UPDATED 2/7: In Reproductive Rights News
Republicans are unveiling legislation that seeks to give fetuses legal rights, laws that could effectively ban abortion and jeopardize access to fertility treatments. GOP North Dakota Rep. Lori VanWinkle made her case this week for a billthat likens abortion to murder and states that life begins at “the moment of fertilization.”
Other Republican-controlled state legislatures are exploring fetal personhood this year. A Kansas House committee heard arguments last week for a bill that would allow child support payments from the moment of conception.
Republican Oklahoma Rep. Jim Olsen proposed a bill that would provide protections for fetuses and make abortion a felony, States Newsroom reported. Doctors would face up to a $100,000 fine, up to 10 years in prison or both, unless abortion is necessary to save a woman’s life.
The Tennessee legislation combines several anti-abortion talking points: It defines life as starting at fertilization, gives fetuses equal protection rights and argues that the Comstock Act of 1873 should be used to ban the mailing of abortion pills. Anyone found guilty of sending abortion medication into the state would be liable for up to $5 million in damages.
November 24: ProPublica found Amber Thurman and Candi Miller died preventable deaths in Georgia as a result of a state abortion ban.
According to an essay in The Guardian: “Thurman had just established a new degree of stability for herself and her young son when she discovered that she was pregnant with twins in 2022. As her pregnancy had already progressed beyond her state’s gestational limit, she took a road trip to North Carolina with her best friend, where a clinic gave her abortion pills. Abortion pills have very low rates of complications but rare problems do occur. In Thurman’s case, not all of the pregnancy tissue had been expelled from her uterus, and she arrived in a Georgia ER with bleeding, pain and falling blood pressure – the telltale signs of an infection.
“Thurman could have been cured with a D&C, or dilation and curettage, a procedure in which the cervix is dilated to create an opening through which instruments can be inserted to empty out the contents of a uterus. … But Georgia’s abortion ban outlawed the D&C procedure, making it a felony to perform except in cases of managing a “spontaneous” or “naturally occurring” miscarriage. Because Thurman had taken abortion pills, her miscarriage was illegal to treat. She suffered in a hospital bed for 20 hours, developing sepsis and beginning to experience organ failure. By the time the Georgia doctors were finally willing to treat her, it was too late.”
November 8, Reproductive Rights Today newsletter, States Newsroom compilation
State Supreme Court justices who upheld abortion restrictions racked up major wins across the country this week. Legal battles over policy have often found their way to these courtrooms since federal protections for reproductive rights dissipated in 2022.
In Arizona, where an abortion-rights ballot measure succeeded, two judges who voted with the majority to uphold a 19th century abortion ban in April will stay on the bench.
Florida also had two justices and a proposed abortion-rights amendment on the ballot. Roughly 57% of voters marked “yes” on a question that would have codified the right to an abortion up to fetal viability, but the measure didn’t clear the 60% threshold required to amend the Florida Constitution.
More than 60% of voters retained Justices Renatha Francis and Meredith Sasso, judges appointed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida Phoenix reported. Francis and Sasso dissented in the April ruling that allowed Amendment 4 to make the ballot. They also joined the majority decision that allowed the six-week abortion ban to take effect in May.
Meanwhile in Ohio, all three Republican state Supreme Court candidates won their races, which will soon give the GOP a 6-1 supermajority. “These three conservative pro-life judges earned Ohio’s pro-life vote,” Ohio Right to Life said in a statement.
And in Texas, three Republicans were reelected to the all-GOP state Supreme Court, despite an effort from Democrats who emphasized the court’s abortion rulings, Texas Tribune reported. One of the conservative justices who won Tuesday was John Devine, who said he was arrested 37 times at anti-abortion protests in the ’80s and ’90s.
Last year, Texas’ high court overturned a ruling that would have allowed a Dallas woman to get an abortion for a nonviable pregnancy. In May, the justices rejected a request from 20 women and two doctors seeking clarity on which pregnancy complications could result in abortion care under state law, according to the Tribune.
Missouri voted for abortion-rights amendment and for Republicans who vow to overturn it
By Jason Hancock / Missouri Independent
Missourians voted Tuesday night to protect abortion rights, raise the minimum wage and guarantee paid sick leave for workers. They also voted by wide margins to send Republicans to Jefferson City who vehemently oppose those proposals and may try to roll them back.
