“This bill would ensure that our State Department maintains its vital role as an international watchdog and protector of women’s rights,” said Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA).
Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a bill Monday that would require the State Department to again include a subsection on reproductive health in its annual human rights report.
The State Department is responsible for producing a report each year detailing human rights abuses in each country receiving U.S. foreign aid. Starting under the Obama administration, reproductive health information such as systemic international issues with access to contraception and abortion care was included in the report. That practice ended this year under the Trump administration.
The bill, introduced by Reps. Katherine Clark (D-MA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Nita Lowey (D-NY), Eliot Engel (D-NY), and Lois Frankel (D-FL), was filed on International Human Rights Day and the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It would require the State Department to recognize reproductive rights in its annual human rights report.
“Documenting and reporting human rights violations is a major part of eradicating their existence,” said Clark in a statement. “This bill would ensure that our State Department maintains its vital role as an international watchdog and protector of women’s rights no matter the ideology of our White House.”
The bill currently has the support of 45 reproductive rights and social justice advocacy groups, including Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Reproductive health care is health care, and health care is a basic human right,” said Dr. Leana Wen, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in a statement. “The Trump-Pence administration’s erasure of reproductive rights from the State Department’s human rights report is an attack on women around the world, and the communities that depend on them.”
In October of this year, 129 Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo demanding the State Department again include the removed subsection. The bill comes as the Trump administration nominated former Fox News anchor and current State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert to become ambassador to the United Nations. Nauert defended the department’s decision to exclude reproductive health information from the State Department human rights reports.
According to a January Politico report, Nauert said in a statement that the way the department “presents the report’s material has changed from time to time,” and that “this year we are better focusing some sections of the report for clarity.” She added that the department was not “downgrading coverage of LGBT or women’s issues.” The subsection of the report was renamed from “Reproductive Rights” to “Coercion in Population Control,” a move which left advocates concerned.
“This erasure puts real lives in danger,” said NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue in a statement Monday. “Using backdoor tactics to erase all mention of reproductive rights—including abortion, contraception, and maternal mortality—from vital reports and resources in order to push an extreme, ideological agenda is a true testament to just how dangerous and corrupt this administration is.”
The Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) filed a lawsuit in early December against the State Department over a failure to produce records regarding exclusion of the reproductive rights subsection requested under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. “This erasure is tantamount to an outright rejection of the basic principle that reproductive rights are human rights,” said Stephanie Schmid, U.S. foreign policy counsel for CRR, in a statement regarding the suit. “The Center will continue to use the power of the law to hold this administration accountable in order to ensure that the foreign policy of the United States promotes, rather than hinders, women and girls’ access to basic health care like contraception, safe abortion, and maternal health care in order for them to achieve economic, social, and political empowerment.”
This isn’t the first time the State Department has moved against international reproductive health access. The Trump administration reinstituted the “Mexico City Policy”, otherwise known as the Global Gag Rule, immediately after taking office in January 2017. Administered by the State Department, the rule prevents foreign aid from going to organizations which perform, make referrals for, or counsel about abortion care for patients. It has already had a negative effect for pregnant people worldwide.
‘Change is coming,’ writes Health Minister Simon Harris following the passing of abortion legislation through the Dáil.
SIX MONTHS AGO, 1.42 million people voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment and to care for women in crisis pregnancies in this country.
Many of them had waited 35 years to cast their vote. Many others voted with the weight of their own personal experiences upon them.
It took three decades to build the revolution. For that brave minority of campaigners, it may have seemed a tireless and fruitless exercise.
However, every time those men and women stood up against this injustice, the walls of oppression and resistance began to fall.
Their perseverance resulted in the galvanisation of a generation eager to break free from the shackles of the past and shape the society it wanted to live in.
As Minister for Health, it is my responsibility to act on the mandate given to me by the Irish people and today, we move one step closer to achieving that aim.
The Dáil has now passed the Termination of Pregnancy Bill by and the Seanad will now consider the legislation.
As outlined prior to the referendum, the Bill allows for access to abortion within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy with no restriction to reason.
Beyond that terminations will only be permitted when a woman’s life or health is at risk. Abortions will also be accessible when there is a diagnosis of a fatal foetal abnormality.
As legislators, it is our job to scrutinise the Bill before us, but we must remind ourselves of the realities still facing women in crisis pregnancies daily.
Since the people voted, over 2,300 women have found themselves in crisis and despite the overwhelming referendum result, the State has been unable to offer them the care they need.
I have listened to hours of debate in the Oireachtas over the past number of weeks. Many of the TDs have raised genuine issues of concern and I have always sought to engage constructively with them.
But there were others who obstructed and delayed this legislation. Some TDs wanted to rerun the referendum and blatantly disregard the will of the people.
With respect to the genuinely held feelings of the minority, we have a duty to the principles of the majority decision to provide women the right to safe and compassionate care in their own country.
Introduction of abortion services
In the aftermath of the referendum, I asked for abortion services to be introduced in this country in January. This is not a political deadline, as some commentators have suggested but an acknowledgement that women have waited too long for these services and without a deadline, their wait will continue.
There has been lots of discussion over the past number of days about the introduction of the services and again, most people are raising genuine questions. But there is a small minority trying to create a fictional crisis, aided by some aspects of the media.
So, let me clear about the work that is underway by the Department of Health, the Health Service Executive and Dr Peter Boylan to provide this service in January.
An agreement has been reached between the Irish Medical Organisation and the Department of Health on a fee for GPs providing the service. Each GP has been written to, expressions of interest in providing the service have been sought and details of the level of participation should be known over the coming weeks.
The HSE has also been working closely with the Irish Family Planning Association and the Well Woman Centre to ensure they are able to provide the service from January.
Hospitals have provided a plan for the rollout of termination services from January. These are currently being examined by Dr Boylan and the Women and Infants Programme.
For the service user, there will be a 24-hour helpline. It will offer the information, non-directive counselling, and if required, free face to face counselling. Crucially, it will direct the woman to her nearest provider willing to provide the service.
When the legislation is enacted, the HSE will run radio advertisements and digital advertisements informing the public of this phone line.
The HSE will also have new content on abortion services ready to go live on sexualwellbeing.iewhen the legislation is enacted.
Posters and leaflets for the counselling line, along with a new leaflet on contraception, will be delivered to GP surgeries and acute hospitals.
This is all matched by significant resources allocated in Budget 2019.
The introduction of any new service will bring challenges and difficulties but none of these issues should delay the introduction of the service.
The women of Ireland have demanded political leadership and I believe the majority of the Oireachtas has delivered upon that instruction.
We now require clinical leadership and I know the medical profession will respond.
I accept there is more work to be done in this area. I am committed to introducing safe access zones to assist medical professionals willing to provide this service and to protect women from harassment and discrimination. Work is underway by the Department and the Attorney General in drafting a Bill for publication in 2019.
There is significant work still to be done in reducing the number of crisis pregnancies. Work is ongoing to explore all the issues associated with enhancing access to contraception, including associated costs.
The chief medical officer in my Department Dr Tony Holohan has been working extraordinarily hard in this area and I look forward to progressing proposals in this regard in 2019.
We will also proceed with a Women’s Health Action Plan next year.
‘Change is coming’
The journey has been long but we have at the end been given a clear direction by the people and we will not be diverted from the path.
I know there are many women reading this article who have experienced crisis pregnancies and who have had to travel abroad for assistance. I want you to know I am committed to ensuring women will not have to endure similar journeys.
I know there are doctors, midwives and nurses working tirelessly to play their part in the provision of services. Your dedication to providing care to women in crisis will not be forgotten and will be matched by government resources.
I know there are medical professionals reading this who have a conscientious objection to providing this service. I want your rights to be respected and upheld.
I also know there are people who are engaged in conscientious obstruction and I want you to know your efforts will not succeed. You will not deter me or my colleagues in ensuring a safe, woman-centred service is in place in January.
Change is coming. You will not alter its inevitably or change its character.
This is the beginning of a new era for women’s health ushered in by a prevailing spirit of solidarity, inclusivity and equality.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected appeals by Louisiana and Kansas seeking to end their public funding to women’s healthcare and abortion provider Planned Parenthood through the Medicaid program, with President Donald Trump’s appointee Brett Kavanaugh among the justices who rebuffed the states.
