Officials from Equity Forward are aiming to shed light on how an anti-choice group has used tens of millions in state funding.
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. Alex Wong/Getty Images
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.
“For too long, Real Alternatives has been allowed to fly under the radar without fully answering to the taxpayers who fund the organization,” Equity Forward Executive Director Mary Alice Carter said in an email. “As far as we can tell, there has not been a formal oversight process of the Real Alternatives program. Real Alternatives leadership routinely put forward only their lobbyist or attorney to the press and do not appear in public forums. The same cannot be said for reproductive health care centers that regularly submit to oversight.”
Pennsylvania is not the only state in which lawmakers are using public funds to deceive people seeking abortion care. A recent Rewire.News analysis found little transparency and limited oversight of the similarly unregulated organizations receiving millions of public dollars across 14 states.
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.
The Washington state Legislature on Saturday voted in favor of a measure requiring the state’s insurers to cover abortions and birth control.
The Senate voted to pass the measure by a 27-22 vote, according to The Associated Press, after concurring on changes made in the House. The Senate passed an earlier version of the bill in January.
The bill requires any insurers that offer maternity care to include elective abortions in that coverage. It also requires any plans renewed or issued after Jan. 1, 2019,to provide deductible-free coverage for contraceptives, as well as procedures like voluntary sterilization.
The bill now heads to Gov. Jay Inslee (D) for his signature.
The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Steve Hobbs (D), told The Seattle Times in January that the coverage “should be part of basic women’s primary health.”
“No woman should have to seek or pay for an additional rider or co-pay or have any other means of delay or financial burden for this coverage,” he said.
Before the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, scores of women died from illegal abortion care.
If history repeats itself, women will needlessly die because of people like Mike Pence. Shawn Thew / EPA
Speaking at an event hosted by an anti-abortion group in Nashville on Feb. 27, Vice President Mike Pence delivered a speechhighlighting the numerous anti-choice initiatives the Trump administration has launched and suggesting (hoping?) that legal abortion will end “in our time.”
“I truly do believe, if all of us do all that we can, that we will once again, in our time, restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law,” Pence said. “I just know in my heart of hearts that this will be the generation that restores life in America.”
There’s only one problem: Making abortion illegal will not in fact end abortion in America. Doing so will merely drive it underground, making it unsafe and unregulated, and will result in the needless deaths of women. How’s that for restoring the sanctity of life?
I just know in my heart of hearts that this will be the generation that restores life in America.
I just know in my heart of hearts that this will be the generation that restores life in America.
Pence’s dream of returning America to a pre-Roe dystopia, in which forced pregnancy and birth is the law of the land, comes as no surprise. His extreme anti-abortion record is well documented and bereft of consideration for women’s lives, health or history.
Because we know what will happen if we make abortion illegal. Before the Supreme Court legalized abortion in its historic Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, scores of women died from illegal abortion care. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization that focuses on reproductive health, the death toll associated with illegal abortions was significant: In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women, or 18% of maternal deaths recorded in that year. In 1965, death-by-illegal-abortion accounted for 17% of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth that year. And those are just the reported cases.
Even when women didn’t die from their illegal abortions, injury was not uncommon. As the Guttmacher Institute explained, “In 1962 alone, nearly 1,600 women were admitted to Harlem Hospital Center in New York City for incomplete abortions…In 1968, the University of Southern California Los Angeles County Medical Center…admitted 701 women with septic abortions.”
Pence’s dream of returning America to a pre-Roe dystopia, in which forced pregnancy and birth is the law of the land, comes as no surprise.
The situation was indeed bleak. Dr. David Grimes, a retired OB-GYN and pre-Roe abortion provider, detailed his experience treating women with back-alley abortion complications in a recent TIME interview: “I got called down to the emergency department to a see a young woman, a coed from on campus, who was in septic shock. She had virtually no blood pressure. And on examination, I found a dead fetal foot protruding through her cervix at about 17 weeks of pregnancy and [under] suspicious circumstances.”
Then there are the many women who have bravely shared their own experiences, describing painful kitchen-table abortions, waking up in pools of blood and having coat hangers inserted into their wombs.
Desperation drove up to 1.2 million women per year to terminate their pregnancies in the 1950s and 1960s, even though it meant putting their lives and health at risk. Where there is a will, there’s a way. And this pattern will surely repeat if Pence gets his way.
