomp. “Up until the early 2000s, abortion coverage was typical,” she said. “It was a normal part of the package of services that were covered.”
Then came the furious debate around the Affordable Care Act, which devolved into a furious debate about abortion. One of the concessions made to get the ACA through was that states had the option to limit abortion coverage in plans offered through the exchanges, and 25 states have taken advantage of that offer. This laid the groundwork for more types of insurance restrictions. With Texas, 11 states now have private insurance coverage bans on the books. Many insurers in Texas already fail to cover abortion, so while the ban has a whiff of political theater, it’s also a deliberate attempt to choke off access to care.
One of the arguments used to justify the ban on federal funding for abortion is that taxpayers should not be “forced” to pay for something they are religiously or morally opposed to. Similarly, Governor Abbot’s argument for the Texas ban on private insurance coverage is that “no Texan is ever required to pay for a procedure that ends the life of an unborn child.” Except that’s not how taxes—or insurance—work. People don’t pick and choose where their money goes. Someone who opposes war still pays taxes that fund the military. A Jehovah’s Witness who believes it’s a sin to receive a blood transfusion still pays insurance premiums into a pool that pays for someone else’s transfusion.“I find puzzling the conversation about taxpayers paying for people’s abortions, as if people who have abortions aren’t taxpayers and shouldn’t also be able to have the taxes they pay go to supporting their healthcare like everybody else,” said Yamani Hernandez, the Executive Director of the National Network for Abortion Funds.
An aspect of the Texas law that attracted particular attention was that it necessitated the purchase of what was called “rape insurance.” In theory, the law allows women to buy supplemental insurance for abortion care, also known as “riders.” Since the insurance ban does not include exceptions for rape or incest, that means a woman who was raped and got pregnant would not have insurance coverage for an abortion unless, in advance of getting raped, she had bought a rider. Hence “rape insurance.”
But the rider system also means that anyone who wanted their insurance to cover abortion would have to anticipate that need in advance, which again, makes no sense. Unplanned pregnancies are, by definition, unplanned. There are countless reasons why unplanned pregnancies occur and why women choose to have abortions, but a healthcare system in which quality coverage depends on omniscience seems unreasonable. The whole point of insurance is to protect against unforeseen risk.
Furthermore, just because states permit insurance companies to offer riders does not mean they actually do. According to a National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) survey, there is no evidence that supplemental coverage is available in the seven states where lawmakers have allowed it as an option. As a patchwork of regulations across states makes abortion coverage more costly and complicated, disincentives to offer this coverage are mounting for insurers nationwide.
The Reproductive Health Equity Act in Oregon aims to prevent this from happening. By requiring insurers to cover abortion, the state set the standard that abortion is healthcare and insurers have to cover it accordingly. In addition, creating a standard for coverage means Oregon women will definitively know they can use their insurance for abortion. Fifty-three percent of women pay out-of-pocket for abortion, even if they have insurance coverage, and this is often due to uncertainty.
“Many women with private insurance plans fail to use their coverage for reasons including because they assume abortion is not a covered service and because they were given incorrect information regarding their plan’s policies on covering abortions,” wrote Katrina Kimport and Brenly Rowland, two researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, in a study released in late August.
The opacity, complexity, and volatility of policies surrounding insurance coverage and abortion care don’t just cause financial problems for patients, but also for clinics. Independent abortion care providers perform sixty percent of abortions in the U.S., but they are rapidly disappearing. According to the Abortion Care Network (ACN), which tracks clinic closures, the number of independent providers has plummeted by nearly thirty percent in the past five years. Many such clinics have subsidy programs to keep costs low for their patients, and coverage bans will take an additional toll on their solvency. If the trend continues, more clinic doors will close. The fewer clinics there are, the farther women have to travel to get care and the more the costs stack up. If abortion is unaffordable for the vast majority of American women, it’s a right in theory, not in practice.
Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone says the Government is working hard on the wording for next year’s abortion referendum.
Speaking at the opening of the Kennedy Summer School in Wexford, Minister Zappone stressed the need for “reproductive justice” in Ireland.
She told the audience: “Equality is a rich and complex concept. So much more than protections and guarantees, it is being empowered to see, take, and benefit from opportunities that arise.
“This often requires hard conversations and hard work.
“One of those hard conversations is about the 8th amendment, which denies women full reproductive rights.
“Instead, it oppresses us with the burden of choicelessness.
“Choicelessness is not only about the ability to decide whether to remain pregnant, but about the ability to decide what is done to our bodies, including in pregnancy and labour.
“That is why repealing the 8th amendment is about reproductive rights for all women, including those who want to continue with their pregnancies.
“Of course, for those who don’t the 8th Amendment means they cannot access abortion in Ireland.”