It’s become a familiar pattern in Missouri — progressive ballot measures like Medicaid expansion and marijuana legalization finding success in a state where Republicans have dominated for more than a decade. Exactly why this seems to play out cycle after cycle is a matter of debate.
November 7 — Reproductive Rights Today newsletter, States Newsroom compilation
Seven states approved abortion-related constitutional protections this week, but just two of those states — Arizona and Missouri — expanded access.
Nearly 62% of Arizona voters affirmed Proposition 139, which would put the right to abortion up to fetal viability — later to protect someone’s life or health — into the state constitution. Sixty percent of votes had been counted in Arizona as of 4 p.m. ET Wednesday, according to the Associated Press.
Once election results are certified, the amendment is set to override a 15-week abortion ban in the state that includes no exceptions for rape, incest or fetal genetic abnormalities, Arizona Mirror reported.
Chris Love, spokesperson for Arizona for Abortion Access, told States Newsroom her group is expecting challenges to the ballot measure. “I think that we have prepared ourselves for every legal possibility that is out there from the beginning of this campaign up until the very end,” she said. Arizona Right to Life tried unsuccessfully to block the proposal from appearing on the ballot in August, the Mirror reported.
In Missouri, 52% of voters marked “yes” on Amendment 3, a measure that will codify the right to abortion up to fetal viability, and later in pregnancy to protect someone’s life or health, Missouri Independentreported. The proposed amendment also contains protections for access to birth control and other reproductive health care services.
Missouri became the first state to prohibit most abortions after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. Abortion providers faced regulations in the state before the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling. By 2019, Missouri only had one abortion clinic.
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Voters adopted Initiative 434, an abortion-restrictions amendment that bans most abortions after the first trimester, with exceptions for the life of the mother, rape and incest. The measure also leaves the legislature the authority to pass additional restrictions, up to a complete ban.
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In Florida, an abortion-rights amendment garnered about 57% of the vote but fell short of the supermajority, 60%, needed for passage.
“The thing to look at is the number, which is that 57% of Floridians voted in favor of restoring abortion rights,” said Kelly Hall, executive director of the nonprofit Fairness Project, which supported the abortion-rights measures in Florida and four other states. “In any other state, in any other context, that would count as a win.”
She noted that supporters won a large majority despite strong opposition from Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who directed state resources to fight the measure. Hall vowed that “this conversation about abortion in Florida is far from over.”
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An attempt to restore abortion rights in South Dakota went down to defeat Tuesday.
The Associated Press called the results at 1:49 a.m. Central time Wednesday. The tally at that time was 61% against Amendment G and 39% in favor, with 64% of statewide votes counted.
October 31, Heather Cox Richardson
Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana of ProPublica reported today that at least two pregnant women have died in Texas when doctors delayed emergency care after a miscarriage until the fetal heartbeat stopped. The woman they highlighted today, Josseli Barnica, left behind a husband and a toddler.
At a rally this evening near Green Bay, Wisconsin, Trump said his team had advised him to stop talking about how he was going to protect women by ending crime and making sure they don’t have to be “thinking about abortion.” But Trump, who has boasted of sexual assault and been found liable for it, did not stop there. He went on to say that he had told his advisors, “I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.”
October 2 — Reproductive Rights Today, Elisha Brown
Vice presidential candidates U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, an Ohio Republican, and Gov. Tim Walz, a Minnesota Democrat, clashed on abortion during a debatehosted by CBS News. Vance argued that his party would advance “pro-family” policies, while Walz countered that restoring abortion rights can exist in tandem with family-friendly policies.
Moderator Norah O’ Donnell asked Walz about former President Donald Trump’s false claim during the last debate that the governor supports abortion in the ninth month. Walz refuted the assertion: “That’s not what the bill says.”
Walz signed the Protect Reproductive Options Act in January 2023, securing for pregnant Minnesotans “the fundamental right to continue the pregnancy and give birth, or obtain an abortion, and to make autonomous decisions about how to exercise this fundamental right.” The law doesn’t limit the right to an abortion before fetal viability, but it also does not say anything about “partial-birth abortions,” or “late-term abortion” as Vance asserted during Tuesday’s debate.
Minnesota no longer releases data on abortion. But in 2021, just 8% of abortions were performed in the second trimester, and only one pregnancy was terminated in the third trimester, at 28 weeks, according to Minnesota Reformer.