The justices left intact lower court rulings that prevented Louisiana and Kansas from stripping government healthcare funding from local Planned Parenthood affiliates. The case was one of a number of disputes working their way up to the Supreme Court over the legality of state-imposed restrictions involving abortion.
Three conservative justices – Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch – dissented from the decision by the nine-member conservative-majority court, saying it should have heard the appeals by the states.
At least four justices must vote to grant review for the court to hear an appeal. Along with the four liberal justices, Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts – the court’s two other conservative justices – opposed taking up the matter.
Planned Parenthood’s affiliates in Louisiana do not perform abortions, but some in Kansas do. Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for low-income Americans, pays for abortions only in limited circumstances such as when a woman’s life is in danger.
It marked the first-known vote by Kavanaugh in a case since he joined the court in October after a fierce confirmation fight in the Senate. Kavanaugh was named by Trump to replace the retired Justice Anthony Kennedy, a conservative who sometimes sided with the court’s liberals on social issues like abortion.
Some Kavanaugh opponents feared he would back legal efforts to overturn or further restrict the legal right to abortion.
Thomas suggested the justices who rejected the appeals put politics over the law.
“So what explains the court’s refusal to do its job here? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that some respondents in these cases are named ‘Planned Parenthood,'” Thomas wrote in dissent.
“Some tenuous connection to a politically fraught issue does not justify abdicating our judicial duty,” Thomas added.
Louisiana and Kansas announced Republican-backed plans to terminate funding for Planned Parenthood through Medicaid after an anti-abortion group released videos in 2015 purporting to show Planned Parenthood executives negotiating the for-profit sale of fetal tissue and body parts. Planned Parenthood denied the allegations and called the videos heavily edited and misleading.
The organization’s affiliates in each state, as well as several patients, sued in federal court to maintain the funding.
“We regret today’s decision from the U.S. Supreme Court announcing that it fell one vote short of taking our case against Planned Parenthood,” Kansas Governor Jeff Colyer, a Republican, said in a statement.
‘FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT’
Leana Wen, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, praised the court’s action, saying in a statement: “Every person has a fundamental right to healthcare, no matter who they are, where they live or how much they earn.”
Legal battles over other laws from Republican-led states could reach the court in the next year or two. Some seek to ban abortions in early pregnancy, including Iowa’s prohibition after a fetal heartbeat is detected. Others impose difficult-to-meet regulations on abortion providers such as having formal ties, called admitting privileges, at a local hospital.
The cases from Kansas and Louisiana did not challenge the constitutionality of abortion itself.
Many social and religious conservatives in the United States have argued against government funding of Planned Parenthood, and Republican politicians have made efforts at the state and federal level to eliminate public funding for abortion services.
The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2016 blocked Louisiana’s Medicaid cuts, saying the action would harm patients. The 5th Circuit said no one disputed that Planned Parenthood was actually qualified to provide the medical services it offers and the state was seeking to cut funding “for reasons unrelated to its qualifications.”
In February, the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Kansas could not block funding because states “may not terminate providers from their Medicaid program for any reason they see fit.”
That’s partly because Catholic institutions may not want it known.
A 2005 study found that 54.9 percent of Catholic hospitals do not provide emergency contraception for any reason, compared with 42.2 percent of non-Catholic hospitals. Shutterstock
As Catholic health systems that restrict care on religious grounds have expanded, Maryam Guiahi had what she thought was a simple question. Guiahi, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, wanted to know what happens to patients who are denied reproductive health care by Catholic institutions.
So she and fellow researchers trawled through thousands of papers dating back to at least the 1960s in scientific databases, looking for data on patient outcomes.
They found one study. It happened to be one Guiahi had written.
“We don’t know, when patients get denied a service, do most of them figure out a way to get it in some other way?” Guiahi told Rewire.News. “Or do most of them end up having outcomes that they were not hoping for?”
Guiahi and her fellow researchers—who published their review in the latest issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology—found just 27 studies on reproductive health care at Catholic institutions, which now account for one in six acute-care beds in the United States. While these facilities follow religious directives that ban an array of reproductive care, most studies focused on the availability of birth control, sterilization, or emergency contraception. Two focused on abortion care. One looked at miscarriage management and one at infertility care.
Part of the reason for this lack of information is that Catholic institutions may not want it known, according to Guiahi, who has been thwarted in her research.
“At one institution, I just wanted to survey women to understand what they thought they could get at this institution—like did they think they could get a birth control pill?” Guiahi said. “And the response I got was: We prefer not to make our patients aware of what we don’t offer.”
This secrecy seems to be working. More than a third of women who rely on a Catholic hospital for reproductive services don’t realize it’s Catholic. One in five of these institutions don’t disclose their religious identity on their website, Guiahi found in another study.
Another barrier is that researchers within Catholic institutions may fear retaliation if they report on reproductive care, Guiahi said. That could explain why only two studies have been conducted by researchers within these facilities, meaning the bulk of the research comes from outsiders who don’t have access to patient information. Providers who have found ways to get around the rules and provide reproductive care at Catholic hospitals may also want to avoid publicizing the workarounds, lest the Catholic bishops find out and stop them.
But Guiahi’s lone study on patient outcomes is enough to raise concerns.
That study, from 2011, looked at what happened when the Catholic Loyola University Medical Center restricted access to injectable contraception for patients who had just given birth. Pregnancy rates over the ensuing year increased, particularly for young women of color. Overall, women of color are more likely to give birth in Catholic institutions.
Other research excluded from Guiahi’s review points to the devastating effect of reproductive health-care denial, showing, for example, that women who are denied abortions and carry unwanted pregnancies to term are more likely to suffer serious medical complications and mental health issues, or to stay with abusive partners. Their children fare worse than their peers and are more likely to live in poverty.
The lack of data on Catholic hospitals hampers meaningful public dialogue about how to regulate these hospitals, which receive billions in public funding through Medicare and Medicaid, and deprives patients of the ability to make informed choices about where to seek care. Mergers, hospital closures, and insurance policies that dictate where patients seek care have made Catholic institutions the only accessible option for many people.
There is one obvious conclusion that emerges from the research on Catholic hospitals. The availability of reproductive care in these institutions—as in secular institutions—can vary widely. A 2005 study, for example, found that 54.9 percent of Catholic hospitals do not provide emergency contraception for any reason, compared with 42.2 percent of non-Catholic hospitals. But another from 1999 found 82 percent of Catholic emergency departments do not provide emergency contraception, even for rape.
Even within the same Catholic system, religious rules around sterilization and contraception can differ.
That makes it seem a tall order for patients to understand how these directives can impact their lives, especially when not even researchers have the answer.
A decade before Roe, Pat Maginnis’ radical activism—and righteous rage—changed the abortion debate forever.
There was nothing remarkable about the small woman carrying a box of leaflets—certainly nothing to justify the clutch of reporters waiting for her across from San Francisco’s Federal Building on a July morning in 1966. Still, there they were. She arrived at exactly 9 a.m., greeted them, and began distributing fliers to anyone who passed. There were two of them: One was a yellow slip of paper titled “Classes in Abortion,” listing topics like female anatomy, foreign abortion specialists, and police questioning. The other—which she gave only to the assembled journalists and the five women who signed up for her class that Wednesday evening—described two techniques for DIY abortions. “I am attempting to show women an alternative to knitting needles, coat hangers, and household cleaning agents,” she told the reporters, adding that she had notified San Francisco police of her whereabouts and plans.
The woman was Patricia Maginnis, a laboratory technician and founder of the Society for Humane Abortion, an organization that she ran out of the front room of her small apartment in San Francisco. She’d started the SHA in 1962 (back then, it was called the Citizens Committee for Humane Abortion Laws). Arguably the first organization of its kind in America, its mandate was radical: The SHA sought to repeal abortion laws, endorse elective abortions, and offer women any resources it could in the meantime. These resources would come to include “the List,” an up-to-date directory of safe abortion specialists outside the country, classes on DIY abortions, and symposia where sympathetic doctors could confer with each other about the safest and best abortion techniques. SHA would eventually formalize its legal strategy with a branch called the Association to Repeal Abortion Laws (ARAL, which would form the basis for NARAL), specifically devoted to challenging legislation.
