ColumnMarch has been madness when it comes to attacks on reproductive freedom—three states are ignoring the constitution and passing restrictive abortion bans. 

Looking at the political landscape, it’s clear that since I wrote a recap of the attacks on choice exactly two years ago, our ability to make decisions about our bodies and the course of our lives is still on the table. As individual states one-up each other passing over-the-top, unconstitutional bans, Planned Parenthood leader Cecile Richards is concerned that Roe v. Wade may be heading back to the Supreme Court.

In some states, the barriers to access would, essentially, make abortion illegal for anyone lacking the resources to travel, or in some cases pay out-of-pocket for a totally 100 percent legal medical procedure covered by most insurance policies. The fact that a woman may not have the resources to cross state lines but is expected to figure out how to access the prenatal care necessary to have a healthy pregnancy, let alone raise an actual child, doesn’t seem to be part of the conversation in the states where our rights are in the most danger. The top three offenders this month are North Dakota, Virginia and Arkansas.

Let’s start in North Dakota—a state with just one clinic offering abortion services. This month, Gov. Jack Dalrymple signed a bill that, if it goes into effect August 1, would make abortion illegal six weeks after conception. No matter what. Rape? Incest? Not Jack’s problem. He also signed into law two more measures: one that would ban abortions based on genetic defects such as Down syndrome and another requiring any doctor who performs abortions to be a physician with hospital-admitting privileges.

While it might be the least headline-grabbing, it’s the last of the laws that poses the most immediate threat to the women of North Dakota. Here’s why: The six-week ban will be tied up in court for a long time because it undermines the constitutional protections in Roe v. Wade—which guarantees the right to first-trimester abortion services. The even more radical “personhood” amendment, which could ban all abortions if voters approve it on the November 2014 ballot, will face similar legal challenges if it becomes law.

This is by design. Dalrymple doesn’t expect these laws to sail through. In the long term, they’re debates designed to get Roe v. Wade back to the Supreme Court. In the short term, they are red herrings for the real attack: Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers: TRAP laws. These are the laws requiring anyone performing an abortion to be a physician with hospital-admitting privileges. And this law could close the one clinic in North Dakota.

This popular anti-choice tactic is sold to the public as a concern for women’s safety. But this isn’t about keeping women safe. Women’s health clinics are perfectly capable of providing women with safe abortions, and surgical abortion is actually one of the safest types of medical procedures. Complications from having a first-trimester aspiration abortion are considerably less frequent and less serious than those associated with giving birth. Early medical abortion (using medications to end a pregnancy) has a similar safety profile.

In reality, TRAP laws do just what the name implies: They trap clinics by making it illegal for medical professionals to do their jobs. In Fargo, where the Red River Women’s Clinic is located, at least one of the two local hospitals won’t offer those privileges because the quality of care at the clinic is so high that the clinic doesn’t need them, according to RH Reality Check. I get it, but why not step in and offer the privileges to save the clinic from this attack?

The state’s new Democratic US Senator, Heidi Heitkamp, has been a bit cagey about her stance on abortion. While she has said she is against public funding, she hasn’t said much else and doesn’t have a voting record on the issue. Email Senator Heitkamp and let her know that these restrictions are unacceptable and unconstitutional. A recent email to her supporters asks for donations to fight Karl Rove’s efforts to keep three other women out of office. She says she wants strong women in the government, so encourage her to be strong and fight these bans.

In Virginia, Gov. Bob McDonnell is looking to limit access to abortion via health insurance. He introduced an amendment to the state’s health insurance exchange implementation bill that would prevent insurance plans in the new health exchange from covering abortion. While similar bills introduced in other states would allow a woman to buy a policy rider for abortion coverage, McDonnell’s doesn’t make that inclusion.

NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia estimates that this ban will affect the approximately  50,000 women in Virginia who will be using the state-based health benefits exchange. As in North Dakota, this ban would limit access, primarily, to lower income women. Most private insurance covers abortion services. McDonnell, on his monthly call-in to Washington’s WTOP Radio, said this amendment is simply a restatement an existing federal law — the Hyde Amendment — that prohibits use of public funds for abortion, and also a restatement of existing state law. This amendment is dangerous because, as McDonnell himself said, it provides the language to apply to federal exchanges as well.

