Repro Rights Roundup: Magically Disappearing Abortions, Fake Clinics, And 'Free Speech'

Plus: No 'heartbeat' bill for Iowa.

Fun Fact, Becoming A Republican Undoes Your Abortion

For her entire tenure in the North Carolina state Senate, Rep. Tricia Cotham advocated for and ran on a platform of raising the minimum wage, supporting LGBTQ rights and voting rights, and protecting reproductive rights. When advocating for abortion rights, she frequently told the story of how those rights literally saved her life when her wanted pregnancy went wrong.

“Cotham added, “Abortion is a deeply personal decision. It should not be a political debate. My womb and my uterus is not up for your political grab. Legislators, you do not hold shares in my body, so stop trying to manipulate my mind.” #ncpol”

— Bryan Anderson (@Bryan Anderson) 1680703995 

But then, earlier this year, Tricia Cotham was traumatized by some liberals somewhere (maybe!) making fun of her for her use of American flags and the praying hands emoji and was forced to become a Republican! So, though she won her previous election by promising to codify Roe v. Wade and protect abortion, she became the deciding vote that allowed the Republicans in the state Legislature to pass a 12-week abortion ban, which included the 72-hour waiting period she was advocating against in the video above, and override Democratic Governor Roy Cooper's veto.

When people brought up the abortion she had spoken of repeatedly in order to question her vote on this, Cotham wasn't just appalled that anyone would use such a sensitive, personal event in her life against her — she claimed that, actually, people were confused and she never actually had an abortion at all , but rather a miscarriage that went wrong.

“I think the hardest thing and the most unfortunate and deeply personal, and this is deeply wrong: I had a miscarriage, and a miscarriage in a medical term is called a spontaneous abortion,” she explained in an interview with radio host Brett Jensen last week.

“And so instead of saying ― first of all, they should not be talking about my miscarriage, that is just very painful and wrong ― but they’re repeating this message that I had an abortion. And that is false,” she said. “And that has been extremely frustrating, and they keep on doing it, and that’s below the belt.”

As we know, miscarriage care is intrinsically tied to abortion care, which is why so many miscarriages are going very sideways these days, but what she had was pretty clearly an abortion.

While she does refer to the procedure she had, in the video, as a "physician-assisted miscarriage," she also says that her doctor told her that the pregnancy "would likely not be viable" and that going through with it could make it so she would not be able to have more children in the future or, worst case scenario, even die. That's an abortion . If the baby isn't already dead, it's an abortion . Had Cotham had the exact same thing happen to her today, with the law she helped to pass, she would probably have died while waiting for a board to decide she was close enough to death to get the care she needed.

So she's full of it — which, frankly, does mean that she is ideally suited to be a Republican. Though she probably should have run as one in 2022 instead of tricking those in her district who voted for someone they thought was going to protect their reproductive rights.

Iowa's Supreme Court Still Won't Let The State Ban Abortion After Six Weeks

Abortion remains legal until 22 weeks in Iowa following a split 3-3 decision in a case on resurrecting a previously overruled 2018 law that would have banned it after six weeks. The law was initially struck down by a district court that found that there was no compelling state interest in banning abortions that early on, citing a state Supreme Court ruling finding that "a woman's right to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy is a fundamental right under the Iowa Constitution."

Via CBS:  

"The State appealed [the January 2019 ruling], and now asks our court to do something that has never happened in Iowa history: to simultaneously bypass the legislature and change the law, to adopt rational basis review, and then to dissolve an injunction to put a statute into effect for the first time in the same case in which that very enactment was declared unconstitutional years earlier," Justice Thomas Waterman wrote in the court's decision Friday.

The justice added, "In our view, it is legislating from the bench to take a statute that was moribund when it was enacted and has been enjoined for four years and then to put it into effect."

TLDR: Wasn't legal then, still isn't legal now.

Closing his opinion, Waterman wrote "It would be ironic and troubling for our court to become the first state supreme court in the nation to hold that trash set out in a garbage can for collection is entitled to more constitutional protection than a woman’s interest in autonomy and dominion over her own body.”

