You Like Abortion Rights! You Really, Really Like Abortion Rights!

Your reproductive rights roundup.

Abortion’s On The Ballot In Ohio!

Abortion rights supporters have collected enough signatures to call for a vote on whether or not to enshrine the right to abortion and the right to make other reproductive choices for oneself into the state constitution.

The amendment will read:

1. Every individual has a right to make and carry out one's own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on contraception, fertility treatment, continuing one's own pregnancy, miscarriage care, and abortion.

2. The State shall not, directly or indirectly, burden, penalize, prohibit, interfere with, or discriminate against either an individual's voluntary exercise of this right or a person or entity that assists an individual exercising this right, unless the State demonstrates that it is using the least restrictive means to advance the individual's health in accordance with widely accepted and evidence-based standards of care.

3. However, abortion may be prohibited after fetal viability. But in no case may such an abortion be prohibited if in the professional judgment of the pregnant patient's treating physician it is necessary to protect the pregnant patient's life or health.

4. As used in this Section,"Fetal viability" means "the point in a pregnancy when, in the professional judgment of the pregnant patient's treating physician, the fetus has a significant likelihood of survival outside the uterus with reasonable measures. This is determined on a case-by-case basis"; and "State" includes any governmental entity and political subdivision.

This is very good news for Ohioans who don’t want to be forced to give birth against their will, given that a poll published this week found that 58 percent of people in the state want abortion to be legal — and bad news for Republicans who have passed 57,000 laws banning the procedure that are currently being held back by court orders.

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Outlets like the National Review are crying that the ballot initiative is “too radical,” which is perhaps something that Republicans should have thought about before they gerrymandered the hell out of states like Ohio in order to win and then used their ill-begotten political power to pass extreme anti-abortion bills. Whoops!

Also it’s not “too radical,” it’s just right and it’s what Ohioans deserve.

You Like Abortion Rights! You Really, Really Like Abortion Rights!

Another poll released this week found that increasing numbers of Americans don’t actually want the government to be involved with their reproductive choices at all.

The poll, conducted by nonpartisan research firm PerryUndam, found that most people were actually more likely to support a bill that did not include any restrictions, including viability restrictions, on abortion rights than one that did.

Via FiveThirtyEight:

The researchers asked 4,037 registered voters if they supported a constitutional amendment establishing reproductive freedom. Half of the sample read an amendment identical to the ballot measure that passed in Michigan in 2022; the other half read the same amendment except the researchers removed language that allowed the state to regulate abortion after viability, or when a fetus can live outside a woman’s body.

PerryUndem found that respondents who received the version of the ballot measure with no government regulations included were 15 percentage points more likely to say they would “definitely” vote for it: Forty-five percent said they would “definitely vote yes” on the version with no restrictions, while 30 percent said they would “definitely vote yes” on the version with a viability restriction. The results were particularly pronounced among Democrats and women of reproductive age (ages 18 to 44), who were much more likely to support the version of the amendment without restrictions.

It’s almost as if, by outlawing abortion, the Right has been giving us all a real-time demonstration of what happens to people when the state gets involved with their reproductive choices and they’re starting to feel like their own doctors might be just a little more qualified than people who want to pretend you can reimplant an ectopic pregnancy.

Crisis Pregnancy Centers Can’t Play Their Dirty Tricks In Illinois No More

For years, so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” have been known to engage in deceptive practices like marketing themselves as abortion clinics in hopes of luring in those seeking abortion so that they can then try to talk them out of it — or even just pretending to offer medical care when they don’t.

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has signed a law barring these Potemkin clinics from engaging in deceptive practices or providing misinformation to those seeking abortion care in the state, which is a really big deal.

Naturally, forced birthers are crying that the law hurts their non-existent First Amendment right to pretend to be a business they are not.

"This is one of the most extensive restrictions on free speech against pro-life speech of any state in the country. What they've done here in Illinois, is to declare pro-life speech to be misinformation," Peter Breen, executive vice president of the Thomas More Society, told ABC7.

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While the First Amendment guarantees the right to free speech, it does not guarantee the right to an audience, and deceptive business practices have long been regulated by the government.

The crisis pregnancy centers are still free to exist. They can offer counseling and free diapers to those who do not want to have abortions all they like. They just can’t pretend to be abortion clinics or insinuate that they have medical personnel on staff if they do not, or tell people things that are not factually true in hopes of persuading them to not have an abortion. It is not the fault of the Illinois government or anyone else that the “pro-life” movement so frequently relies on outright lies to bolster their positions.

Also In Illinois …

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul wrote an op-ed for the Chicago Sun-Times this week promising that the state will not, under any circumstances, be complying with the demand from 19 Republican state Attorneys General that they be given access to the private medical information of those who cross state lines to receive legal health care — for the purpose of prosecuting them when they get back home.

Just Stick An Abortion Ban In Any Old Bill, Why Don’t You?

The Senate on Thursday passed an $886 billion defense spending bill, because that’s obviously more important than people having health care. The largely bipartisan nature of the bill is expected to roil Republicans in the House who had included a bunch of culture war wins for themselves in their version of the bill, which included “provisions to undo the Pentagon’s abortion travel policy, block funding for surgeries and hormone therapy for transgender troops and limit diversity training and programs.”

The House’s agriculture bill also includes a provision, unpopular even among some Republicans), that would override the FDA and and bar mifepristone from being sold in retail pharmacies and through the mail.

It won’t pass in the Senate, and Republicans in the House likely know this. They just want the whole world to know that they are coming after the abortion pill, one of the safest ways to manage an unwanted pregnancy early on.

Quite frankly, it’s probably a bad move all over to claim that the FDA doesn’t know what it’s doing when it’s an agency we are supposed to rely on for our own safety, regardless of how we feel about abortion. If they can do this, it could be any other medication next, and I don’t think anyone wants that.