“I am attempting to show women an alternative to knitting needles, coat hangers, and household cleaningagents.”— Pat Maginnis
But on this particular day, and on this particular mission, Maginnis claimed she was acting alone, outside of her organization. The leaflets were her way of knowingly violating both a city ordinance and Section 601 of the California Business and Professions Code, which declared it unlawful to distribute information about abortion. She was also flouting Penal Code 276, which made it a crime to “solicit[] any woman to submit to any operation, or to the use of any means whatever, to procure a miscarriage.” The violation was the point: Maginnis had politely informed the police of her every move in advance. The aim was to goad the legal apparatus into an ugly confrontation that it preferred to keep as merely a threat; she wanted to make the system own the consequences of its laws. “I could get arrested for soliciting women to undergo a felony,” Maginnis told the alt-weekly Berkeley Barb, “but I feel it is necessary at this point to have a test case.” To get a law thrown out, you first need to go to court. And to get to court, you must be arrested.
She’d launched her leaflet campaign about six weeks earlier, and the police had so far refused to respond to her provocation (some cops would later tell Maginnis that they knew she wanted to be arrested—implying this was why they’d refrained). Still, things were going smoothly enough this morning; a man named Steve Hooper, writing for the Barb, described the women to whom Maginnis gave leaflets as ranging from neutral to receptive. Some wished her luck. (As for the men, they “seemed indifferent except for one old suit who said he wanted a leaflet for his secretary,” Hooper wrote.)
Then it happened. While the reporters watched, a documentarian named Gary Bentley interviewed Maginnis for 10 minutes with a camera crew. Content with his footage, he asked his cameraman to film as he walked up to Maginnis. Here’s Hooper describing what happened next:
With microphone in hand and cameraman turned on, he said, “I’m placing you under citizen’s arrest for violating Section 188 of the Municipal Police Code. What do you think of that?”
“Excuse me, please,” Pat Maginnis said, and she hurried after one more woman to give her a leaflet.
When the police arrived in response to Bentley’s citizen’s arrest, they did so unwillingly. They tried to argue that they weren’t the ones arresting her even as they helped Maginnis into a cop car. It didn’t matter. Maginnis’ “test case” paid off. San Francisco’s Section 188 would be declared unconstitutional, and the case against her would be thrown out in court. It was the first of her many legal victories.
A social history of American abortion shows two things: 1) that it’s always been around, and 2) that anti-choice efforts tend to intensify in response to women’s perceived “liberation.” This was certainly true when Pat Maginnis came of age. Women had joined the workforce in unprecedented numbers during World War II, and the 1950s were engaged in the genie-rebottling project of fetishizing traditional gender roles. One result, as Leslie Reagan points out in When Abortion Was a Crime, was a sharp increase in the (medicalized) oversight of women’s choices. A system in which abortions were decided between the patient and her doctor or midwife would eventually give way to hospital committees, which debated on a case-by-case basis whether women deserved “therapeutic” abortions. The discussions were humiliating and sometimes even coercive, particularly when they concerned lower-income women and women of color: It wasn’t uncommon for committees to approve the requested abortion if the woman agreed to be sterilized. As medical bureaucracies solidified, hospitals started reporting abortions (and attempted abortions) to police.
She proposed that the only question anyone should ask prior to approving an abortion was a simple one: whether the woman wantedit.
That this compromised women’s privacy and subjected their health care to literal policing barely registered in these discussions, which tended overwhelmingly to prioritize the physicians’perspective rather than women’s needs. Doctors worried about the semilegal status of “therapeutic” abortions, but they also didn’t like committees telling them what to do with their patients. In either case, the debate revolved around doctors’ preferences and anxieties. There were plenty of organizations trying to reform abortion laws, ranging from Planned Parenthood—which in 1955 held an “abortion conference” to address possible reform efforts—to the California Committee to Legalize Abortion. Some abortion activists also chose to work within the existing framework: steering patients toward favorable hospital committees or training women on what to say to get “therapeutic” abortions, whether by emphasizing excessive vomiting or offering up stories that would earn them permission on psychiatric grounds.
Maginnis aimed for more than reform. She wanted a total system overhaul. As a figure in feminist history, Maginnis, now 90 years old, may not loom as large as a Margaret Sanger or a Betty Friedan. But while she’s finally getting some belated recognition, she was never particularly interested in taking credit for her work. Nor was she much invested in making herself or her positions respectable or palatable to mainstream culture. This may have made her an awkward figure for a movement that was then treading delicate territory. And yet, a decade before Roe, with her ungainly activism, her proclivity for wearing clothes she’d found on the street, and her righteous, unquenchable rage, Maginnis helped to fundamentally reshape the abortion debate into the terms we’re still using today. She was the first to take a passionate, public stance arguing that the medical stranglehold over women’s reproductive lives was corrosive. And the Society for Humane Abortion was arguably the very first American organization to advocate a pro-choice position that centered the woman, instead of the legal dilemmas of the physician—specifically, her right to privacy and choice. Rejecting the finicky gatekeeping protocols, the committees and evaluations and red tape, Maginnis proposed that the only question anyone should ask prior to approving an abortion was a simple one: whether the woman wanted it.
Pat Maginnis grew up with six siblings in Okarche, Oklahoma, during the Great Depression. Her father, a veterinarian, barely scraped by. Her family’s troubles were compounded by Catholic strictures: Her mother had converted in order to marry her father and—because birth control was not an option—consequently continued having children long after the doctors advised against it. “She had constant ‘female trouble,’ ” Maginnis says, recalling her mother’s unhappiness and pain. “I don’t know what that meant, but she had constant problems.” Her father, the illegitimate son of an opera singer, was differently scarred by the vagaries of unplanned pregnancy. “My grandma was on her way to be a star,” Maginnis says, “but she got pregnant. And apparently pregnancy was just a killer of dreams.” Her father never got over the humiliating circumstances of his birth. “He was a good soul, but forever tortured because he had been conceived out of wedlock.”
It’s hard to separate Maginnis’ refusal to become a parent herself from the misery that this litany of reproductive events inflicted on her family. Maginnis says that her father was so abusive that her older brother confessed to her that growing up he’d feared for his life more than once. Her family was not, in consequence (and despite its size and religious piety), particularly close. Some years after she started the SHA, her mother sent her a letter: “Dear Patricia,” Maginnis reads now, affecting a formal, slightly prissy voice, “I was thinking you must be about 40 years old. I do think you could do something besides teaching these girls to commit murder. P.S. If you come this way, do look us up. Love, Mother.”
It was a sufficiently chilly relationship—and Maginnis was so eager to get away—that she describes her banishment to a boarding school as a relief and remembers her mother’s trip to visit her in California with some acidity. “I never talked to her about my sex life,” Maginnis says. I’d asked whether she ever discussed abortion with her mother; that her answer took this form surprised me slightly. I wouldn’t necessarily have used the phrase “sex life” (which, to me, connotes pleasure) to include abortions. But Maginnis would; in fact, that was sort of her point. Any campaign for elective abortion is, of course, at least in part aimed at granting that women, too, might find joy and delight in sex (rather than just pain, danger, and obligation). As a guilt-ridden ex-Catholic myself, I was both baffled and impressed by Maginnis’ immunity to the shame that ailed her family: How does a soft-spoken, scrupulously polite Oklahoma girl who attended Catholic schools with strict Catholic parents shed her sexual guilt to become not just sexually adventurous, but a pioneer in activist lawbreaking?
When Maginnis was growing up, the family’s house looked out on a highway where convoys of young soldiers would pass during World War II. The Maginnis girls didn’t date, but, Pat says, “I was bursting with hormones.” She gasps at the memory of a convoy of young men passing her house: “Oh, I was just—I ran in the house, and I grabbed a pink satin bedspread. … In about five minutes, I made a halter.” Her parents came home to find their 14-year-old busily waving at trucks filled with men in her pink halter. When she saw her parents, she ran back inside and changed back into her gray togs, but it was no good: She was sent to a convent school. “I was naughty,” she says. But as with all these sorts of stories, the prudery only half-strangled her desire.
Instead of going straight to college like her sisters, she went to work in a lab at the Bureau of Mines in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and funded her own sea voyage to the Netherlands to meet a longtime pen pal and notional fiancé. They did not marry in the end. (“I knew that the intimacy required and the responsibilities and the thought of children I couldn’t face,” she says. “I decided that marriage was not for me.”) Then, partly because a friend told her the uniforms were cute, she joined the Women’s Army Corps. She was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina until she was spotted walking with a black soldier: “The captain called me in and scolded me. She said, ‘You’re setting a bad example for young white women who might join the military.’ ” She was shipped off to Panama as punishment.
