Republican Lawmakers Refusing To Adjust Unclear Abortion Bans
AP reports on how lawmakers aren't planning to adjust any abortion bans even though medical professionals complain about risks from unclear exception rules. Stat notes there's been a failure to even define what abortion is.
AP:
GOP Lawmakers Resist Calls To Tweak Abortion Bans. Some Say They'll Clarify The Laws' Few Exceptions
In Republican-led states across the U.S., conservative legislators are refusing to reevaluate abortion bans — even as doctors and patients insist the laws’ exceptions are dangerously unclear, resulting in denied treatment to some pregnant women in need. Instead, GOP leaders accuse abortion rights advocates of deliberately spreading misinformation and doctors of intentionally denying services in an effort to undercut the bans and make a political point. (Kruesi, 3/11)
Stat:
Amid The Battle Over Abortion Rights, A Failure To Agree On How To Define Abortion
Every year, Lisa Campo-Engelstein tells her medical ethics class the story of Isabel: A fictional character who arrives at a health clinic seeking an abortion. Doctors determine that Isabel is 37 weeks pregnant and, what’s more, she’s suffering from high blood pressure that endangers the life of the fetus. Thirty-seven weeks is just three shy of an average full-length pregnancy, so instead of an abortion, the clinic’s doctors recommend that Isabel have an emergency C-section to maximize the chance of a live birth. Isabel refuses. “I don’t want to get cut open to save a baby I didn’t even want in the first place,” she says. By refusing the C-section, is she having an abortion? (Sidik, 3/11)
The Texas Tribune:
Can Texas’ Child Services Handle More Kids After Abortion Ban?
As Texas has underfunded programs for people with disabilities over decades, accessing these services is a minefield. And advocates, lawmakers and experts worry it may become even more difficult in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, as demand for these state services rises but policy goes on unchanged. More than 16,000 additional babies were born in Texas in 2022 compared to 2021 after the state banned almost all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, according to a University of Houston analysis of 2022 fertility data. (Bohra, 3/11)
Chicago Tribune:
Illinois Abortion Providers Praise Drugstore Plans To Dispense Mifepristone, But Foes Fear 'Normalizing' Terminations.
As the drugstore chains Walgreens and CVS Health plan to begin dispensing the controversial abortion pill mifepristone, Illinois reproductive rights advocates praise the new means of access to the medication — which they say will improve health equity as well as help destigmatize abortion. (Lourgos, 3/9)
The New York Times:
Wyoming Banned Abortion. She Opened An Abortion Clinic Anyway
It was not such an implausible idea, back in 2020, when a philanthropist emailed Julie Burkhart to ask if she would consider opening an abortion clinic in Wyoming, one of the nation’s most conservative states and the one that had twice given Donald Trump his biggest margin of victory. In fact, Ms. Burkhart had the same idea more than a decade earlier, after an anti-abortion extremist killed her boss and mentor, George Tiller, in Wichita, Kan., where he ran one of the nation’s few clinics that provided abortion late in pregnancy. (Zernike, 3/10)