Vance said Republicans would not create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency if the party regains the White House. Project 2025, which Trump has distanced himself from but Vance has said contained good ideas, calls for all states to report abortion data to the federal government. That information is currently only voluntary, but Vance cosponsored legislation that would implement a similar mandate.
He casts abortion as an issue many Americans disagree on and said Republicans can earn trust by supporting fertility treatments — Vance endorsed a GOP resolution on IVF but voted against a Democratic IVF bill in June — and making child care more affordable. “I want us as a Republican Party to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word,” he said. Vance then went on to say that abortion policy should be decided by state lawmakers. “I think that’s what makes the most sense in a very big, very diverse and let’s be honest, sometimes, a very very messy and divided country,” he said.
But Walz countered that a patchwork of abortion policies takes agency away from Americans and in some cases, can lead to death. He mentioned the case of Amber Thurman, a Georgia woman who died in 2022 after she had abortion medication complications and doctors waited until she slipped into organ failure to provide a dilation and curettage procedure, ProPublica reported. Walz asked, “How can we as a nation say that your life and your rights, as basic as the right to control your own body, is determined on geography?”
Vance, who agreed that Thurman should still be alive, was asked about his previous support for a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks. “I never supported a national ban,” he said. “I did when I was running for Senate in 2022 talk about setting some minimum national standard.”
When running for Congress in January 2022, Vance said, “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” according to CNN. Vance has since said he supports abortion in cases of rape, incest and to save the pregnant person’s life. He opposed a ballot measure in Ohio that 57% of voters approved in November 2023. The amendment secured the right to abortion, birth control, child care and a gamut of reproductive health care services, the Ohio Capital Journal reported.
Both candidates shared personal anecdotes about the complexities of reproductive health care. Vance said he grew up with a friend who chose to have an abortion due to an abusive relationship, while Walz mentioned his family’s fertility journey.
Vance derided Walz this summer after he clarified that his family conceived via intrauterine insemination, not in vitro fertilization. Walz first opened up his family’s treatments in February after an Alabama Supreme Court ruling caused a pause in IVF services in the state.
Vice President Kamala Harris and Walz have said they would work to restore the federal right to an abortion, legislation that would likely require a majority in both chambers of Congress. But Harris recently said she would support eliminating the Senate filibuster — moving the majority vote down from 60 to 51 — to codify abortion rights across the nation, States Newsroom reported. Neither Democrat has specified whether a federal abortion law should include gestational limits, but the Women’s Health Protection Act that Harris has supported includes that restriction with certain exceptions.
Meanwhile, Trump and Vance have insisted abortion policy should be left to the states. Both Republicans previously expressed interest in a federal abortion ban. Last month, Vance said “I’ve learned my lesson” after telling NBC News in August that Trump would veto a ban if he’s reelected president. During the presidential debate, Trump said he and Vance had never discussed the issue. Trump said on social media last night that he would veto such legislation.
Vance and Walz’s matchup could be the last debate of the election season in a year that could be a referendum on abortion rights.
North Dakota’s abortion ban was officially repealed Thursday following a judgment entered by South Central District Court Judge Bruce Romanick.
“The law as currently drafted takes away a woman’s fundamental rights to liberty and her fundamental right to pursue and abstain safety and happiness,” he wrote in the judgment. “The law also impermissibly infringes on the constitutional rights for victims of crimes.”
Romanick was asked to review the ban as part of a lawsuit brought by Red River Women’s Clinic — once North Dakota’s only abortion clinic before it moved to Moorhead, Minnesota — and a group of reproductive health care doctors. Tammi Kromenaker, the clinic’s director, said the facility has “no plans to move back to North Dakota.”
“Having moved once was already a huge upheaval and drain on our resources. We are 5 minutes away from our former location in downtown Fargo, which means that access for our patients is essentially the same,” Kromenaker wrote in a Thursday statement to the Monitor.
She noted that other North Dakota regulations, “including a 24-hour waiting period, restrictions on medication abortion, forced state materials designed to dissuade patients from abortion, strict parental involvement laws and more,” still make abortion care difficult to provide in the state.
September 26 — Reproductive Rights Today, Elisha Brown
Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican running for a U.S. Senate seat, is under fire from Republicans and Democrats for saying many suburban women are “single issue voters” who only care about abortion.