During those two years in Central America, she experienced a different kind of discrimination. She’d trained as a surgical technician, but instead of being allowed to work in surgery as she’d hoped, she was assigned to the pediatrics and obstetrics wards—the realm of women. There, she was exposed to women suffering from botched abortions, women being forced to give birth, infants with terrible abnormalities. What she didn’t get in surgical experience, she got in perspective. “A general overview of the status of women,” as she puts it to me. “And I wasn’t at all happy with it.” Then she went to college at San Jose State—and got pregnant. She’d been fitted for a diaphragm. Used foam. None of it worked.
Maginnis is amiable and funny. She has a gift for impressions and chuckles ruefully at things I find sad or hard to hear. But when I ask her about her decision to terminate, she speaks with real anger—present-tense anger she still feels, decades later. “I was not in the family-ing business, and a child coming from me was not going to happen,” she tells me. “I simply thought my parents were ruthlessly forced into parenthood, and they … took it. They accepted it,” she says. “My mother would tell you she enjoyed having children. I didn’t go through childhood with that impression.”
She got her first abortion in Mexico and swore to herself that she would never again leave her own country to get medical care. She spent the next decade producing a list of legitimate abortion providers outside the country while also working quietly with those within it. Despite her best efforts, she would get pregnant twice more. But she would continue to have a sex life. And the horror of having to wrestle down her own fertility forged her into the formidable antagonist to the law that she became.
It helped, perhaps, that Maginnis was no longer young by the mid-1960s. She came of age long before the sexual revolution, which meant she had a particular experience of—and a particular fury about—what women had been routinely expected to tolerate. It’s hard for statistics to express just how urgent the abortion conversation was in the 1960s, or how difficult it was to even have the conversation, given the laws. In 1961, Los Angeles County Hospital admitted over 3,500 patients treated for illegal abortions. As of 1967, almost 80 percent of the women who died as a consequence of botched abortions were nonwhite.
Maginnis can’t pinpoint a single moment that turned her into an activist. She admits to once feeling great sympathy for a celebrity who was pilloried for needing an abortion, but it’s clear that there was no single precipitating incident. Her work, rather, was inspired by a slow and building rage. “What I saw was law, medicine, and religion were largely at fault for our problems,” she says.
When Maginnis launched her leaflet campaign, she chose a location that would maximize her ability to confront a medical community she saw as at best patronizing to women and at worst exploitative and controlling. The state Board of Medical Examiners had gathered at the University of San Francisco to discuss the implementation of hospital committees that would determine whether women could receive abortions. As the mostly male board debated the circumstances under which women could be forced to give birth, Maginnis was outside handing out information on how to abort without the help of the doctors within. She was shocked at how unseriously the board took their mandate. She told the Berkeley Barb that when she’d handed some board members a leaflet titled “Are you Pregnant?” with abortion information on it, they “twittered like a bunch of schoolgirls.”
This, she felt, was the collective effect of the laws and ordinances that made even talking about abortion illegal: The entire concept had become untouchable, a boogeyman. “The word abortionwas taboo,” she says. “And I thought: That’s crazy. People won’t talk about abortion! They’re afraid to. I’m going to talk about abortion! ABORTION!” she yelled. “Women weren’t talking about it. They were afraid to talk about it.”
Maginnis wasn’t. She relied on logistical help from two women, Lana Phelan and Rowena Gurner, who joined her to form the Society for Humane Abortion’s central trio, which came to be known as the “Army of Three.” Maginnis was the fire, Gurner the strategist and organizational genius, and Phelan the organization’s eloquent mouthpiece. Gurner, like Maginnis, also worked full time, professionalizing the organization in her spare hours. She spent many nights sleeping on SHA’s floor. Gurner “had polish,” Maginnis tells me, her eyes lighting up. “She gave me $20 once. Now, Patricia!” she says, mimicking her. “You go buy a new dress for this occasion, and don’t bring something that you found on the street or in the thrift store!”
“The word abortion was taboo. And I thought: That’s crazy. … I’m going to talk about abortion!ABORTION!”— Pat Maginnis
Gurner’s gift for strategy and Maginnis’ grit turned the leafleting plan into an all-out, accelerating assault on laws they saw as punitive or unjust—using themselves as bait. “I plan to leaflet for abortion until they get sick of me and arrest me or repeal the law,” Maginnis had announced to the Berkeley Barb when she launched her campaign on June 16, 1966. Her initial plan had been to distribute a thousand leaflets. A week later, when she hadn’t been arrested, she escalated. “My minimum goal is to distribute 50,000 leaflets by July 25, telling women where they can get abortions,” she announced through the press. When she finally was arrested (in late July, thanks to that “citizen’s arrest” by Gary Bentley), she caused the city ordinance under which she was arrested to be ruled unconstitutional. She had no intention of stopping there. “I was arrested under a local ordinance,” she told the Barb in 1966. “Now it’s the state laws that need changing.”
Los Angeles Free Press
When the San Mateo County district attorney announced that if Maginnis and Gurner showed up, he intended to enforce California’s state law forbidding the dissemination of written matter on abortions, the pair immediately arranged a class in San Mateo that covered abortion laws and DIY abortions. As Gurner put it to the Barb: “We just want to get this law on trial. … We obviously and willingly broke the law. And we did it so that no DA could weasel out because of ‘insufficient evidence.’ ” It worked. They were arrested on Feb. 20, 1967, and faced (according to the Barb) a sentence of five to seven years in state prison if found guilty. While their hearing was in progress—in a courthouse in Redwood City—an unrepentant Gurner and Maginnis advertised that they were still looking for a place in Berkeley they could rent on Thursday nights to hold more abortion classes. (The room needed to hold 50 people, and they were willing to pay $10 a night.)
It took six years from their 1967 arrests for Maginnis and Gurner’s efforts to pay off. Initially, both women were convicted of violating Section 601 of the California Business and Professions Code—the state statute that made it unlawful to advertise abortion. But in 1973, the state Court of Appeals overturned their convictions, ruling that Section 601 was overly broad—for one thing, it “does not distinguish between abortions which are permitted and those which are not”—and thus unconstitutional.
The Army of Three hadn’t been trying to get arrested merely as a matter of strategy: They had real information to distribute, information that was hardest to obtain for women who weren’t rich. Maginnis was incensed by a medical consensus that effectively discriminated against the poor. “The medical profession’s committee idea of legalized abortion is very discriminatory,” she told the Barb. “It will help those with lots of money or contacts, not the majority of women.” Lower-income women suffered—like the third member of the Army of Three, Phelan, who struggled to collect the $50 she needed for an illegal abortion. Women in search of abortions were also easy to exploit. According to Maginnis, some parties whose phone numbers and addresses were being circulated (or sold) as abortion providers weren’t actually doctors. This discovery, and the accompanying stories of botched abortions and sexually exploitative abortionists, spurred her to create “the List.” Essentially a Yelp for abortion seekers, the List offered a continuously updated and reliable list of qualified abortion providers in Japan, Sweden, and Mexico. The Jane Collective in Chicago would follow suit a few years later, performing the abortions themselves.
By 1969, the Society for Humane Abortion claimed to have sent 12,000 women out of the country to get abortions from reliable, trustworthy providers. To give you a sense of just how necessary the List was, here’s an excerpt from one List user’s earlier attempt to obtain an abortion domestically (as printed in a set of letters to ARAL published by the Los Angeles Free Press): “I was two weeks along then and he made me wait until I was 3 months along. Then he said it was too late to get any help from anyone but he would do it if I would sleep with him!” The classes SHA organized instructed women on every aspect of an abortion: how to schedule one, how to prepare, what to expect, how it was done, how to respond to police interrogations if you had to be hospitalized, and how—if you couldn’t travel—to perform your own.
The classes sometimes included DIY abortion kits with items like gauze, a thermometer, cotton, and a syringe. Maginnis was by all accounts a vivid teacher. Newspapers reported that she lectured using an IUD for a pointer and that she “graphically illustrated the dangers of unsanitary abortion by holding up anal bacteria cultures and infected blood samples.” The class taught women female anatomy. It instructed them on how to calculate how many weeks pregnant they were. It instructed them on exactly how to call for an appointment (the woman, not the man, should place the call).
These classes were understood by many to be essential but legally risky. When the Los Angeles Free Press took the bold step of republishing the entire class’s contents across several pages of an October 1967 issue, the layout was anxiously peppered with editor’s notes and legal disclaimers like: “The Free Press can not and does not advise women who are not legally entitled to an abortion to follow the advice of Pat Maginnis.”