Conversely, legalized abortion saves women’s lives. Deaths from abortion declined fivefold between 1973 and 1985 (an immediate, positive impact of the Roe v. Wade decision), and they are now a rarity. What’s more, legal abortion enables women to obtain abortions earlier in pregnancy — when it is safest — thereby reducing the risk of complications.
Desperation drove up to 1.2 million women per year to terminate their pregnancies in the 1950s and 1960s, even though it meant putting their lives and health at risk.
For Pence to deliver a triumphant speech exalting the efforts of anti-choice legislators and activists — and encouraging them to “do the work” until abortion is outlawed — is essentially promoting the injury and death of women.
One cannot claim to respect the sanctity life and also be willing to impose deadly consequences on a large faction of the population. While abortions are generally on the decline, which is good news, studies suggest between one third and one quarter of womenwill have an abortion during their reproductive years. Stripping away the legal right to abortion care won’t save lives. It will only jeopardize women’s health and wellbeing.
If Pence was really serious about women’s health, he would be talking about improving access to contraception — something that is believed to be a driving force behind the decline in unplanned pregnancies. But that’s not his style.
Make no mistake: If history repeats itself, women will needlessly die because of people like Mike Pence.
Putting my body in the street has raised the stakes for me.
Every first Saturday of the month, protesters gather inside the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral and then walk to Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger clinic a few blocks away.
Maria Silvestri
Before I joined NYC for Abortion Rights (NYC4AR), I didn’t know the location of my nearest abortion clinic, or any abortion clinic at all.
I work in publishing, not health care; I hadn’t been active in any reproductive rights organizing before; and I’ve never needed to go to an abortion clinic for health care. In a way, that made me more like anti-choice activists than other members of NYC4AR. Our members are reproductive health-care workers, clinic escorts, abortion doulas, and patients. Anti-choicers are none of the above. But they can all point to their local abortion clinics on a map; they’ve even compiled an extensive national database. They know, of course, because they’ve made it their business to know by showing up at clinics to systematically harass patients.
Many who believe in abortion rights, meanwhile, have been like me—ideologically correct and physically inert, even as members of the anti-choice movement have effectively claimed the space in front of abortion clinics as their territory.
There’s a good example of this right here in the middle of Manhattan, spitting distance from the Housing Works Bookstore and Whole Foods. Every first Saturday of the month, protesters gather inside the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral and then walk to Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger clinic a few blocks away. They line up on the sidewalk in front of the facility, hold mass, and try to dissuade patients from getting to their appointments. According to clinic staff, the church has been doing this for years. Their tactics are different from those of the anti-choice activists on trial right now—pray-and-shame doesn’t look exactly like scream-and-shame or harass-and-shame. But the effect is more or less the same: In both cases, accessing abortion care entails submitting yourself to humiliation from a small contingent who believes that patients have no right to make decisions about their own future.
The most recent monthly anti-abortion mass was on a cold morning in early February. This time, as the sun rose, we began gathering at the gated entrance of the church and formed a walking picket line. If there is any church member who hasn’t thought critically about what it means for a church to protest a women’s health center, we thought, maybe a protest at their own gates would be instructive. Parishioners arrived in ones and twos and picked their way through the line to get to the entrance. Safely behind the gate, some turned and stared or shouted before going inside. One woman fell in with the picket line for a few rounds of a chant (“Pro-life? That’s a lie! You don’t care if women die!”) before she realized her mistake and hurried into the church. A woman walking a dog across the street pumped her fist. “Yes! Thank you!” she shouted.
Just before 9:00 am, the church doors opened. A procession of about 65 priests and parishioners filed into the street and we swarmed to meet them. Walking quickly, we spread out between them, chanting “stop harassing women”; they avoided eye contact. We were outnumbered by nearly two to one, but any moment spent rebuffing us, we thought, was a moment not spent in front of the clinic.
The walk was two short blocks. At Planned Parenthood, they lined up on the sidewalk across the street and we lined up in front of them, face to face, our bodies between them and the clinic like a shield. “They held up large crosses and attempted to ask women passing by … if they were going into Planned Parenthood for services,” Delicia Jones, a founding member of NYC4AR and one of the coordinators of the action, told me afterward. Throughout the mass, recounted Jones, “we used our signs and our bodies to block them from view of patients. They prayed and sang. We held our ground, and the antis left the space.”