“As a woman, a progressive, a campaigner and a Government minister I firmly believe we need a system of reproductive justice – which must include a referendum on reproductive rights.
“We must trust women to make decisions for themselves and their families, and ensure that our structures mean those decisions really are choices.
“True reproductive justice means building a society where the care of children is a collective effort, properly supported by the State.”
“The referendum next year will be part but not all of ensuring reproductive justice in Ireland.”
“Without repealing the 8th amendment and the clear establishment of reproductive rights for all, those who can become pregnant in Ireland will be unequal to those who cannot.
“That situation simply cannot persist.”
She said the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar had already outlined his determination to hold the referendum before the Summer and she hoped they could meet that deadline.
She said: “I think there are two things we’re working on now: one is the wording of the referendum itself – and it seems many, many people want a full repeal of the 8th amendment.
“And we also have to listen to the citizens from the Citizens’ Assembly, who recommended that we should have an amendment to that to include and to insist that it really is the power of Oireachtas members to legislate for abortion.
“Secondly, I think what’s really important – and I know it’s important to the Taoiseach too – is that as we bring the wording of the referendum to the people that we will also have in front of them a scheme of a bill in relation to the kind of abortion legislation that would be put in place if a referendum were to succeed”.
The Ohio Supreme Court will hear two high-profile abortion cases this month. The first will decide whether to shutter Toledo’s last abortion clinic, and abortion opponents call it “the most significant abortion case in state history.”
The second case, to be heard Sept. 26, involves a lawsuit challenging the legality of patient-transfer agreements, the ban on public hospitals from providing them, and a requirement that doctors inform pregnant women about detection of a fetal heartbeat before they undergo an abortion.
Abortion-rights advocates say that if the Toledo clinic in the first case is forced to close, that city would become the first major city in Ohio without access to abortion services.
Both cases stem from abortion regulations enacted by state lawmakers.
In the first case, to be heard Tuesday, the state is asking justices to overturn two lower-court rulings that have allowed Capital Care Network to stay open.
At issue is a 2014 order by the Ohio Department of Health to close the clinic because it failed to obtain an agreement with a local hospital to take patients in the event of a medical emergency, as required by state law.
Ambulatory surgical centers, which are outpatient facilities that include abortion clinics, have long been required to have transfer agreements. In 2013, Ohio legislators and Gov. John Kasich barred publicly funded hospitals from entering into them with abortion clinics.
After losing its transfer agreement with the University of Toledo Medical Center because of the ban, Capital Care secured a new one with University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor, Michigan. But health department officials declared that a hospital 52 miles away is not local.
Judges with both the Lucas County Common Pleas Court and Ohio’s 6th District Court of Appeals in Toledo disagreed with the state and ruled in favor of the clinic, allowing it to remain open.
In court filings, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, representing the state, argued against lower-court findings that lawmakers violated the Ohio Constitution’s single-subject rule by placing the requirement in the state budget bill. The state attorneys also take issue with a part of the ruling saying that the regulation is unconstitutional because it created an “undue burden” on the clinic. The latter issue, DeWine stressed, wasn’t even raised by the clinic.
“The clinic should lose its license for failing to meet a health-and-safety law, and its constitutional claims do not matter,” DeWine said. “Ann Arbor is too far away to be part of an effective plan for ‘emergency situations.’”
Jennifer L. Branch, a Cincinnati attorney representing Capital Care, argued that tucking the transfer-agreement provision into the massive budget bill allowed insufficient opportunity for public debate.
“At the end of the state budget process, Ohio legislators buried controversial anti-abortion provisions in the several thousand pages of a budget bill that was sure to pass. The written transfer-agreement provisions, which are inherently controversial and of significant constitutional import, were not debated and approved during a fair and open legislative process,” Branch said in court filings.
More controversy was stirred up after Supreme Court Justice Sharon Kennedy spoke at a Greater Toledo Right to Life event in March. Branch and NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio demanded that Kennedy recuse herself from hearing the case, questioning her impartiality, but the justice refused.
Toledo’s other clinic, Center for Choice, was forced to close in 2013, the first casualty of the public-hospital ban on transfer agreements with abortion facilities.
In addition to Capital Care, the Department of Health is seeking to close Women’s Med Center of Dayton, which also is operating without a written transfer agreement or state-approved variance.
Two other abortion clinics without such agreements, Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio and Founders in Columbus, are operating under waivers from the health department.
Abortion-rights advocates say transfer agreements are medically unnecessary. Opponents argue that they protect women.
“We have an abortion clinic that wants to avoid health and safety standards, and they’ve come up with a preposterous proposal” to fly patients to Ann Arbor in case of emergency, said Michael Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life.