Los Angeles Free Press
The Society for Humane Abortion didn’t interact much with the feminist movement or Planned Parenthood directly, at least at first. “It was too touchy,” Maginnis says. In the SHA’s early days, Planned Parenthood was more invested in advocating for contraception than abortion. Margaret Sanger’s theory was that abortion would become unnecessary if women had sufficient access to contraception. Maginnis disagreed. “Margaret Sanger, bless her,” she says. “We can’t thank her enough for Planned Parenthood, but it isn’t enough.” Under Maginnis’ leadership, the SHA spoke out—and in certain regards, provoked change—in ways Planned Parenthood wouldn’t. “We used to say we made Planned Parenthood respectable,” Maginnis laughs.
Her admiration of Sanger, though, is genuine. “Sanger took rotten eggs and tomatoes and rotten fruit thrown at her when she went out, and I don’t think people know that today,” she says. She understood that an organization with Planned Parenthood’s institutional heft needed to keep some distance from the SHA; Maginnis’ strategy of flagrantly flouting the law had made her something of a too-hot-to-handle legend.
Berkeley Barb
When the Therapeutic Abortion Act was signed into law by California Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1967, the Army of Three planned a program of civil disobedience. The act, an unhappy compromise between groups whose politics hadn’t yet coalesced into well-defined positions like “pro-choice” and “pro-life,” ostensibly aimed to make legal abortion more widely available. (National Review called the signing of this bill Reagan’s “darkest hour.”) Abortion at the time was only legal to save the life of the mother; the act made “therapeutic” abortion legal in cases that would “gravely impair” women’s mental as well as physical health. But it also added a draconian 20-week limitation and required that any medical committee discussion of a prospective abortion for reasons of rape or incest include the relevant district attorney. Functionally, as even some attorneys at the time argued, it meant that wealthy women (who dealt with private hospitals) would have access to abortions, whereas women in public hospitals would be bound by a more conservative take on the law: They would need to show sufficiently “severe” mental distress—like psychosis—to obtain a legal abortion. (“How much for a psychosis?” reads a political cartoon Maginnis once drew, depicting a patient asking a psychiatrist for a diagnosis that would legitimize a therapeutic abortion.)
“We’re going to instruct women in the arts of phony psychosis and false hemorrhage,” Pat Maginnis told reporters. “This unbelievable piece of legislative slop must be violated to the point that the medical profession and legislature is pressured into accepting more modern abortion techniques.” ARAL issued a leaflet asking members of Congress whether they would request permission to get a vasectomy or treatment for venereal disease from a panel of female doctors.
It was a combative stance—and a sign of SHA’s uncompromising position on the right to choose—for a bill that Planned Parenthood, among others, now credits with being among the first to functionally legalize abortion.
The “Che Guevara of abortion reformers,” as alt-weeklies called her at the time, now seems like an unlikely avatar of female rage. When I visited her at her home this summer, I found a 90-year-old woman who laughs a lot and peppers her speech with gentle exclamations. “Oh, my goodness,” she chuckles, remembering the time she invited police to attend a class she was teaching on DIY abortions—and they asked her to pay $3 an hour for a female officer’s time. “I think a policewoman did show up, but more out of personal interest,” Maginnis says wryly. She conveys a bemused mildness I found hard to reconcile with the working-class firebrand I’d expected.
But there’s no real contradiction here: The woman who said “excuse me” to the man detaining her in 1966 is also the woman who faced down the San Francisco homicide squad in 1959 in the hospital while recovering from a self-induced abortion. Had she given herself an abortion? the police asked. “Sure I did,” she replied. “Want me to demonstrate how in court?”
In her 10th decade, Maginnis remains equal parts polite and independent. She lives alone in a house in the San Antonio neighborhood of East Oakland that she bought back in 1979 for a song (the owner had tried to burn it down for the insurance money). Until just a few years ago, when she gave her archives to a library, her house was filled with several decades’ worth of handwritten letters from women telling her about their abortions or asking for help.
In the ’60s, especially given the respectable caution that characterized organizations like Planned Parenthood, there was a radical politics to the matter-of-factness with which the Army of Three openly talked about their own abortions. And that matter-of-factness still feels radical today. The second time she got pregnant, Maginnis recalls, she was deeply frustrated at the prospect of being forced to leave the country again for an abortion. But by then, she says, “I had figured out, if I start just giving my uterus no rest, that fetus is going to fall out.”
“We used to say we made Planned Parenthoodrespectable.”— Pat Maginnis
Startled, I ask Maginnis to explain. She elaborates that her plan was to “squat down and take my clean, scrubbed fingers and manipulate until I could get it to rebel and kick the fetus out.”
“So you could reach your cervix?” I ask.
“Oh yeah, very easily. You probably could too.”
“Does that work?”
“I manipulated, I worked on it, and finally, at five months, the fetus went into—I went into labor. It took a long time and a lot of work.”
Five months of daily effort to induce an abortion, followed by labor and police questioning—all instead of a simple, fast, safe procedure. In telling me this story, she betrays none of the story’s weight; rather, there is a relationship between her tight understatement and her rage.
In interviews, Phelan was less circumspect and much more graphic about the horrors she endured because safe abortions weren’t easily available. After she had one child, her doctor told her another pregnancy would kill her but didn’t tell her how to avoid getting pregnant. When she did—as a woman, she once said, “you don’t know how to say no to your husband. That silly Bible says you can’t say no!”—it took her so long to gather the $50 she needed for an illegal abortion that by the time she’d saved it, she was four months pregnant. The abortionist—a woman on the outskirts of Tampa, Florida—stuffed her uterus with slippery elm bark and told her not to come back. She was at her sister-in-law’s house when she started to feel extremely ill. She’d told no one, not even her husband. As she recalled in 2004:
This is a thing you do yourself. And if you die and go to hell, it’s you that goes, not anybody else. So I excused myself to go to the bathroom because it was hurting so. When I sat down on the john and looked down, there was a little tiny hand protruding from my vagina and the blood was just flying, and I thought, “Oh my God, what do I do now?”
I didn’t take as long to think about it as Bush did the war … [laughs] I gathered up all the toilet tissue I could get in my hand and stuffed it back inside of me, pushed everything back up inside my vagina and just packed it. And got all the blood off I could and cleaned everything up. And then I went out back inside and said I had to go home because I was so sick, and that was not a lie.
She was 16. First came fear. The anger would follow. This seems to be a pattern: Restrict women’s rights, force them to suffer needlessly, blame them when they fail impossible tests, and you will eventually create unsuspected forces for change. “It seemed to me when I got involved wasn’t really when I got involved [in the abortion rights movement],” Maginnis says. “I’d been involved for years before, just not driven to do anything except be angry. In a constant rage over it. And wondering why women, in addition to myself, were in a constant upheaval.”
Was Roe v. Wade a relief when it was passed? I ask her. “For me it wasn’t a big relief,” she says. It had felt more like the expected course of events—reality inching closer to how things should be. But then she continues: “I thought, yeah, that is a good thing. Now, let’s hope we can at least maintain the healthy ideas of it being available. We don’t have to sneak, we don’t have to beg.”
If the Federalist Society—which supplied the list of judges from which Donald Trump chose Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court—has its way, we’re in danger of returning to the times when women had to sneak and beg. Trump pledged during his campaign that Roe would be overturned “automatically” through the pro-life judges he would nominate. It probably won’t be so straightforward: The route the GOP is taking to greatly restrict women’s access to abortion has been circuitous, with progress marked by legal restrictions, by expanding definitions of fetal personhood, by permitting women to be lied to in the service of a single end goal. As my colleague Dahlia Lithwick has written, “women’s experiences, memories, and suffering don’t matter; their control over the truth of what they themselves have lived through is determined by those who win.”
Faced with a similar orthodoxy half a century ago, Maginnis and her cohort refused to let it stand.
The classes a modern-day SHA might teach would likely be different. There’s the internet, for one. The first time we met, I asked Maginnis what she thought women should be doing now, as the country seems poised once again to try to control our bodies. “I’ve thought about that,” she said then. “If I was going to reinvolve myself at this point, what would be the entry point? Kind of like setting out a map, looking for an entry.” She doesn’t quite have an answer. Yet.