This was one morning in front of a clinic that has experienced monthly—sometimes daily—anti-choice harassment for years. We don’t have any delusions that what we did that morning effectively preempted future protests, but I can say this: Attending that action and other clinic defenses with NYC4AR has transformed my relationship to the abortion rights movement. Putting my body in the street has raised the stakes for me. And watching the surprise and distress on the faces of anti-choicers as they realized that clinic harassment would not be so comfortable for them this time has given me a different vision for what the future of abortion access in this country could look like.
For NYC4AR, this is the future of clinic defense—organizing the grassroots and showing up. We show up to vote and to donate and to campaign for legislation, yes, but also to reshape the discourse around abortion in front of clinics every Saturday morning. And a quick word about showing up: This has been the common denominator of the anti-choice movement for years. Whether with rosaries and religious icons or with graphic signs, sound systems, holy water, plastic baby dolls, their own children, and notepads for writing down the license plate numbers of clinic staff, anti-choicers show up. If this were not an effective strategy, we would not have lost so much ground in the fight for abortion access.
Underlying this persistent, pernicious organizing is a belief that the complete criminalization of abortion in this country is actually possible. Anti-choice activists and their allies in Congress and the White House are not wrong about that, of course; that’s why they stole a U.S. Supreme Court seat. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party does not seem to be so sure that their base cares very much about abortion rights anymore, and the New York Times is paying a man to float the idea of just forgetting about abortion rights as a fresh new Democratic electoral strategy. The outrage in response to that David Brooks column was swift, but Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has effectively voiced the same thing; in his words, supporting anti-abortion candidates is just what it will take to become a “50-state party.”
Our backs are against the wall. We’re too busy updating our count of the number of states with just one remaining clinic (six, as of January) to nourish a bold vision of our own. We can’t imagine a world in which accessing abortion care is exactly like accessing any other health care, where we don’t have to be grateful that protesters are just praying (because at least they’re not dousing patients in holy water or carrying graphic signs or physically blocking the entrance or invading clinics or firebombing clinics or killing doctors).
But I believe a world in which we have accepted that a church can effectively claim clinic entrances as their own is a world in which the groundwork for those more violent acts has been laid.
The strategy of clinic defense reclaims the space outside of clinics, resisting the normalization of the shame and stigma that anti-choicers have brought to this space for years. “We’ve been on the defense for so long,” said Lizzie Stewart, a member of NYC4AR since its first action a year ago and a member of the International Socialist Organization. “The strategy of playing nice and not engaging has given way too much ground to the right. No one should have to put up with organized street harassment when they’re trying to access health care.”
More than that, clinic defense mobilizes the visible grassroots expression of support for abortion rights that makes real political gains possible. We have made this argument again and again.
It’s important to acknowledge that some clinics and reproductive health organizations disagree, preferring a strategy of political advocacy alone and of non-engagement with clinic protesters. We argue that this is a false choice—from SNCC to ACT UP, political engagement and protest have been inextricable in the history of progressive organizing in this country. And we point to the enormous spike in support for Planned Parenthood and the clinic escort program in New York following the 2016 election: NOW’s clinic escort program has nearly 1,000 members, up from a few hundred in 2014. Those numbers speak to an energy to put our bodies between protesters and patients in defense of clinics. By showing up at clinics every time the antis do, as we did on February 3 and will again on March 3, we are manifesting our vision for the world that we want to live in—our clinics, our bodies, our lives in our hands.
Vice President Pence predicted Tuesday that legal abortion would end in the U.S. “in our time.”
“I know in my heart of hearts this will be the generation that restores life in America,” Pence said at a luncheon in Nashville, Tenn., hosted by the Susan B. Anthony List & Life Institute, an anti-abortion organization.
“If all of us do all we can, we can once again, in our time, restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law.”
Pence has long championed anti-abortion policies, as a congressman, as the governor of Indiana and as vice president.
He told the crowd he has seen more progress in the Trump administration’s first year in office than he has in his entire life.
Since President Trump took office last year, he has signed legislation reversing an Obama-era rule that blocked states from defunding Planned Parenthood and reinstated a ban on federal funds for global health programs that cover or promote abortions.
But the political reality in the Senate has made it difficult for Congress to accomplish big priorities like defunding Planned Parenthood and banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
“Let me admonish you as we go forward in this cause in 2018 to understand while we have made great progress, we have much work left to do,” Pence said.