“Our desire is to ban abortions, but if (abortion clinics) are allowed to operate, they should operate under the same standards as everyone else.”
Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro Choice Ohio, said abortion opponents continue to use regulations such as transfer agreements to make it more difficult for women to undergo the procedure. Ohio has eight abortion clinics, down from 16 in 2011, she noted.
“This is dressed up as patient protection, but the goal is to prevent women access to abortion care and ultimately outlaw abortion,” Copeland said.
The second case involves a lawsuit filed by Preterm, a Cleveland abortion clinic, challenging the legality of transfer agreements, the ban on public hospitals from providing them, and a requirement that doctors inform pregnant women about detection of a fetal heartbeat before they undergo an abortion. The latter regulation also was included in 2014-2015 budget.
The state is asking justices to overturn a ruling by Ohio’s 8th District Court of Appeals in Cleveland giving Preterm standing to sue, arguing that the clinic has not been injured by the regulations.
“Ohio’s courts of common pleas exist to settle concrete legal disputes between parties, not to offer a platform for hypothetical debates started by those without a personal stake in a matter,” DeWine argued in court filings.
B. Jessie Hill, a Cleveland attorney representing Preterm, said the clinic has been affected by the new regulations.
“Preterm was forced to alter its clinic operating procedures and services to its patients to avoid sanction and loss of license under provisions that were enacted as a part of the budget bill but that are unrelated to the bill’s purpose of appropriations,” Hill wrote in a court filing.
As researchers note in a new study, “the ability to access abortion care when needed—even if more than once—should be prioritized.”
Even as stigma abounds, the study issues a clear directive: Maintaining access to care is of utmost importance, regardless of how frequently someone may need an abortion.
National Network of Abortion Funds
Texas has seen some of the nation’s most regressive abortion restrictions in recent years. This series chronicles the fall-out of those laws, and the litigation that has followed.
Last month, the Guttmacher Institute released a new study examining characteristics of patients who’ve had more than one abortion. This study is the first of its kind to use data from a sample of U.S. abortion patients to explore if there are particular factors that contribute to people having multiple abortions over the course of their lives.
Even as stigma abounds, the study issues a clear directive: Maintaining access to care is of utmost importance, regardless of how frequently someone may need an abortion.
The researchers found that having multiple abortions is quite common, with about 45 percent of abortion patients nationally reporting having more than one abortion. The study also makes clear that structural inequalities play a detrimental role in health-care access—a point echoed by people sharing their abortion stories as part of We Testify, a program of the National Network of Abortion Funds, in interviews with Rewire.
“The health-care system is designed to fail you, not protect you, especially when we live in a world that makes birth control inaccessible, Plan B inaccessible, and sex education that covers pregnancy options is virtually nonexistent, especially in the South,” Stephanie Loraine, 25, told Rewire. The 25-year-old vice president of the Central Florida Women’s Emergency Fund said she experienced significant barriers to getting the abortions she needed. Her first pregnancy resulted from being sexually assaulted at a party, and after her abortion, she recalled that her father threw her birth control prescription out the window. When she found out she was pregnant again a year later, a local pharmacist refused to sell her partner emergency contraception (EC) because he wasn’t the one who was going to take it. The FDA, however, allows men to purchase EC for their partners.
Knowing that she didn’t want to involve her parents but not sure how to navigate the health-care system as a minor at the time, Stephanie Loraine panicked. “I googled everything I could find about self-abortion,” she told Rewire. She ended up saving money from her waitressing job to better navigate the appointments with both a lawyer and a judge to secure a judicial bypass and be able to have an abortion without parental consent. “My parents would’ve made me stay pregnant as a punishment for not saving myself [for marriage] after the first [abortion],” she said.
According to the new study, experiencing “disruptive life events” in the last year—such as exposure to violence, financial hardship, and unemployment—increased a person’s chances of needing more than one abortion, particularly if they experienced more than one of these events at the same time. These disruptive life events point to structural and institutional barriers to health-care access that are often rooted in racism, sexism, classism, and geographic location.
Kelsea, a 31-year old board member of the Carolina Abortion Fund, shared that after a clinic told her the cost of the abortion, “I hung up really quickly, and the first thing I researched was how to cause your own abortion.” Kelsea ended up using half of her unemployment check to pay for the abortion, and the other half “went to pay for my insurance premium, which wouldn’t cover the cost of the abortion.”
Twenty-five states restrict insurance coverage of abortion in exchange plans, and 21 states restrict abortion coverage for people who get their insurance through the government. The average cost of first-trimester abortion is $480, an often-impossible sum for people living paycheck-to-paycheck.