It’s late afternoon on my final visit with Maginnis, and the warmth and long conversation have made the upstairs room where we sit feel especially lived-in. Her compatriots Gurner and Phelan died years ago. It’s not lost on me that I’m talking to someone who fought for reproductive freedom pre-Roe, at a moment when a Supreme Court justice has just been hand-picked to take it away again. In recent months, rage has been much on my mind. If over half of Americans stand to have a committee of men overrule their right to bodily autonomy after a mere 45 years, we can learn a lot from Pat Maginnis—about how women survived, and how they died, and how they fought. So what should we do now? I ask her again, as she raises the blinds to open the window overlooking the street below. “Keep talking about the issue,” she says. “Sure, not everyone is a brilliant speaker, but I think people have to keep talking about it.” She looks at me, her eyes bright. “Don’t you?”
His nomination as attorney general spells trouble.
While attorney general for President George H.W. Bush, William Barr was a vocal critic of abortion rights. Wikimedia Commons
President Donald Trump on Friday announced he plans to nominate William Barr to replace Jeff Sessions as attorney general. Under Sessions’ guidance, the U.S. Department of Justice supported restrictive voter ID laws, defended the Muslim ban, endorsed separating asylum-seeking parents from their children, reversed Obama-era guidance protecting LGBTQ rights, and argued for a right to block undocumented immigrant minors in their custody from obtaining abortions. It’s hard to imagine the situation getting any worse for vulnerable people.
But if Barr is confirmed, that’s exactly what could happen.
Barr, a corporate lawyer who served as attorney general to President George H.W. Bush from 1991 to 1993, has long been a vocal critic of abortion rights. He’s called abortion a result of secular “fanatics” wreaking havoc on the “Judeo-Christian moral tradition.” During his 1991 confirmation hearings he told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee he believed Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and should be overturned. While an attorney at the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 1991, Barr urged a federal court to lift an injunction preventing clinic protesters in Wichita, Kansas, from blocking access to abortion clinics there, saying it was better to let state law enforcement handle the protesters. This was at a time when the anti-choice “rescue” movement sent protesters to clinics in the hundreds and thousands to do whatever they could to disrupt clinic access, including forming human chains in front of clinics, barging in, and handcuffing themselves to medical equipment.
Of course, contrary to Barr’s belief, state law enforcement was often ill-equipped or unwilling to deal with abortion clinic protesters—to the point where Congress eventually stepped in and passed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act in 1994.
In 1992, the American Bar Association adopted a resolution to oppose state and federal restrictions on abortion rights. Barr, then attorney general, publicly opposed the resolution. And when Congress was considering federal legislation to protect abortion rights, he said he would advise President Bush to veto it. Barr repeatedly bemoaned the “permissiveness” of the “sexual revolution,” arguing it created moral upheaval leading to the country’s decline. He railed against the separation of church and state, especially in public schools. “This moral lobotomy of public schools has been based on extremist notions of separation of church and state or on theories of moral relativism which reject the notion that there are standards of rights or wrong to which the community can demand adherence,” Barr said in 1992 in a speech on juvenile crime.
By these measures, Barr may be the best candidate for attorney general Trump could choose to carry on Sessions’ mission at the Justice Department. And that should, frankly, terrify us.
During its first two years, the Trump administration has enabled and encouraged the rise of violent xenophobia through its own policies and statements. There’s little reason to believe a Justice Department run by Barr—who has publicly praised the administration’s militarization of force against immigrants—will do anything to tamp this problem down.
Despite the existence of federal law designed to protect abortion clinic access, the anti-choice movement under Trump has been more emboldened than ever to defy that law and dare the Justice Department to enforce it. With Barr at the helm, the chances of such enforcement are slim.
Barr’s nomination also comes at a time when evangelicals, backed by the DOJ, are urging the federal courts to allow them license to discriminate against LGBTQ people in all forms, from selling cakes to refusing adoptions and foster care placements based on religious beliefs. It comes as evangelicals lobby for more direct government funding of religious activity and greater entanglement of church and state, and for the right to deny care and services to thousands in the name of religious liberty.
As attorney general, Barr will almost certainly be a fierce supporter of those efforts.
Barr still must be confirmed by the Senate, but with Republicans in control and his time serving in the H.W. Bush White House that confirmation is all but a given. As attorney general, Jeff Sessions advocated brutal policies and used the force of the Justice Department against the most vulnerable. Should Barr be confirmed, he will no doubt do the same.
Joseph Silk is among a growing number of anti-choice activists holding or running for office who have called for the right to legal abortion to be ignored.
When it comes to his latest effort to criminalize abortion, Silk said: “I’m going to keep introducing it every year.” Joseph Silk/YouTube
Oklahoma Republican state Sen. Joseph Silk says he wants to abolish abortion—and he won’t give up on bills to make that happen.
Silk pre-filed SB 13, the “Abolition of Abortion in Oklahoma Act,” in late November, prompting national headlines about the extreme bill. The legislation would criminalize abortion care in Oklahoma, making it a felony homicide punishable by life imprisonment. As Rewire.News’ Brie Shea reported, should the bill become law, “all parties involved in an abortion (physicians, nurses, the pregnant person, etc.) could potentially face murder charges.”
The bill isn’t Silk’s first attempt to pass such legislation. Silk introduced the “Oklahoma Bill Prohibiting Abortion After Conception” in 2017 but it wasn’t taken up for a vote. And the year prior, he introduced SB 1118, to define abortion as murder and criminalize it. State Republican leaders blocked the bill from proceeding that time as well, though it passed out of committee.
That 2016 bill was considered by extreme anti-choice group Abolish Human Abortion to be “the first abolitionist bill (of abortion) in the history of the United States.” The group is a part of a subset of anti-choice activists who seek the immediate and total abolishment of abortion rather than steadily chipping away at abortion rights. They call themselves “abolitionists” and liken their work to anti-slavery efforts.
“I’m an abolitionist,” Silk told Rewire.News. “I believe that the government has a primary role to protect life, especially innocent life.” Silk, too, compared the position to those who fought against slavery in the United States. It is “similar to slavery—there were groups that were abolitionists,” he said. “There were people that wanted to kind of regulate slavery and allow people to kind of earn their freedom, and then there’s abolitionists that know slavery is morally wrong and all people are created equal and we need to abolish slavery.’”
He hasn’t always viewed abortion this way. “I used to, when I was first elected, I would kind of run the typical pro-life measures that don’t really actually do anything—such as you can’t commit an abortion until you’ve watched an ultrasound first or hear a heartbeat first,” he said. But then, Silk said, he had a “paradigm shift” in his views after meeting with other “abolitionists” and having a “conversation of how pro-life groups and pro-life bills have really not done anything at all to curb abortion.”
“I only run abolition bills now,” he said.
Silk is one of a growing number of anti-choice activists holding or running for office who have called for the right to legal abortion to be ignored. Among them are Dan Fisher, who launched an unsuccessful bid for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Oklahoma during the last election cycle. Fisher, a former Oklahoma state representative, ran on a platform that centered on “abolishing” abortion. When questioned about the punishments Fisher would propose for those who have or provide an abortion, a spokesperson for his campaign told Rewire.News it would be treated “much like your homicide laws.”
Silk supported Fisher’s run for office and extreme platform, introducing Fisher in March 2018 as part of a two-day campaign rally. As Right Wing Watch reported, Silk used the appearance to call those who opposed his anti-choice legislation the “enemy.”
“If you use your position of authority to protect the continuation of the slaughter of unborn children, you will always be my enemy,” he said. “And if you use your position of authority, I don’t care what level it’s at, but if you use your position of authority to keep the abortion mills running and protected, what is that other than a very, very evil act and abuse of authority?”
Also speaking at the rally, according to Right Wing Watch, was Matt Trewhella—an anti-choice radical who once signed a pledge suggesting that killing an abortion provider was “justifiable”—and Operation Save America’s Rusty Thomas. Trewhella has promoted Silk’s most recent anti-choice bill on his personal Facebook page, and has written about traveling to Oklahoma to promote his agenda in the state legislature.
The anti-choice activist traveled to Oklahoma in February of that year to “to conduct a citizen’s initiative calling for immediate interposition for the pre-born and total abolition of abortion,” according to a 2016 newsletter produced by one of Trewhella’s organizations, Missionaries to the Preborn. The newsletter notes that almost immediately after, Silk first moved on his legislation to criminalize abortion: “Just 72 hours later—an Oklahoma senator introduced the citizen intitiative [sic] in bill form,” it said.
