Abortion – Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information

Wyoming health department records show fewer than five abortions were performed in the state over the past five years. But the true tally of abortions is higher.

Rewire.News’ findings come as anti-choice lawmakers in states across the United States have injected politics into the abortion reporting process. Advocates suggest these reporting requirements represent an underhanded attempt to paint abortion care as a dangerous procedure, though evidence says otherwise.

“I do not report to the state because it is none of their business,” Wyoming abortion provider Dr. Brent Blue told Rewire.News.

Wyoming law requires a report to the state health department within 20 days of every abortion.

Blue said he sends his reports to the Guttmacher Institute, a leading abortion rights think tank. Dr. Giovannina Anthony, who provides medication abortion and other OB-GYN services in Wyoming, said she does as well.

The two physicians are the chief abortion providers in a state where 96 percent of women live in a county without one, and hospitals very rarely provide the service. Most pregnant people in Wyoming seek terminations out of state, in Colorado, Montana, or Utah, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Yet, abortions also occur in Wyoming, although these procedures don’t show up in Wyoming health department reports. And the reason reveals a new beachhead in the abortion rights war.

Laws in nearly every state require physicians to send in a report every time they perform an abortion.

Anthony described the reporting as “for the most part a mandate generated by pro-life factions, to assist their cause in various ways.” She suggested the reports violate federal patient privacy law and unnecessarily single-out abortion, a very safe procedure, over others.

“They do not require a ‘report’ for all colonoscopies, for example, or for any other minor medical procedure,” she said of abortion reporting mandates.

Some state reports intrude on patient privacy, according to the Guttmacher Institute, posing loaded questions unrelated to public health. Oklahoma’s report, for example, asks whether the pregnancy was a result of “forcible rape.” A pending Arizona bill would expand its reports to ask if an aborted fetus was “delivered alive.” Some laws hew to draft legislation from the influential anti-choice group Americans United for Life, which maintains that “American abortion data is inaccurate and often misleading.”

Abortion reporting wasn’t always a political minefield.

In 1969, the CDC began collecting voluntary records on the demographics and the number of women having legal abortions in the United States. The CDC even created a template to aid consistent data collection, with questions on the patient’s age, race, ethnicity, marital status, education level, past pregnancies and their outcomes, the type of procedure, and location. The CDC’s template emphasized the data was to be used for statistical and research purposes only.

Today, 47 states and the District of Columbia voluntarily send aggregate abortion data to the CDC.

While the bedrock of this reporting by the CDC was public health, the motives have shifted in Republican-led statehouses. “We’re seeing abortion reporting become much more politicized,” said Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues manager with the Guttmacher Institute.

The legislative record bears this out. Mostly Republican-controlled states have advanced 80 new abortion reporting requirements since January 2017, with mixed success. These laws are mandates, not voluntary like the CDC’s data collection. Violators of reporting laws can be punished with “everything from a $10 fine to a loss of a license,” Nash noted.

Nash sees ties between the rising emphasis on abortion record-keeping and a landmark 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision in favor of abortion rights, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. Justices struck down provisions in a sweeping Texas abortion law after the state failed to show its restrictions improved women’s health and safety.

The decision sent abortion rights foes scrambling to bolster future abortion restrictions with evidence. “So to build an evidence base, abortion opponents may be looking to adding more requirements to abortion reporting in an effort to show that abortion is dangerous and providers dodgy,” Nash explained. “The problem with this is that abortion is safe and has a very low complication rate.”

In Wyoming, a decades-old state law requires doctors to complete a one-page form every time they perform an abortion. The form asks, among other questions, about abortion complications. While the reporting is mandatory, the state levies no specific penalty for noncompliance. Lawmakers last year advanced a bill to levy a $1,000 fine on providers who did not comply with the reporting, but the bill died in committee.

The Wyoming health department in 2012 reminded providers of the abortion reporting requirement, said Mariah Storey, vital services unit supervisor with the Wyoming Department of Health. Since then, the department has “received less than five reports over the last five years,” Storey said in an email to Rewire.News. “Wyoming residents are likely leaving the state for those services.”