He noted that while a ban on 20-week abortions passed the House last year, it failed in the Senate in January, where Republicans have a slim majority.
All but three Democrats blocked the bill and two Republican senators also voted against it.
Pence said future success depends “not so much on those of us who have the privilege of serving in public life as it does on all of you.”
The Trump administration official who has denied abortions to unaccompanied minors in U.S. custody said he does not believe they have a constitutional right to the procedure.
Scott Lloyd, the director of the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which cares for minors who enter the country without their parents, denied seven abortion requests between March and Dec. 19, 2017, according to documentsreleased by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is suing the administration over the policy.
In a deposition Lloyd gave in December, he replied “yes” when asked if he believed unaccompanied minors have “no constitutional right to abortion.”The ACLU has battled the Trump administration over the policy, representing four pregnant unaccompanied minors who had been blocked from getting abortions.
In three cases, the girls were able to get abortions while the fourth was released to a sponsor.
Lloyd previously worked for the Knights of Columbus, a group that opposes abortion.
The new policy represents a significant departure from how previous administrations handled pregnant unaccompanied minors in U.S. custody seeking abortions.
Under former Presidents Obama and Bush, the ORR director only had to sign off on abortions when federal funds were requested for the procedure, often in cases of rape or incest.
Jonathan White, deputy director of the ORR, said in his deposition also released by the ACLU that the new policy was made by political appointees, including Maggie Wynne, a counselor at Health and Human Services, and Lloyd.
ORR staffers were notified that all abortions required the director’s approval unless the minor’s life was in danger.
Lloyd also directed shelters funded by the ORR to give minors asking for abortions “life-affirming” counseling.
“Certainly, it is understandable that a woman who is pregnant from the vile actions of a criminal would want to terminate her pregnancy,” Lloyd wrote in a Dec. 17 memo. “But I cannot authorize our program to participate in the abortion requested here, even in this most difficult case.”
According to the dispositions, Lloyd has never approved an abortion during his tenure as ORR director.
White also testified that under the direction of Wynne, ORR staff were instructed to look into the possibility of reversing a medication abortion.
Harassment at clinics from “sidewalk counselors” is just one more hurdle to accessing abortion care for those in St. Louis, Missouri.
Some protesters hold signs. Some stare at you, holding a rosary and whispering prayers to themselves. Some stand on step stools so they can yell at patients and staff over the fence. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
I wake up early and drive across St. Louis, Missouri, to the Planned Parenthood clinic in the Central West End one Saturday each month, rain or shine. I sign in, wave hello to the clinic staff, and slide on a neon-colored vest emblazoned with the words “Pro-Choice Volunteer” on the front. My only job that day is to walk with patients from their cars, into the clinic and back, to ensure their emotional and physical safety.
It’s because of this work that I fully support buffer zones, like the one up for a vote in St. Louis on Friday, March 2. Buffer zones provide a safe space for patients and staff to enter and exit clinics: an area where they can be free of harassment from people who have shown up to yell at them, demean them, and shove their anti-choice beliefs on them. And I’ve seen firsthand how big of an effect buffer zones would make on St. Louis clinics.
When I started volunteering for NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri’s clinic escort program (I now work at the organization as its communications and digital strategy manager), the Planned Parenthood at which I volunteered was the only clinic offering abortion services in the entire state, meaning patients were driving from all over Missouri—sometimes upwards of four or five hours—to access the constitutionally protected health care they needed, wanted, and deserved. Since then, two more clinics have opened, but additional barriers to access haven’t made obtaining an abortion any easier.
In addition to state-mandated restrictions on abortion such as medically inaccurate counseling and an unnecessary 72-hour waiting period, women face another intimidating barrier before they even walk into the clinic: protesters—the so-called prayer warriors and “sidewalk counselors,” all there in hopes of stopping patients from receiving the care they seek.
These anti-choice protesters show up every day of the week, but, on Saturdays in particular, they gather around the driveway and swarm the clinic. Since they’re not allowed inside the gated lot, this is the best they can do to get close to the patients.
Some protesters hold signs. Some stare at you, holding a rosary and whispering prayers to themselves. Some stand on stepstools so they can yell at patients and staff over the fence.
I’ve seen men yell at women and throw baby clothes at them. “You’ll always be a killer,” they shouted.