“You know, the left has a lot of single issue voters. And sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen: abortion’s it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else,” Moreno said during a Warren County town hall on Friday, according to NBC’s Columbus affiliate.
“OK. It’s a little crazy, by the way, especially for women that are like past 50. I’m thinking to myself: I don’t think that’s an issue for you,” he continued, as some members of the crowd laughed.
Reagan McCarthy, Moreno’s spokesperson, defended the candidate’s comments in a statement to the local NBC station: “Bernie was clearly making a tongue-in-cheek joke about how Sherrod Brown and members of the left-wing media like to pretend that the only issue that matters to women voters is abortion.”
Moreno is running against Brown, a Democratic senator who backed a reproductive rights ballot measure that more than 2.1 million Ohio voters approved in November 2023.
“Bernie Moreno just keeps insulting the 57% of Ohioans who voted last year to protect abortion rights,” Brown wrote in an X post on Wednesday. Besides securing the right to abortion up to fetal viability, the amendment also codified access to child birth, contraception, fertility treatments and miscarriage care, Ohio Capital Journal reported.
Former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley also criticized Moreno’s comments: “Are you trying to lose the election? Asking for a friend. #Tonedeaf #DonLemonVibes,” Haley said in an X post on Tuesday. The last hashtag alludes to when former CNN anchor Don Lemon made sexist comments about Haley’s age last year.
Bipartisan condemnation of Moreno’s view of suburban women comes as abortion is expected to be an issue in races up and down the ballot.Three seats on the conservative-leaning Ohio Supreme Court are up for reelection this year, Capital-Journal reported. The justices will likely review cases on the state’s remaining abortion restrictions in the future. Limits on abortion in Ohio remained after the reproductive rights amendment passed, and Republican Attorney General Dave Yost defended them. But judges recently blocked laws that required a 24-hour waiting period for abortions, banned telehealth abortion and only allowed physicians to prescribe abortion pills.
Capital-Journal and WEWS reporter Morgan Trau recently spoke to suburban women in Ohio about the issues. They care about about reproductive rights, the economy and public education, Trau reports:
Both suburban and rural mothers in Ohio are being guided to the polls this year by the desire for a better future for their children.
“I always dreamed of having girls,” said Bridget Baum, a mom of two who got her wish. “It’s just really special raising two girls in this environment today,” she said in an interview with OCJ/WEWS on the couch of her sunroom.
Baum lives in Pepper Pike, an affluent suburb outside of Cleveland with about 6,800 residents, according to the U.S. Census. Pepper Pike is a Democratic stronghold, with 83% of its voters choosing to protect abortion access in 2023.
Baum’s main focus is on ensuring abortion access. “One thing about being a woman and having girls is that I want to make sure that they have the protections that I have always had,” Baum said. She is excited to vote for Harris, but not just because of her support for reproductive health care.
“I care so much about public education — public services matter a lot to me, whether that’s Social Security, whether that’s taking care of women who have just had children, whether that’s child care being subsidized,” Baum said.
September 25 — Reproductive Rights Today, Elisha Brown
At least 210 Americans faced pregnancy-related criminal charges the year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion, new research shows.
The cases were concentrated in states that ban abortion and have high maternal mortality rates, according to a report released by the advocacy organization Pregnancy Justice. …
Although the researchers’ work is ongoing, the quantitative data from the latest iteration of the report underscores the uptick in pregnancy-related criminalization post-Roe. Last year, a multi-newsroom investigation found that hundreds of cases in Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Carolina used child endangerment laws to jail pregnant women struggling with drugs, even when they delivered healthy babies. This summer, an Oklahoma judge ruled that expectant mothers who use medical marijuana cannot be charged with child neglect, The Frontier reported.
In the year after the Dobbs decision, 22 people faced charges for having miscarriages, according to Pregnancy Justice. On Monday, KFF Health News published a story about Amari Marsh, a 23-year-old South Carolina woman who was charged with murder and jailed for nearly a month after having a miscarriage. Last year, a grand jury declined to indict Brittany Watts, an Ohio woman who was charged with abuse of a corpse after she miscarried at home, the New York Times reported.