Silk says Trewhella’s visit to the state in 2016 was not what motivated him to first introduce the bill. “However, I would say it was encouraging to see somebody very adamant and passionate about the abolitionist movement as well,” he said. “And so, he didn’t have anything necessarily to do … [with me] becoming an abolitionist, but he’s definitely been supportive of all that language which is very, very good to see.”
When it comes to his latest effort to criminalize abortion, Silk said: “I’m going to keep introducing it every year.”
In an interview with Oklahoma News 4, Silk appeared unconcerned that women could be punished for abortions under his legislation. When asked what he would say to a woman sentenced to life in prison for an abortion, the Republican replied: “I don’t know. The exact same thing I would say to a mother who just killed a 1-month-old or a 1-year-old child.”
“It’s a horrific act and there shouldn’t be any tolerance for it,” he said, referring to abortion. His legislation makes no exceptions for cases of rape, incest, or life endangerment.
Silk has suggested that the legislation isn’t designed to challenge the landmark abortion rights case Roe v. Wade, as it would instead instruct the state to ignore federal law on abortion. “The attorney general shall direct state agencies to enforce those laws regardless of any contrary or conflicting federal statutes, regulations, executive orders, or court decisions,” the legislation says. Silk told Rewire.News that “the goal of it is to essentially use state sovereignty to say … Roe v. Wade was constitutionally illegitimate, and it was immoral. So we as a sovereign state are not going to participate in the act of abortion.”
However, he sees a potential avenue for his bill to help undo abortion rights in federal courts. “I would love to see a bill be challenged all the way up to the Supreme Court and then the Supreme Court overturnRoe v. Wade or just say its a state issue. I would actively support those measures,” he said. “I’m looking at some things we can do to maybe get there.”
“I think, depending on what happens with Senate Bill 13 through the committee process, and there’s amendments and stuff like that, it may become a vehicle that would end up going up to the federal courts.”
Silk said in 2016 that his legislation could be used to tee up a challenge to abortion rights at the U.S. Supreme Court. “We need to attack the issue directly,” he told conservative conspiracy website WorldNetDaily. “Life begins at conception, and abortion is murder,” he said. “Until we start doing that, [the Supreme Court is] never going to be forced to overturn that ruling.”
Silk has introduced or co-sponsored several other anti-choice bills. Those include a failed measure he introduced in 2017 to require death certificates be issued to all aborted fetuses in Oklahoma and a failed effort to amend Oklahoma’s Heartbeat Informed Consent Act to force providers to determine if there is the presence of a fetal heartbeat before performing an abortion. In that case, if a fetal heartbeat was detected, the bill would have required the provider to tell the pregnant person that an “unborn human individual” has a heartbeat and inform them of the statistical probability of bringing the “unborn human individual” to term.
He expanded on his views on reproductive rights while speaking with Rewire.News, explaining that he “absolutely” supports banning some forms of birth control—something that could happen should his belief that “life begins at fertilization” be enshrined in law. “[A]ny birth control that allows an egg to be fertilized and then somehow disrupts the process, that should be banned because it is essentially taking human life,” he said. “Now, all other birth control types that don’t allow fertilization, that would be completely fine and there’s nothing morally wrong with any of that.”
Though he noted that SB 13 doesn’t specifically address it, Silk also objects to some in-vitro fertilization practices, which he said were “immoral.” “They fertilize a lot of eggs, use a couple of them, discard all the other fertilized eggs. Or freeze them for an indefinite period of time,” he said.
Silk has made efforts to restrict LGBTQ rights. He sponsored multipleiterations of a “Conscience Act,” which would allow for discrimination against LGBTQ people by allowing anybody in the state to refuse to provide “services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods or privileges to be used to promote, advertise, endorse or advocate for a specific marriage, lifestyle or behavior.” In an interview with the New York Times about so-called conscience measures in 2015, Silk said that “[Gay people] don’t have a right to be served in every single store.”
Silk doubled down on the statement, according to the Advocate in a subsequent post to his campaign website. “Yes, I did say that homosexuals do not have the right to be served in every store, just as I do not believe that I, my family, or anyone else have the right to be served in every private business,” he reportedly said. “The right to provide services should be the decision of the business owners. We need to keep our country free and stop this radical, intolerant, movement.”
The Dáil should listen to the voters, not generate red tape that could stop vulnerable people getting the care they need
Dublin Castle on 26 May 2018. ‘In May 2018, after 35 years of harm and hypocrisy, the Irish people delivered an unequivocal mandate.’ Photograph: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
In 1983, as the Irish electorate voted in favour of a constitutional ban on abortion, campaigners warned in bold print: “This Amendment Could Kill Women.”
It did.
Following the tragedy of Savita Halappanavar’s death in 2012, Irish politicians were forced to legislate on a 20-year-old supreme court decision, one that consecutive governments had conspicuously kicked into the long grass. In 1992, a judge had ruled that a suicidal teenage rape victim had the right to an abortion. When the government finally produced the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act 2013, it was so clearly unfit for purpose that the Abortion Rights Campaign doubted it would enable a suicidal teenage rape victim to access a termination at all.
Those campaigners were right.
In 2014, a suicidal teenage victim of rape and torture was forced to carry her pregnancy to viability and deliver by C-section.
In May 2018, after 35 years of harm and hypocrisy, the Irish people delivered an unequivocal mandate – 66% of voters said it was time to repeal the eighth amendment. The rationale behind this result is not opaque, as some would have us believe. Neither is it a reflection of lesser-of-two-evils logic – where middle-ground voters accepted universal access to abortion up to 12 weeks because they understood it as the only way to protect victims of rape or incest.
Rather, exit polls show that 62% of people cited a woman’s right to choose as the motivation for their votes, and 55% cited women’s health. These were the electorate’s two main priorities. There is no ambiguity about what the people want.
With this mandate, you would think that Irish activists could stop playing Cassandra; could be done, finally, with issuing chilling prophesies that their country seems cursed to ignore.
Yet, as the regulation of termination of pregnancy bill emerges from the circus of the Dáil debates, it is apparent that our representatives are still not listening. A mandatory three-day waiting period; unnecessary criminalisation; casting the patient’s views of risks to her health or of the probable gestational date as clinically irrelevant; creating an unworkably high bar for access to abortion where the health of the pregnant person is at risk; and regulations that seem designed primarily to create barriers to safe, legal care – this is not what the Irish people voted for.
The three-day wait is a political concession that has no basis in best medical practice or clinical evidence. Its only purpose is to make access to care more difficult. And, as always, the most vulnerable will be the most affected – people with disabilities, single parents, people suffering partner abuse, people in precarious employment, people on low incomes, people who live in remote areas, and asylum seekers in Direct Provision facilities will all find it much harder to attend multiple appointments.
Add the stipulation that the doctor who originally examined the patient must be the one to carry out the procedure, and we run into senseless bureaucracy and scheduling issues. This requirement fails to acknowledge the team-based nature of medical care and, of course, it presents more obstacles to patients.
If you don’t stop to think through the actual ramifications of these unnecessary regulations, they might seem minor. What’s a three-day wait period? What difference does it make if the doctor who originally examined you must carry out the termination? But abortion is time-sensitive. For someone at 10 weeks of pregnancy, with childcare and work commitments, these stalling tactics are the difference between accessing safe, legal care at home and begging money for the boat to Liverpool.
The purveyors of red tape know this. They know that their hoop-jumping exercises will effectively prevent many vulnerable women, trans and non-binary folk accessing the care they need and should be legally entitled to.
Lawyers for Choice have expertly analysed the legislation and found myriad potential human right abuses. If our representatives fail to listen, I will surely soon be writing another column about another tragedy, another frustrated screed about how, once again, Ireland’s pro-choice advocates were right.
• Emer O’Toole is associate professor of Irish performance studies at Concordia University in Canada
ThinkProgress asked House members if they support lifting the federal funding ban on abortion care. Here’s what they said.
BOSTON, MA – OCTOBER 01: NEW YORK DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (IN BLUE) STANDS WITH BOSTON CITY COUNCILOR AND DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE AYANNA PRESSLEY (R) AT A RALLY CALLING ON SEN. JEFF FLAKE (R-AZ) TO REJECT JUDGE BRETT KAVANAUGH’S NOMINATION TO THE SUPREME COURT ON OCTOBER 1, 2018 IN BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS. (PHOTO BY SCOTT EISEN/GETTY IMAGES; EDIT BY: DIANA OFOSU/THINKPROGRESS)
For the past four decades, lawmakers in Washington, D.C. have largely prohibited federal dollars from paying for low-income people’s abortions. But with a record number of Democratic women elected to office in November and their party holding the majority in the House next year, momentum is building to lift the ban.