Wyoming residents do indeed seek abortion care outside the state. CDC records in 2014, the most recent year available, show 642 Wyoming residents terminated their pregnancies in Colorado, Montana, and Utah; the CDC had no data on the number of abortions performed in Wyoming that year.

It’s no secret that Blue and Anthony provide abortion services in Wyoming, as reproductive rights advocates acknowledge. Blue talked publicly last year about being an abortion care provider to Vice News. Moreover, Guttmacher surveys in 2011, 2013, and 2014 showed a total of 380 abortions in Wyoming—a sum far outpacing the state’s figures of fewer than five.

When asked about the discrepancy in the Wyoming’s health department numbers, Anthony offered an answer that illustrates the tension around abortion reporting. She directed Rewire.News to the Guttmacher Institute, not the state. “If you are looking for numbers, that is where you should focus your efforts,” she said. “Their stats appropriately assess the need for reproductive services. They do not ask intrusive, irrelevant questions.”

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2018/03/16/abortion-reporting-politicized-wyoming-abortion-providers-ignore-state-law/

The state of California has more than 200 “crisis pregnancy centers” operating within its borders. These anti-choice businesses are set up to look like comprehensive reproductive health-care facilities; in reality, their purpose is generally to direct people away from abortion clinics and through their doors, where they can pressure clients to carry their pregnancies to term.

These businesses are almost always religiously affiliated and promote anti-contraception and anti-abortion viewpoints. They have a documented history of using deceptive advertising practices to target poor people and communities of color. Next week, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider arguments in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra that these business practices—which the centers deny are deceptive—are constitutionally protected free speech.

In 2015, California lawmakers passed the Reproductive Freedom, Accountability, Comprehensive Care, and Transparency Act, or the Reproductive FACT Act, which amounts to a mandatory disclosure bill. Lawmakers passed the measure in response to allegations that businesses posing as reproductive health-care clinics were providing clients with misleading and sometimes dangerously inaccurate information about their pregnancies and their options.

During hearings on the bill, the legislature found that the ability of California patients to receive comprehensive and accurate information about their reproductive rights is hindered by the existence of these centers. According to early legislative analysis done on the bill and cited in court documents, these centers employ “intentionally deceptive advertising and counseling practices [that] often confuse, misinform, and even intimidate women from making fully-informed, time-sensitive decisions about critical health care.”

The Reproductive FACT Act disclosures are extremely straightforward. Facilities that are licensed as pregnancy centers by the state must display a brief statement disclosing that California offers access to free and low-cost birth control and abortion care, along with a number to call for more information. Unlicensed centers must disclose, in up to 13 languages, that they are not medical facilities and do not offer medical care.

That’s it.

Attorneys from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ litigation mill representing the centers challenging the law, claim those disclosures are too much, though. They sued before the law could take effect, arguing the disclosures are state-compelled “pro-abortion” speech. Both a lower court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed and upheld the law. In November, the Roberts Court agreed to step in and hear ADF’s claims.

This should be an easy case for the Court to settle—because, quite frankly, there is no compelled speech here. Licensed centers are simply required to post a notice of the existence of a state program with the number to call for more information. Unlicensed centers must disclose the fact that they are not licensed. These are disclosures of facts, not political opinions on abortion and contraception.

And unlike some state laws that mandate abortion providers read a government-sponsored script to patients when performing an ultrasound, or others that require doctors inform patients incorrectly that abortion causes breast cancer, the California Reproductive FACT Act doesn’t require employees at these centers to say a single word.

But with a conservative Court majority that seems at least open to the idea of allowing evangelicals to weaponize the First Amendment, a win for reproductive rights advocates here is not a given. As we saw in McCullen v. Coakley, the case challenging the constitutionality of a Massachusetts buffer zone, the justices were susceptible to the anti-choice framing of “plump grandmas” looking to “counsel” patients out of having an abortion in the context of whether the state could enforce certain protest restrictions.  And as Justice Anthony Kennedy showed in his majority opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart when he helped create “abortion regret syndrome,” they are also susceptible to the anti-choice narrative that it is abortion providers, not fake clinics, preying on vulnerable people. In many ways, NIFLA v. Becerra brings these two narratives together in its challenge to the California law.