A judge vacated North Dakota’s abortion ban in a Thursday ruling, finding the law unconstitutionally vague and an infringement on medical freedom. South Central Judicial District Court Judge Bruce Romanick’s order came as part of a lawsuit challenging the law brought by reproductive health care doctors and an abortion clinic last year. Romanick’s ruling declared the law “unconstitutionally void for vagueness” and found that “pregnant women in North Dakota have a fundamental right to choose abortion before viability exists.”
The ban, enacted by lawmakers in 2023, makes abortion illegal in all cases except rape or incest if the mother has been pregnant for less than six weeks, or when the pregnancy poses a serious physical health threat.
Tammi Kromenaker, director of the Red River Women’s Clinic [and a Minnesota Women’s Press Badass award winner in 2024], said Thursday’s decision gives her hope. “I feel like the court heard us when we raised our voices against a law that not only ran counter to our state constitution, but was too vague for physicians to interpret, and which prevented them from providing the high quality care that our communities are entitled to,” Kromenaker said.
The clinic had been North Dakota’s sole abortion clinic, but moved from Fargo to Minnesota after a prior abortion ban went into effect. Republican Attorney General Drew Wrigley said the state will appeal the decision.
September 12 — Reproductive Rights Today
Some American women living in states with abortion bans turned to sterilization after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned federal abortion rights, a new study found.
Tubal ligation — getting fallopian tubes cut and tied to prevent pregnancy — increased by 3% each month from July to December 2022 in states that banned abortion after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling in June 2022, according to research published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Columbia University researchers parsed insurance claims data for nearly 5 million women of reproductive age in 2021 and 2022 who had no signs of gynecologic cancer and either had their tubes tied or opted for a salpingectomy — a procedure that completely removes the fallopian tubes. The study categorized ban states as those with total or near-total abortion bans, even if some restrictions were blocked by the courts after the Dobbs decision, as is the case in Utah and Wyoming.
“Our study suggests that the Dobbs ruling and subsequent state laws banning or limiting access to abortion may affect a woman’s choice of contraception,” Dr. Xiao Xu, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University, said in a news release. “The findings also warrant attention because tubal sterilization is an irreversible method of contraception.”
Xu and her team concluded that tubal ligations increased overall in 36 states and Washington, D.C., including the ban states — information on the database limited the scope of their study. But the states with abortion bans saw greater increases in the surgery.
Jacqueline Ellison, the study’s lead author, told RRT in April that she wasn’t surprised by the imbalance in the findings, considering that the onus for birth control often falls on women.
The U.S. Senate gridlocked over reproductive rights on Wednesday, when Republicans blocked Democrats from advancing a measure that would have expressed support for abortion access.
The failed 49-44 procedural vote was just one in a string of votes Senate Democrats are holding this summer to highlight the differences between the two political parties on contraception, in vitro fertilization and abortion ahead of the November elections.
Maine Sen. Susan Collins and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski were the only Republicans to vote to move the bill toward final passage.
“This is a plain, up-or-down vote on whether you support women being able to make their own reproductive health care decisions,” Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray said during floor debate. “It doesn’t enforce anything. It doesn’t cost anything. It’s actually just a half-page bill, simply saying that women should have the basic freedom to make their own decisions about their health care.”
The legislation, if enacted, would have expressed a “sense of Congress” that abortion rights “should be supported” and that the nationwide, constitutional protections for abortion established by Roe v. Wade “should be restored and built upon, moving towards a future where there is reproductive freedom for all.”
June 24, 2024 — Reproductive Rights Today, Jennifer Shutt
Advocates in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota have either secured questions for the November ballot or are in the process of doing so, according to the health news publication KFF.
Residents in California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Vermont, and Ohio have all previously decided to bolster or add protection for abortion access in the two years since the Supreme Court ruling was released.
Polling from the Pew Research Center conducted earlier this year shows that 63% of Americans support abortion access being legal in all or most cases, while 36% say it should be illegal in most or all cases.
The polling shows that Democrats and Republicans hold views in both directions, with 41% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats saying it should be legal in most or all cases, while 57% of Republicans and 14% of Democrats say it should be illegal in most or all cases.
Both sides plan to spend millions to win over voters.