By ThinkProgress’ count, at least 183 House members support repealing the Hyde Amendment, a legislative provision that prohibits federal Medicaid dollars from covering abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or life endangerment. Hyde is not permanent law but written and passed through congressional appropriations bills annually. Reproductive rights and justice advocates are cautiously optimistic 2019 is finally the year Congress doesn’t attach the coverage restriction or other similar riders to an appropriation bill. The number of members backing repeal so far is a feat of its own.
Lawmakers will also have the opportunity to formally put an end to Hyde. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) told ThinkProgress she will re-introduce the EACH Woman Act for the second time next year; the legislation ensures that anyone who gets health care through the federal government will have coverage for abortion services and that legislators cannot interfere with what private insurance covers. The bill needs support from at least 35 more representatives to pass, according to a ThinkProgress analysis.
ThinkProgress looked at the bill’s current co-sponsors, as well as endorsements from the pro-abortion rights group NARAL, which only supported candidates this election cycle who expressed support for repealing Hyde and the EACH Woman Act. We reached out to every House member who was not a co-sponsor or endorsed by NARAL to determine their position on Hyde, but did not hear back from every office by publication.
“As Co-Chair of the Pro-Choice Caucus, I’m looking forward to working with both the newly-elected and returning members to advance a pro-woman agenda in the new year,” Lee told ThinkProgress by email.
A ThinkProgress investigation found nine states never paid for a survivor’s abortion and four only paid for one in 2017.
“That includes fighting against the Administration’s efforts to gut the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, protecting access to birth control and reproductive health care, ending discriminatory bans on abortion coverage, and ensuring students receive comprehensive sex education, grounded in evidence and science. It’s time to get to work.”
There’s a sense of optimism given the composition of the incoming House of Representatives. While a member’s gender doesn’t guarantee they’ll support Hyde repeal, it’s a strong predictor, according to a Data for Progress study that looked at Democratic House members’ stances on Hyde. That means the 35 newly elected Democratic women who will serve on the House next year increase the odds of repealing Hyde and codifying protections for abortion coverage. At least 102 women will serve on the House next year, including at least 43 women of color; of the 102, 89 are Democrats.
Of course, nothing is a guarantee. Members of Congress have been known to vote against bills they’ve co-sponsored and endorsements don’t always forecast someone’s future voting record. Still, the amount of support to repeal Hyde on the record so far is unprecedented. Support could even grow as pro-choice activists visit Capitol Hill next year.
All* Above All, an organization dedicated to lifting abortion coverage bans, noted the historic shift after the midterm elections and will now be spending a lot of time educating new members about the EACH Woman Act.
Simultaneously, they’ll be asking House members to pass clean appropriation bills. Usually, the Hyde Amendment is attached to an appropriation bill for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), along with other language that is used to block abortion coverage for other groups who also get health care through the federal government like the military, federal inmates, or Peace Corps volunteers.
“Given what the freshman class looks like, I think we’re going to have a lot of positive outcomes from that outreach,” said Destiny Lopez, co-director of All* Above All. “It’s like constant, vigilant education of members because yes, we have all of these amazing women and women of color and younger folks who have come into Congress now who hopefully are going to be with us without a lot of explanation because they’ll just get it.”
Congresswoman-elect Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) is among those who won’t need to be convinced.
“The Hyde Amendment disproportionately impacts low-income women, women of color, immigrants, and young people who rely on Medicaid for their healthcare coverage,” said Pressley in a statement to ThinkProgress. “I called for the Amendment’s repeal as part of the Equity Agenda I put forward during the campaign, and remain committed to working with advocates and activists to ensure unfettered access to abortion services, including through the passage of the EACH Woman Act.”
While the ultimate goal is to pass the EACH Woman Act (which won’t happen next year with this Senate and president), the short-term objective is to continue to garner more support. Five years ago, it was unconscionable that legislation like the EACH Woman Act would even exist, said Lopez; the bill was first introduced in July 2015. Holding a hearing or vote on the matter would be a step forward.
Meanwhile, prominent figures within the anti-abortion movement are concerned about the sea change. Just last year, the House passed a bill to codify the Hyde Amendment. Now, they are going to have to defend their gains.
“[W]e must also face the reality of a now pro-abortion led House of Representatives that is determined to thwart President Trump’s pro-life policy agenda. The pro-life movement cannot be complacent. We must be prepared to fight to hold the line on important pro-life policies such as the Hyde Amendment,” said Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser in a statement the day after the election.
The Hyde Amendment initially passed when only 19 women served on the House. After failing to pass the Human Life Amendment — which recognized the fetus as a “person” from the moment of conception — anti-choice lawmakers conceded to denying low-income people abortion coverage. Led by late Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), Congress first barred Medicaid from paying for abortion care in 1976. (There are a few narrow exceptions like for rape or incest but they generally don’t work. States can also opt to use public funds to cover abortion care, but less than half do.)
The 94th Congress looks very different than the 116th Congress, with female voters supporting Democrats more than usual in recent years.
“We brought the power of women of color in particular to the voting booth. And so when I think about abortion rights issues, one of the issues that most impact women of color is the Hyde Amendment,” Lopez told ThinkProgress.
About 51 percent of Medicaid enrollees of reproductive-age subjected to abortion coverage restrictions are women of color, according to All* Above All. When Medicaid doesn’t pay for the abortion, people who live near or below the federal poverty level have to apply for non-profit funds or pay for the procedure themselves; it’s usually a combination of both. An abortion can cost upwards of $3,500, depending on the zip code, facility, and how far along the pregnancy is.
“Just as we’ve been there for them right now, it’s time for our elected leaders to be there for us,” she added.
And a groundbreaking Supreme Court case could determine the fate of tribal land in Oklahoma—and the nation.
Abortion clinics and the ACLU are banding together to challenge a state policy that bans payment for abortion services before the mandated two-day waiting period is over. Shutterstock
The American Civil Liberties Union announced last week that it will be appealing state citations issued against three Arkansas abortion clinics. The state board of health had upheld the citations after the state department of health determined that the clinics violated state law prohibiting physicians from collecting payment during the mandated 48-hour waiting period for people seeking abortions. The ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project and the ACLU of Arkansas will claim the law is unconstitutional and a violation of the fifth and 14th amendments’ right to equal protection and the right to privacy.
Now for a pressing reminder of why courts matter: Justice Daryl Hecht, a pro-choice judge on the Iowa Supreme Court, is retiring this month for health reasons. His retirement leaves a vacancy on the court, and Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds gets final pick from a group of nominees sent by the state’s judicial nominating commission. The Iowa Supreme Court will be deciding the constitutionality of a blocked fetal heartbeat law that bans abortion as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. We can be certain Reynolds—who signed the law and who earlier this year appointed her father to the judicial nominating commission—won’t be replacing Justice Hecht with another liberal. At the Faculty Lounge, Anthony Gaughan breaks down why this may spell trouble for abortion rights in Iowa—and ultimately for the rest of the country.
Courts
The U.S Supreme Court heard arguments last Monday in a case that will decide whether citizens can talk back to law enforcement without fear of consequences. Garrett Epps, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Baltimore, provides a great explanation of the case, including the legal history of citizens suing for “retaliatory arrest.”
Last week, the nation’s high court also heard a case over jurisdiction stemming from a crime committed in Native American territory in Oklahoma, which could have huge implications for tribal land rights and state rights. Rebecca Nagle, a writer, advocate, and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, provides a historical accounting of tribal land grabs and why Cherokee land rights—which could affect half the state—should be restored.
Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and her allies last week filed a lawsuit over Georgia’s 2018 election. The suit claims the secretary of state—who was Abrams’ opponent—and the state election board “grossly mismanaged” the election and deprived Georgians of the right to vote. Fair Fight Georgia, which was formed by Abrams, and Georgia Care in Action hope the lawsuit will fix the electoral system for future elections. At Slate, Richard L. Hasen breaks down why the lawsuit’s method of attack—targeting the entire state electoral process rather than a singular focus like voter purges—is actually pretty genius.
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