In Arkansas, the Republican-controlled House and Senate decided they know better than their women constituents, Gov. Mike Beebe and the Supreme Court when they approved an unconstitutional bill to ban abortions after 12 weeks. The Republican-controlled Senate passed The Arkansas Human Heartbeat Protection Act 26-8. We all started hearing about Heartbeat Bills a few years back when, in Ohio, a fetus was called to testify via ultrasound. To make sure you can hear that beat, the Arkansas bill would also require women to undergo a medically unnecessary, invasive vaginal ultrasound. Beebe vetoed the bill saying it, “blatantly contradicts the United States Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court.” Which it does. As does the six-week bill in North Dakota.

These guys aren’t stupid. They know this. So why are they fighting to get these bills passed in their states? Because, since 1992, they can. Planned Parenthood v. Casey upheld a woman’s right to have an abortion, but some shockingly vague language opened the door for all of what we are seeing today. The Court said the government may seek to discourage women from having abortions by requiring waiting periods and other efforts—as long as these restrictions do not pose an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to an abortion. Undue burden was left undefined.

Is it an undue burden to be forced to have a medically unnecessary trans-vaginal ultrasound? To have to travel hundreds of miles for an abortion, only to be told you have to come back in 72 hours because of a waiting period? What about to be forced to pay for a procedure that should be, legally, covered by health insurance?  Yes, I think those are undue burdens.

This death by a thousand cuts approach isn’t new. Republicans have applied it to voting rights, civil rights, gay rights and other social issues for decades. Public opinion on social issues is changing, and the party can’t win national elections with its throwback views. So Republicans attack issues like abortion and gay marriage piece by piece, state by state. But this isn’t just a fight against abortion; it’s a fight against equality. This is a relatively small number of people—with deep pockets and loud voices—who fear that ensuring the freedom of choice to everyone will rob them of their power. And that would be the best possible outcome.  

Image: alexandralee

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Three mothers tell their own tale of how abortion changed their lives…for the better.

Lucy was 18 when she had an abortion.

“It was the ‘bad’ kind,” she says. “The kind you have because you just don’t want to have children, or because you were irresponsible. You know, the slutty kind.” She got on with her life and thought about it every now and then, occasionally wondering if she had made the right decision. Last July, Lucy, who now lives in Norfolk and is 31, gave birth to a little a boy, Ezra. In becoming a mother, she says, she finally laid to rest those sporadic demons. “Since having my son, having gone through that process of pregnancy and childbirth and child care, I have never been so absolutely certain that what I did all those years ago was right.”

Lucy is not alone. Despite a rising anti-choice sentiment across the UK, where this story is being reported, there are a number of women for whom parenthood only strengthens their resolve that access to abortion must be safe, legal and guilt-free.

Emily lives in Devon with her partner and two daughters, aged three and one. She has a third daughter, Ivy, whom she painfully chose to abort at 23 weeks when she was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. The prognosis was poor. Assuming Ivy survived birth, she would have had open heart surgery in the first week of life. Assuming she survived that, she would have needed surgery again at six months, and if she survived that, then again at three, and so on.

Emily says: “Ivy was a baby. She was perfect in every way, down to her tiny fingernails and her eyelashes. She had my partner’s feet in miniature. When she was born, she tried to breathe. We held her till she went still and told her we loved her, and that we would make the most of this life and never forget her. That was my choice.”

Nadine Dorries debates plans to bar abortion providers from giving advice to pregnant women

Not long after Emily returned to work after losing her daughter, Conservative MP Nadine Dorries, who has repeatedly tried to limit access to abortion services during her time as a politician, tabled an amendment to the 1967 Abortion Act that would strip abortion providers of the right to counsel women. The loosely worded bill threatened to land the role of counselor in the hands of religious or anti-choice groups.

Emily says: “I was driving home listening to the radio and was so furious I had to pull over and cry angry tears. I could not believe that there were people out there who dared to feel they had the right to take that choice out of anyone’s hands. ”

Thirty-year-old Julie had a very strict Catholic upbringing. These days she is an atheist, pro-choice, and married with a son (8 months) and a daughter (3). When she was at university she got pregnant by accident and miscarried at six weeks. During the two weeks she knew about the pregnancy she was terrified of having the baby but also realized very quickly that she was unable to have an abortion.

She says: “I felt like I would be killing a baby, and I just couldn’t consider it as an option. But I believe that a mother’s job is to do what’s best for her family, especially the child she’s carrying, sometimes the best thing is a termination and the mother should have that option.”

