Reproductive Rights Today

Anti-abortion centers (AACs), also known as crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), advertise that they provide clients with alternatives to abortion. But the explicit mission of these organizations is to dissuade people from terminating pregnancies. According to a database created by Andrea Swartzendruber and Danielle Lambert, epidemiology and biostatistics professors at the University of Georgia's College of Public Health, there are 2,546 centers in the United States. Most AACs are concentrated in the South, the region with the most abortion restrictions. 

While Friday marked the last day to file briefs in a pivotal federal lawsuit in Texas that could restrict medication abortion access across the country, Democratic officials have stepped up their defense of reproductive rights. A dozen Democratic attorneys general, led by governors in Oregon and Washington, sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week, urging the agency to loosen regulations of mifepristone, an abortion medication. That litigation came the same week as 20 Democratic governors announced a coalition to safeguard abortion access and reproductive health care. 

A new study from leading abortion researchers in California shows how the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to undo constitutional abortion rights negatively affects pregnancy care across the country, particularly in the 13 states that ban most abortions, according to States Newsroom National Reproductive Rights Reporter Sofia Resnick. 

Doctors in North Carolina, a key state in the fight over abortion access, are urging legislators to stop meddling in reproductive health care. A group of physicians issued an open letter to North Carolina lawmakers this week detailing the effect abortion restrictions and bans have had on their work. 

Lawmakers in Alabama and Tennessee have considered adding exceptions to their state’s abortion bans to either clarify that authorities will not prosecute pregnant people for seeking abortions or health care providers in some cases —  such as terminating an ectopic pregnancy or aborting a fetus with fatal abnormalities, for example — despite chagrin from some anti-abortion advocates both inside and outside legislatures. 

The United States, as some Reproductive Rights Today readers may know, has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world, compared to other wealthy countries. In 2020, 861 pregnant people died from pregnancy-related causes, up from 754 deaths in 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. maternal mortality rate in 2020 was 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births, up from 20.1 a year earlier.

In every state where reproductive rights were directly on the ballot last year – Kansas in August, then California, Kentucky, Michigan and Vermont in November – voters either added constitutional amendments that protected abortion access or rejected adding abortion restrictions to state laws. Now, Republican lawmakers want to make it harder for proposed measures to appear on ballots, particularly in states that allow citizen-initiated constitutional amendments. 

Reproductive rights efforts to preserve abortion access in Kentucky and Texas took a hit this week as judges in both states handed down decisions that maintained abortion bans.

The right to privacy embedded in some state constitutions, especially in some Republican-led states, looms large when it comes to the debate on abortion. Alaska’s Supreme Court has a track record of protecting reproductive rights under a privacy clause. And the Montana Constitution also has a right to privacy that the high court there has cited and includes medical privacy – thus abortion. Still, it hasn’t stopped lawmakers in both Alaska and Montana from attempting to impose restrictions. Meanwhile in Hawaii, traditional midwifery is at risk.

All eyes are on a legal battle over medication abortion brewing in Texas. Sofia recently broke down the claims at the center of Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. the Food and Drug Administration, a federal lawsuit filed in Texas last year by a conservative group on behalf of several anti-abortion doctors and advocates urging the FDA to undo approval of mifepristone, the first pill used in a medication abortion. Their claims include the drug is dangerous; taking abortion pills is riskier than giving birth; and emergency rooms are overrun with medication abortion patients.

In addition to the dispatch from Texas, we have news about a Texas GOP lawmaker who has called for the death penalty for people who have abortions, and a look ahead in 2023. With this edition, Reproductive Rights Today is going on a little break, but we will be back in the new year!

In addition to the dispatch from Florida, we have an update in a Montana case over whether advanced practice registered nurses should be allowed to continue providing pre-viability abortions, and news about Kentucky GOP lawmakers saying they do not plan to introduce exceptions to the state’s strict abortion ban.