That doesn’t mean the Court will buy it, though. As with Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the case that struck down Texas anti-abortion requirements that doctors have admitting privileges at local hospitals and that clinics meet the same architectural standards as stand-alone surgical centers, evidence in these cases still matters. California had plenty of evidence of the harm these centers were causing when it first passed the Reproductive FACT Act and responded with a narrowly tailored law that doesn’t prevent anti-abortion centers from operating. It just requires they operate in a transparent fashion.

The Court hears oral arguments on March 20 and a decision is expected later this summer.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2018/03/13/anti-choice-clinics-claim-deceptive-business-practices-free-speech-will-justice-kennedy-agree/

Reproductive justice activist Alejandra Pablos has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in what immigrant rights advocates are calling an act of “retaliation” for protesting in Virginia earlier this year. She is currently in custody for an indefinite period of time at the Eloy Detention Center in Eloy, Arizona.

Pablos works as the Virginia Latina Advocacy Network field coordinator for the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH) and is a member of We Testify, an abortion storytelling leadership program of the National Network of Abortion Funds, and Mijente, a social justice organizing network. She was put in deportation proceedings, losing her legal permanent resident status, more than two years ago following a drug-related arrest and a Driving Under the Influence charge.

Elsewhere, other activists have called attention to apparent retaliation against protesters, most notably in Washington state. “Alejandra isn’t the only one. Detainment is also evidence of ICE’s pattern of singling out immigrant leaders for being outspoken and fearless community mobilizers. In recent months, ICE detained prominent immigrant activist Maru Mora-Villalpando for her ‘extensive involvement with anti-ICE protests and Latino advocacy programs.’ Among other immigration activists, ICE has also detained Ravi Ragbir, executive director of the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City, and Eliseo Jurado, husband of a Peruvian woman taking sanctuary at a Colorado church,” NLIRH said in a statement to Rewire.News after publication.

Mijente noted in a petition on Wednesday, the same day that Pablos was taken into custody, that she had led “chants [in early January] at a peaceful protest in Virginia [against deportations] outside of the Department of Homeland Security,” where local agents took her into custody. “It appears that after the protest in Virginia, one of the ICE agents called her deportation officer in Tucson, Arizona, and sought to get her detained in retaliation for her protest.” She is actively fighting the charges of suspicion of trespassing and obstruction of justice from this arrest; her court date was scheduled for April.

“It appears that after the protest in Virginia, one of the ICE agents called her deportation officer in Tucson, Arizona, and sought to get her detained in retaliation for her protest,” Mijente explained in its petition.

She was taken into custody Wednesday morning at what seems to have been a regularly scheduled check-in with ICE in Tucson, Arizona. After already spending two years at Eloy and being placed in deportation proceedings, Pablos is now seeking asylum status “based on dangers she would face as a political organizer in Mexico,” noted Mijente.

The organization’s petition continued, “She will not have a chance to be released or to pay a bond until she sees an immigration judge at an indeterminate time.” The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last Tuesday that immigrants held in detention are not entitled to bond hearings under the law—meaning they can be held, as Rewire.News’ Senior Legal Analyst Imani Gandy explained, “often in prison-like conditions and for years on end—while waiting for a decision about whether they will be permitted to remain in the United States or whether they will be deported.”

In a Facebook video, recorded by another organizer shortly before her check-in to be used in the event that she was taken into custody, Pablos explained, “I went in today thinking that they were going to readjust my bond. I was recently detained in Virginia at a DHS protest and now I’m being detained illegally and I’m going to Eloy Detention Center where I was already there for two years. ICE lied to me. I went in there in good faith. I’m doing everything that I can. It’s been a long time that I’ve been going through this case and they’re trying to really separate me and tear our movement apart and tear our community apart, and I’m not letting that happen.”

Pablos reportedly moved from Arizona to Washington, D.C., in 2016.