Abortion services are under attack in the UK like never before. The conservative majority of the coalition government are pushing through Nadine Dorries’ amendment regardless of it being defeated in parliament, and aggressive American anti-choice group 40 Days for Life have shipped their brand of campaigning to a new shore and began picketing abortion clinics at the beginning of Lent, filming women going in and out and handing out wildly inaccurate information.

While those who genuinely believe abortion is murder and those who believe it is unfortunate but sometimes necessary are never going to agree, the popular discourse on abortion misses the fact that the stories carry on long after a woman leaves the clinic, and that terminating a pregnancy can be a foundation stone for building stronger, happier, more together lives.

Emily refuses to dress her experiences up in any coy language.

“I did kill my baby,” she says. “I chose to have Ivy at 23 weeks and to watch her die in my arms because for me, that was preferable to continuing with the pregnancy. She would have had a life, just not the life I wanted for her, or for me, or for my partner, or at that time, for the possible future brothers or sisters she might have.”

And if she had chosen to continue with the pregnancy, chances are she would have lost a baby or a child at a later date than she did, something she considers to be considerably harder than losing a baby pre-birth. She doubts very much she and her partner would still be together, or that they would be living in their dream house in the idyllic Devon countryside, or that they would have the two daughters they have now.

“It’s too crazy to think about,” she says. “I’d not be me. I say that was the hardest choice I ever had to make but really, in the moment, it was one of the easiest. I knew as soon as we had the full facts that there was no way that I would put my baby through the treatment. I’ve never doubted that we made the right choice, not for a second. And that is the truth.”

Lucy says she had always considered her abortion a selfish act. At the time, she was rarely able to make it through the day without having an alcoholic drink, she was using drugs regularly and was “indescribably miserable and confused.” When she found out she was pregnant, she went to the pub, drank a double vodka, smoked half a pack of cigarettes and stayed out all night taking speed. In retrospect she thinks that perhaps she wasn’t so selfish after all. She knew she wouldn’t be able to stop drinking or using drugs throughout the pregnancy.

“So I had a choice,” she says. “I could bring a child in to the world – a very unwanted child – who would start life physically damaged because of my inability to care for it in the womb, and would move through life emotionally damaged because of my inability to care for it when it arrived. Or I could choose something else, to end the pregnancy, get myself straight, go to university, get a masters degree, fall in love, buy a house, have a child who is so adored that some days I feel like the love flows out of me in giant waves. If I had continued with that pregnancy when I was 18 it would have destroyed many lives.”

Julie’s first pregnancy was exactly the opposite experience. Even though she didn’t want a child, she was unable to drink or smoke, do anything that might harm the fetus in anyway and still holds with her a guilt that she miscarried because she didn’t want to keep it. When she fell pregnant with what would become her eldest child she obsessively researched the phases of gestation and fell in love “with a child, not a potential child” and began to believe that the 24 week time limit on is horrific. Yet during her third pregnancy, the one that would produce her second child, she planned to attend a pro-choice rally.

“To me I was exactly the right person to be there, saying ‘look at me, I’m pregnant, I love my children but I’m still pro-choice.’ The conservative right and the Catholics like to paint women who terminate pregnancies as morally, emotionally and intellectually weak. I could never have terminated a pregnancy myself, but I believe I should have the right to, and I will publicly stand with women who have had to make that decision. I will also stand against anyone, politician or religious zealot, or both, who thinks that religious dogma is an appropriate basis for lawmaking,” she says.

Lucy says that if she could have gotten to the same point in her life in a less awful way then of course she would choose that.

“But I did what I did and I’m fine with that. No one is pro-abortion, no one wants to actually do it, but sometimes it is the best option. I’ve spent a lot of time mired in existential crises and trying to rationalize it and eventually realized that we decide who lives and dies all the time. We make conscious decisions to have a baby; that someone knew should not exist. We send people to war to die. The death penalty sends innocent people to their graves every year. We have people die from famine or drought or brutal regimes and we allow that to happen. We decide that our grandma or uncle or best friend has reached such a point in their illness that their quality of life is too diminished and we quietly ask the doctor if they can up the morphine dosage. It’s just part of the way stuff works. We can call upon Fate or God and be a victim of circumstance, or we can engage with it, choose our lives, the course of events that are best for ourselves and our families. If you don’t like it, so be it, but no one has the right to interfere with those choices. I now consider my first true act as a mother was realizing that I was in no position to become a mother. In a sense I am proud of that and it gives me confidence that I am making the right choices for my family now.”

Image: The Guardian, zeevveez, Medill DC, Elvert Barnes

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