- Two years after Indiana became the first state to ban abortion post-Dobbs, a new poll shows voters widely oppose the law. (Indiana Capital Chronicle)
- Kentucky rape survivor featured in Gov. Andy Beshear’s pivotal campaign ad discusses Dobbs’ impact on national television with Vice President Kamala Harris. (Kentucky Lantern)
- “We know of women who no longer can have children because they lost vital reproductive organs after they were refused timely care.” — Dr. Valerie Sorkin-Wells, retired OB-GYN and medical director for Precision Trials, Arizona Mirror
- One of the most significant effects of Dobbs is among obstetric providers in the 14 states with abortion bans. The Association of American Medical Colleges published data in May showing fewer new graduates of U.S. medical schools applied to residency programs in states with bans. The decreases were particularly noticeable in ban states such as Tennessee and Alabama, with decreases of about 20% in both between 2023 and 2024. Missouri showed one of the largest decreases at 25.7%, a drop from the previous year, which was still down almost 11%. Arizona experienced an even steeper decline of 26.4%, even though it is a state with a 15-week ban rather than a near-total ban. (Reproductive Rights News)
June 14, 2024 — Reproductive Rights Today, Elisha Brown
A saga that began in November 2022, when a group of anti-abortion doctors filed a lawsuit in Texas seeking to revoke the federal government’s 24-year-old approval of a commonly used abortion medication, has ended. For now.
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected the case, ruling the doctors lacked standing to challenge the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in a medication abortion and to manage miscarriages, reported States Newsroom’s Washington, D.C. senior reporter Jennifer Shutt.
The doctors were represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based Christian right law firm, which filed the case in a Texas court led by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who has a history of anti-abortion writings. They asked the court to revert the FDA’s rules on mifepristone to pre-2016 guidelines, which would have narrowed the window for when the pill can be used during the first trimester and banned the pill from being shipped in the mail, among other limitations.
ADF lawyer Erin Hawley said the organization was “disappointed that the Supreme Court did not reach the merits of the FDA’s lawless removal of commonsense safety standards for abortion drugs.”
While the decision means access to mifepristone remains available under the current FDA guidelines, Republican attorneys general in Idaho, Kansas and Missouri who were allowed to intervene in the case at the district court level may continue the fight. ADF said on social media Thursday it is grateful to those attorneys general for “standing ready to hold the FDA accountable.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh authored the main opinion and wrote that the abortion-rights opponents who originally brought the lawsuit already have legal protections that allow them to decline to provide abortion care. The doctors’ additional argument that emergency rooms were overflowing with patients who had complications from medication abortions was largely based on anecdotes and research that was ultimately retracted.
“Not only as a matter of law but also as a matter of fact, the federal conscience laws have protected pro-life doctors ever since FDA approved mifepristone in 2000,” Kavanaugh wrote. “The plaintiffs have not identified any instances where a doctor was required, notwithstanding conscience objections, to perform an abortion or to provide other abortion-related treatment that violated the doctor’s conscience.”
Kavanaugh may have hinted at how the court will rule on the other major abortion case on the docket: Idaho argues it does not have to comply with the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act, a federal law that requires emergency room doctors to provide medically necessary abortions. “EMTALA does not require doctors to perform abortions or provide abortion-related medical treatment over their conscience objections because EMTALA does not impose obligations on individual doctors,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Justice Clarence Thomas offered a concurring opinion that primarily focused on his objections to allowing third parties to bring lawsuits. “As I have previously explained, a plaintiff cannot establish an Article III case or controversy by asserting another person’s rights,” Thomas wrote.
In reactions to the ruling, Democratic lawmakers and reproductive rights supporters pointed out that abortion policy is still evolving in the nation, regardless of the Supreme Court’s mifepristone ruling. For instance, abortion referendums could be on the ballot in nearly a dozen states this fall.
President Joe Biden said in a statement that the “decision does not change the fact that the fight for reproductive freedom continues.”
Read also
https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/us-senate-republicans-reject-democrats-bill-ivf-protections
https://www.newsfromthestates.com/see-data-reproductive-rights
https://www.newsfromthestates.com/see-data-reproductive-rights
https://ncnewsline.com/category/abortion-policy/
For 2025 coverage, Minnesota Women’s Press earned a community leadership award, three photography awards, and four editorial awards, including for coverage of social issues and for our Spring 2025 “Know Your Rights” special section supported by Unidos MN. Our publisher was named Journalist of the Year by Violence Free Minnesota for gender-based violence coverage.