Here, here!

New Twitter Loves Free Speech For Nazis, Not So Much For Abortion Rights

This week, a campaign ad for Rachel Hunt, a Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor of North Carolina, was blocked from being promoted on Twitter.

“I’m running for Lt. Governor because the Republican plan isn’t this year’s 12 week abortion ban; it’s next year’s total abortion ban. I'm North Carolina Senator Rachel Hunt. Let me explain... #ncpol”

— Rachel Hunt (@Rachel Hunt) 1686565800 

When the campaign contacted Twitter to try to find out why it was being blocked, they were told in no uncertain terms that it was because of the video's pro-choice stance.

Via HuffPost:  

When the Hunt campaign reached out to Twitter to inquire about the holdup, an employee said the video was blocked from promotion because of “the mention of abortion advocacy.”

“Ah yes, the mention of abortion advocacy is the issue here,” a Twitter employee told Hunt’s campaign Wednesday in an email reviewed by HuffPost. The employee said the company may have “some good news to share on that front” in the next week or so, seemingly suggesting it may change its standards and practices on content discussing abortion rights.

“For now, though, you still won’t be able to message around that topic,” the employee added.

You can't talk about abortion rights ... in The New Town Square ?!?!?! This is just shocking, given how much Elon Musk and others have been going on and on about their great love of free speech! It's almost as if they really were only talking about free speech for one very particular group of people.

Google Made $10 Million From Fake Abortion Clinic Ads

On Thursday, the Center for Countering Digital Hate released a report finding that, over the last two years, Google has made more than $10 million in ad revenue from crisis pregnancy centers masquerading as abortion clinics to lure in those looking to terminate their pregnancies, in hopes of convincing them to keep it.

Sure, for Google, it's not a lot. They make billions in ad revenue every year. However, the fact that they are making any money at all off of tricking people in extremely vulnerable situations is gross as hell.

Via CNN:  

Using Semrush, an analytics tool, researchers at the CCDH identified “188 fake clinic websites” that placed ads on Google between March, 2021 and February of this year. CCDH estimates that ads for fake clinics were clicked on by users 13 million times during this period.

Some searching for “abortion clinics near me” on Google instead found results directing them toward so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” that may try to talk abortion-seekers out of treatment and offer medically unproven abortion pill reversal techniques, according to the report.

Other Google searches populated by crisis clinic ads included “abortion pill,” “abortion clinic” and “planned parenthood,” the report said, with clinics in states where abortion is legal spending two times as much as those in states with bans.

A spokesperson for Google told CNN that despite the organization's findings, they do not actually allow this at all.

“We require any organization that wants to advertise to people seeking information about abortion services to be certified and clearly disclose whether they do or do not offer abortions,” a Google spokesperson told CNN. “We do not allow ads promoting abortion reversal treatments and we also prohibit advertisers from misleading people about the services they offer.”

“We remove or block ads that violate these policies,” the company added.

I did a Google search myself for "abortion clinics near me," and while there is a note on the sponsored search result that says "Does not provide abortions," Google is still making money off of these search results that specifically come up when someone is looking for where they can get an abortion.

That's a problem. It's fine if they come up if someone is searching for someone to tell them not to have an abortion, but they should not come up at all when someone is looking for one. That's deceitful and it's not something that would happen for literally any other kind of search. If you search for "chocolate cake," you get recipes for chocolate cake and the sponsored results are all cakes you can order. You don't get an ad from Weight Watchers. It should be the same with abortion.

More to Read!

A horrifying story, on Jessica Valenti's Abortion Every Day substack, of a Texas woman who would have been forced to carry a headless fetus to term if she hadn't traveled out-of-state to get an abortion.

The Washington Post 's deep dive on the American College of Pediatrics, an organization for Christian right-wing doctors that has been advocating for bans on abortion and gender affirming care across the nation.

 Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons .

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