While the harassment at large is terrible, among the worst of it may be the “sidewalk counselors,” who wear vests that look like our clinic vests and hold up signs saying “Check-In Here.” In all of our Midwestern politeness, most cars stop in the driveway to check in, though of course all they will receive are pamphlets filled with anti-choice propaganda shoved through the window and an invitation to receive a free pregnancy test in a “crisis pregnancy center” RV parked across the street.
These fake clinics frequently pose as actual medical centers, even though they usually are not staffed by medical personnel; the anti-choice centers are simply fronts meant to provide a space to lie to women and convince them to carry a pregnancy to term. We don’t need people trying to deceive women at such a personal and vulnerable time in their lives.
Buffer zones have been shown to work in cities and states that have already enacted them. A 2013 survey from the National Abortion Federation of clinics found that 75 percent of clinics with a buffer zone reported that it improved ease of patient and staff access to the clinic.
In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court protected a woman’s right to choose in its landmark Roe v. Wade ruling. We have a right to access abortion care, yet “sidewalk counselors” who believe they know our situations better than we do are allowed to deceive those seeking access to reproductive health care. It’s time we take action to protect women as they make a deeply personal decision, so they can take advantage of their constitutionally protected care free of harassment.
This is the first bill introduced in the United States that prohibits abortions after 15 weeks’ gestation, and appears to be the first bill introduced as part of a legislative effort by the Alliance Defending Freedom, which aims to “eradicate Roe.”
Gov. Phil Bryant (R) told Mississippi Today that if the 15-week ban is approved by the legislature, he will sign the bill into law. Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
Mississippi lawmakers on Tuesday advanced a first-of-its-kind proposal to prohibit abortion care after the first trimester, as the Republican-controlled state Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee voted to approve the bill.
HB 1510, sponsored by Rep. Becky Currie(R-Brookhaven), would prohibit abortion care after 15 weeks’ gestation. The bill, which could receive a vote in the full GOP-majority state senate as early as next week, includes an exception in the case of a medical emergency or severe fetal abnormality.
The bill defines a medical emergency as an abortion necessary to save the life of the pregnant pregnant person if there is a “life-endangering physical condition” caused by the pregnancy or if carrying the pregnancy to term will “create a serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”
HB 1510 was passed February 2 by the GOP-controlled house in a 80-30 vote, with 12 Democrats joining the Republican majority and a single Republican joining the Democratic minority.
Gov. Phil Bryant (R) told Mississippi Today that if the 15-week ban is approved by the legislature, he will sign the bill into law. “As I have repeatedly said, I want Mississippi to be the safest place in America for an unborn child,” Bryant said. “House Bill 1510 will help us achieve that goal, and I am grateful the House passed it. I look forward to signing it once the senate follows suit.”
This is the first bill introduced in the United States that prohibits abortions after 15 weeks of gestation, and appears to be the first bill introduced as part of a legislative effort by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which aims to “eradicate Roe” and pass laws banning legal abortion at the state level.
Felicia Brown-Williams, Mississippi state director at Planned Parenthood Southeast Advocates, told Rewirethat the 15-week abortion ban is “unspeakably dangerous” for the women and families in Mississippi and a waste of taxpayer dollars.
“HB 1510 is part of a strategic attack on Roe v. Wade and a blatant attempt to chip away at women’s rights,” Brown-Williams said. “Mississippi legislators know that if it passes, HB 1510 will be the subject of a lengthy and expensive legal battle, with Mississippi taxpayers footing the bill. The thing is, they don’t seem to care.”
Opponents of the Wyoming bill called it a veiled attempt to give legal rights to fetuses.
Being offered such a certificate, a series of women testified in person and in writing, would make them feel a “range of emotions from awful to infuriated.” Shutterstock
A panel of male Republican lawmakers in Wyoming unanimously advanced legislation permitting death certificates for miscarriages, after hearing from nearly a dozen women who’d reportedly had miscarriages and opposed the bill.
The new certificates would apply to a nonviable birth, which the bill defines as an “unintentional, spontaneous demise of an unborn child” between nine and 20 weeks’ gestation.
Being offered such a certificate, a series of women testified in person and in writing, would make them feel a “range of emotions from awful to infuriated,” according to Better Wyoming, a progressive blog. But the five GOP committee members reportedly said they believed the death certificates, which are voluntary, would provide “comfort.”
The sponsor of the bill, state Sen. Brian Boner (R-Douglas), reportedly said the measure was inspired both by a friend and by a recent Florida law, which allows the state to issue “certificates of nonviable birth.” The advent of such certificates is rare, but growing. Idaho provides miscarriage certificates on a voluntary basis, and Arizona furnishes voluntary “fetal death” certificates.
