Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Perspectives: Abortion Restrictions Would Cause Women To Carry Children Who Have Fatal, Painful Conditions To Term
The New York Times: The Hidden Consequences Of The New Abortion Laws
Recent state-imposed limits on abortion — from Georgia to Missouri, from Ohio to Mississippi — are rightly seen as a broadside aimed at women’s reproductive freedoms. But it is also worth examining a more particular, and potentially agonizing, consequence of these new restrictions. It is a hard one to talk about. It is, to some extent, taboo. But it must be discussed. Namely: These new laws, should they survive judicial scrutiny, would ensure that a generation of women would be forced to carry pregnancies to term despite the detection of fetal anomalies — some of them cruel, painful and fatal. (Jennifer Senior, 5/29)
St. Louis Post Dispatch: Missouri's Latest Attack On Abortion Rights Is A Reminder: Elections Have Consequences.
The ink was barely dry on Missouri’s draconian new anti-abortion-rights law before state regulators delivered the second blow against women’s control over their own bodies. Using — and blatantly abusing — their official licensing powers, regulators are threatening to shut down the last abortion provider in Missouri when its license expires Friday. (5/29)
The Washington Post: Kamala Harris Wants An Abortion Rights Law Modeled On The Voting Rights Act. Here’s Why That Could Work.
Over the past few months, several states have moved to severely limit access to abortion, prompting a court fight that could make its way to the Supreme Court. Conservatives are hoping the new right-leaning majority will overturn (or at least chip away at) Roe v. Wade. Liberals, meanwhile, are looking to 2020 to more firmly enshrine the right to have an abortion into law. One candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), has a novel idea for how to do that. She has proposed legislation modeled after the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 that would require states with a history of limiting women’s abortion rights to get clearance from the Justice Department before passing laws that limit abortion. (Eugene Scott, 5/29)
The New York Times: Why The Fight Over Abortion Is Unrelenting
Why has the abortion issue had such staying power, compared, for example, with the steady liberalization of views on homosexuality and interracial marriage? Part of the reason for this is that the abortion issue taps into competing, deep-rooted views on the role of men and women in society. The sexual revolution and the radical transformation of the work and personal lives of women after the introduction of the contraceptive pill in the early 1960s — and the guarantee of women’s reproductive rights by the Supreme Court decisions Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 and Roe v. Wade in 1973 — brought these antithetical beliefs about abortion to the fore. (Thomas B. Edsall, 5/29)