“Our hermana en la lucha and poderosa Alejandra was detained in Arizona earlier this morning by ICE. Alejandra is a powerful immigrant and reproductive justice organizer who has done incredible work for the Latinx community in Arizona and Virginia. Right now, we are asking you to join us in supporting Alejandra so that we can bring her home, said Margie Del Castillo, director of field and advocacy at the NLIRH, in the statement. “NLIRH will continue to fight for so that our community can live with dignity and without fear of deportation.”

As Rewire.News Immigration Reporter Tina Vasquez has reported, so-called silent raids, which involve ICE detaining people during their regularly scheduled immigration check-ins, have become increasingly common in the last year. The immigration reform group America’s Voice noted in a 2017 press statement, “A key way the Trump Administration is running up its deportation numbers involves going after the undocumented immigrants who are easiest to find—those who have been checking in with ICE regularly for years under an exercise of prosecutorial discretion.” The group’s executive director Frank Sharry added, “With few exceptions, ICE ‘check-ins’ are becoming ‘turn yourself in for deportation’ events. The Trump Administration doesn’t need to rely on raids when these ‘silent raids’ advance their goals of sowing fear among immigrants and deporting whoever they can get their hands on.”

In response to questions about Pablos’ case and the apparent pattern of retaliation against activists, an ICE spokesperson said in a general statement after publication that the agency does not target undocumented people “for arrest based on advocacy positions they hold or in retaliation for critical comments they make.” Matthew Albence, executive associate director for enforcement and removal operations, added that, “as ICE leadership has made clear, ICE will no longer exempt classes or categories of [unauthorized migrants] from potential enforcement. All of those in violation of the immigration laws may be subject to immigration arrest, detention and—if found removable by final order—removal from the United States.”

In Pablos’ case, activists have launched a petition on her behalf to support her release from ICE custody, heeding her call in the Facebook video: “I need you to stand up for me. I need you to fight for me,” she said. “Call ICE, write letters of support, do whatever we can.”

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2018/03/07/reproductive-justice-activist-detained-retaliation-protesting/

A nonpartisan watchdog group in Pennsylvania is challenging the national trend of siphoning taxpayer money from essential human services to fund the anti-abortion activities of fake clinics.

Equity Forward has filed a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, asking to access records related to state contracts with Real Alternatives, which received a $32.5 million, five-year grant administering an anti-choice “Alternatives to Abortion” program.

While reproductive health clinics and providers like Planned Parenthood are under scrutiny from Republican legislators, organizations like Real Alternatives, which uses state funds to support anti-abortion counseling centers, avoid public oversight, Equity Forward officials told Rewire.News.

An investigation by Pennsylvania’s auditor general last year found that Real Alternatives had misused state grants by diverting federal tax dollars from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program to fund its fake clinics and anti-choice activities outside the state.

The audit found an estimated $497,368 in misused money between 2012 and 2015.

Real Alternatives, which is 99.9 percent funded by taxpayer dollars, has held state contracts for more than 20 years and received $83 million in public money since 2003.

Equity Forward fought for months to obtain the records, but both the health department and Real Alternatives refused to turn over documents that should be publicly available, according to a press release from the organization. “Equity Forward is taking action to access Real Alternatives’ records as this anti-abortion organization continues to stonewall all efforts to shed light on their taxpayer-funded operations,” Carter said in the release.

The lawsuit seeks access to records dealing with Real Alternatives’ practice of recouping 3 percent of funds from the local service providers with which it subcontracts, a practice state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale last year called an “egregious violation” of the multimillion dollar grant.

Equity Forward estimates that Real Alternatives has taken $3.19 million in public money through its Program Development & Advancement agreements since July 1997, according to the release.

“In this case, these financial records are a basic public record that may shed light on Real Alternatives’ decades-long practice of hiding their use of public funds, which could top millions of dollars,” said Terry Mutchler, Equity Forward’s transparency counsel.

The lawsuit is an important step to hold publicly funded groups accountable and “take aim at organizations and individuals working to limit access to reproductive health care,” Carter said in the release.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2018/03/05/anti-abortion-group-forced-show-spending-millions-taxpayer-money/