The Wyoming bill is in the same vein as the “Unborn Infants Dignity Act,” copycat legislation by the anti-choice group Americans United for Life (AUL) that recommends states also issue death certificates in cases of abortion. But unlike the AUL legislation, the pending bill doesn’t include death certificates in cases of abortion.
Opponents of the Wyoming bill called it a veiled attempt to give legal rights to fetuses, as Better Wyoming reported. A Laramie OB-GYN estimated that 1,000 of her patients had lost pregnancies over the past decade, and she reportedly told lawmakers that not one had asked for a death certificate for the fetus. She suggested the bill could worsen the state’s shortage of doctors.
Under the Wyoming bill, the name of the “miscarried child” would be included on the certificate. Other options are “Baby Boy,” “Baby Girl, or “Baby,” along with the last name of the requesting parent.
Republicans control the state legislature and governor’s office. If the legislation clears both chambers and is signed by the governor, it would go into effect July 1. Last year, Gov. Matt Mead signed into law the state’s first abortion restrictions in nearly three decades.
Critics compared the new draft rules to Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers laws, favored by anti-choice state legislators, that often have the effect of shutting down abortion clinics.
The proposed rules require clinics and hospitals that provide abortion care after 20 weeks’ gestation to be outfitted with equipment to administer oxygen, monitor heart functions, and perform neonatal resuscitation measures. Shutterstock
The Arizona health department has issued draft rules requiring doctors to perform life support on a fetus in the exceedingly rare case that one is born alive during an abortion procedure.
Published this month, the proposed rules require clinics and hospitals that provide abortion care after 20 weeks’ gestation to be outfitted with equipment to administer oxygen, monitor heart functions, and perform neonatal resuscitation measures. After the procedure, staff must document whether a fetus was delivered alive, among other requirements.
Critics compared the draft rules to Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers(TRAP) laws, favored by anti-choice state legislators, that often have the effect of shutting down abortion clinics.
“They’re trying to make it impossible to provide care,” Kat Sabine, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Arizona, said of the proposed rules. “Honestly I don’t see a medical provider who’s not impacted.”
The new rules come out of Republican-led legislation in 2017, SB 1367, that was modeled on the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act from Americans United for Life, an anti-choice legislation mill. Passed in nearly half of U.S. states, the anti-choice legislation mandates an “affirmative duty of physicians to provide medical care and treatment to born-alive infants.”
A tiny fraction of “induced terminations” result in infant death, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An estimated 143 infant deaths occurred nationally between 2003 and 2014, and most involved pregnancy complications.
The Arizona Medical Association and American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Arizona opposed the GOP’s controversial “born alive” bill.
“Doctors take life saving measures if a viable infant is truly ‘born alive,’” the Arizona chapter of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said in a statement against SB 1367. “Before viability, resuscitation is not recommended by most doctors,” the statement noted.
Dr. Peter Stevenson, an Arizona neonatologist, said the standard of care for fetuses delivered before 22 weeks’ gestation is “comfort measures,” not resuscitation.
Even so, state Sen. Steve Smith (R-Maricopa), the bill’s sponsor, toldRewire last year that state and federal laws offered inadequate protection in the rare cases of infant death related to a termination. “All we’re saying is if this is happening, we want to make sure that the baby is taken care of,” Smith said.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) signed the legislation in March 2017. Now, the proposed rules will implement the new law in affected health-care facilities.
NARAL’s Sabine said she’s concerned about language in the draft rules striking a reference to “nationally recognized medical journals,” and replacing it with “peer-reviewed medical information.” She said the state was one of the first to push unproven abortion “pill” reversal, and fears the health department is trying “to get rid of scientifically and medically accurate information.”
“They want to keep pushing bunk science like abortion reversal … and ideology about care,” she said.
Written comments on the proposed rules can be submitted to the Arizona Department of Health Services.
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![[Photo: A pro-choice escort waits at the doors of a Planned Parenthood as pro-life activists rally during a protest.]](https://rewire.news/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/GettyImages-159973008-740x525.jpg)
![[Photo: Gov. Phil Bryant looks on during a meeting of the National Governors Association at the White House.]](https://rewire.news/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/GettyImages-464260892-740x525.jpg)
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Abortion - Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information 