The study also found that increased age was also strongly associated with having more than one abortion, with people 30 and older having more than two times the odds of having had a prior abortion compared with people in their early 20s. “If we’re sexual beings who are able to get pregnant over the course of our lives, it only makes sense that people have multiple abortions,” Stephanie Loraine told Rewire. Indeed, if people must use contraception consistently and correctly for three decades to prevent pregnancy (and that’s if you want to have two children, the U.S. average), it makes logical sense that most people need access to abortion at different times in their lives.
The researchers discovered that more than half (54 percent) of Black women in the study reported having multiple abortions, a higher percentage than white women or Latinas. This is likely due to the compounding negative effects of racism and sexism on Black women’s health, which is also reflected in unjust policies like the Hyde Amendment. That amendment is attached as a rider to the federal budget every year and has the effect of disproportionately denying health care to women of color.
Community-level abortion stigma also affects how and why Black women access abortion care: “There’s a stigma in the Black community about being a single parent, being a Baby mama,” Kenya, a 42-year old abortion clinic employee in Texas, told Rewire. “For me, I didn’t want to be a statistic. I didn’t want to be a single mother with a lot of children. I [had a baby] once and didn’t want that to be my life.”
Kenya works at the clinic where she had her abortions, and realized that she was keeping her personal experiences from her patients for fear of their reaction. “I started to ask myself why I wouldn’t say that I’ve had multiple abortions aloud. Maybe it can help someone else not feel bad about their choices or not feel judged. There’s nothing to be ashamed about. Multiple abortions are necessary, and a lot of women do it.”
Because the Guttmacher study is quantitative in nature, it didn’t delve into the experience of having multiple abortions, particularly the worries about judgment and shame, an experience that even people in the reproductive health, rights, and justice community have. “I worried my friends would be like, ‘Seriously, another one though? There’s no reason for you to do this again,’” Kelsea told Rewire. “Despite fighting stigma every day, I still felt it and was mad at myself for letting this happen again.”
Megan, a 34-year old operations manager in Illinois, echoed this sentiment: “I don’t think I’ve ever said out loud that I’ve had two abortions, except to my husband and best friends, and I’m an abortion rights activist … I was surprised at how much weight saying that was for me, and then once I said it, it helped the shame dissipate a bit.”
Internalized stigma and fear of what others may think wasn’t the only factor keeping people from sharing their multiple abortion experiences with loved ones. “Online all the time I see memes about people who’ve had multiple abortions as serial killers,” Stephanie Loraine told Rewire. “The [anti-abortion] memes say things like, ‘if you’ve had multiple abortions, then your womb is a tomb.’” Despite the proliferation of these awful messages, there’s no reason to consider multiple abortions a negative health event or even something to be prevented.
As the study authors note, “the ability to access abortion care when needed—even if more than once—should be prioritized.” While some people may expect negative social consequences for sharing your experiences with abortion, having more than one abortion has no documented negative health outcomes, meaning that there is no medical reason to encourage women to have fewer abortions. Discouraging patients from seeking the health care they need, including multiple abortions, may in fact contribute to stigma instead of a patient’s physical and mental well-being.
“We’re good people making the best decisions we can for the circumstances we’re in,” Kelsea said. “We should approach people who’ve had multiple abortions with a genuine desire to appreciate where they’re at instead of a judgment about why they did what they did.”
The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services issued Planned Parenthood a license to provide abortion services at the Midtown Health Center of Kansas City, which is now taking appointments for medication abortion services.
Planned Parenthood also hopes to expand abortion services to Columbia, Joplin, and Springfield. Laura Segall/AFP/Getty Images
Texas has seen some of the nation’s most regressive abortion restrictions in recent years. This series chronicles the fall-out of those laws, and the litigation that has followed.
Missouri is no longer a state with only one abortion clinic. Planned Parenthood Great Plains announced Monday that abortion services are now available at the organization’s health center in Kansas City.
Aaron Samulcek, interim president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, said in a statement that approval from the state to provide abortion services represents a “hard fought victory” for the health-care organization.
“We celebrate this win for our patients who deserve greater access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care including safe, legal abortion,” Samulcek said.
The clinic stopped providing abortion services five years ago, the Kansas City Star reported.
After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down portions of the Texas GOP omnibus anti-choice law known as HB 2, a federal judge in April blocked Republican officials in Missouri from enforcing a similar restrictions.
After the court ruling, Planned Parenthood Great Plains and Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri said they would seek to expand abortion services to Kansas City, Columbia, Joplin, and Springfield.
The ruling sent Missouri lawmakers scrambling for ways to prevent abortion services from being expanded in the state. Gov. Eric Greitens (R), an outspoken opponent of reproductive rights, called a special of session of the GOP-held state legislature, and lawmakers passed sweeping abortion restrictions.
The new anti-choice laws are set to take effect October 24.
Abortion - Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information 