Reproductive Politics

The newest front in the legislative war over abortion access is the regulation of "medical abortion" performed in the first eight weeks or so of pregnancy. Pro-life activists express many concerns about medical abortion (questions about its safety, for example). Their true cause for alarm is that medical abortion allows for abortions to occur outside of the clinic structure-- the abortion experience occurs largely at home, and, in some states, family planning doctors are prescribing the drugs remotely (through a kind of Skype-like arrangement). Anti-abortion legislatures have been achieving a measure of success against clinics by passing TRAP laws. In other words, legislatures are restricting abortion access by regulating clinics out of business. Medical abortion rewrites the rules because it allows abortions to be decentralized and privatized, so a pillar of recent American pro-life strategy will be severely undermined with its proliferation. Michelle Goldberg and Emi...

As one might suspect, there has been a rather dramatic decline in the number of abortion clinics nationwide in the past few years. Pro-life activists attribute this decline to three things (the first two, I think, having a real and concrete impact): State legislatures passing "TRAP" laws (targeted regulation of abortion providers) that require unnecessary and expensive changes to abortion clinics, which the clinics cannot afford. TRAP laws also sometimes require clinic doctors to have admitting privileges at a local hospital, which local hospitals refuse to provide.  State legislatures "defunding" family planning clinics (that also perform abortions) by passing laws ensuring that no state money goes to places that perform abortions.  Prayer vigils and other forms of direct action at clinics themselves, like the 40 Days for Life campaign.  Because abortion services in the United States are so heavily dependent on the clinic system, attacking clinics legally ...

Does it seem like every day you are hearing or reading about one state or another attempting to pass some sort of legislative restriction on abortion? That's because it is true. The last four years or so have seen a dramatic increase in the number of legislative attempts to do the following: Attack the framework of Roe and Casey directly; North Dakota falls into this category, for example. Chip away at the Roe/Casey jurisprudential   framework, with fetal pain legislation, bans on abortions after 20 weeks, and so on. This kind of legislation does not directly defy the Supreme Court's major abortion decisions-- although they are inconsistent with them-- but attempt to encourage judges to subtly rework the Roe/Casey doctrine. This is what pro-life activists successfully achieved with the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 and the Supreme Court case Gonzales v. Carhart.   Enact regulations that, on the surface, look like they are consistent with Roe/Casey  ...

The coat hanger as a symbol and weapon in abortion politics is back-- or did it ever go away? In an earlier post, I talked about the symbolic power of the coat hanger for pro-choice activists, regardless of how widely it was used in actual self-abortions. Pro-life activists tend to miss the point of the coat hanger-- the question is not how often coat hangers were actually used before the constitutionalization of abortion in 1973, but how the coat hanger symbolically represents the desperation of women to have abortions and the lengths to which they will go to obtain one-- like using coat hangers, knitting needles, wires, etc. Especially for poor and working-class women, it is undisputed that many women experienced danger, pain, injury, and death in undergoing an assisted or self-induced abortion. And then there's Erick Erickson, RedState blogger and pundit. He appeared to display a superlative level of willful obtuseness and sadism while gloating over the recent pro-life le...

Speaking of Mississippi (see my last post), the fight goes on over the state's only abortion clinic, in Jackson. As you know, the Mississippi government is trying to implement regulations that would make it impossible for the Jackson Women's Health Organization to stay open. The status of the clinic is in limbo while the state and the clinic battle it out in court. In the meantime, two developments: First, the governor, Phil Bryant, committed a gaffe, which in American politics means he told the truth. At a pro-life event, he stated the obvious : He wants to shut down the Jackson clinic. To be fair, it is not clear that he meant that his support and defense of the current Mississippi regulations is driven primarily by a desire to shut down the clinic. Governor Bryant theoretically could have a parallel desire to make the abortion process safer for women. It does seem a bit of a stretch. What marks the Mississippi regulations as "TRAPs"(Targeted Regulations of...

The country of Turkey is dealing with its own kind of TRAP law, it seems. In reproductive politics, the term "TRAP" refers to Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers-- regulations that ostensibly improve the safety of abortion as a medical procedure, but in reality serve to raise the expense and difficulty of providing abortions. By adding requirements, such as surgery-center quality facilities, which are nice but medically unnecessary, abortion clinics are driven out of business, limiting access to abortion. One type of TRAP is to focus on the medical credentials of those providing abortions. In Mississippi, for example, the state is attempting to implement a requirement that all abortion doctors have admitting privileges to a local hospital. The problem is, all of the local hospitals around the sole  abortion clinic, in Jackson, refuse to provide admitting privileges, either because they are pro-life or are intimidated by pro-life activists and government officials. As...

The coat hanger made its appearance-- or reappearance-- in American culture this week in two odd ways. First, the show American Horror Story -- which defies brief description-- recently featured a woman attempting to perform a self-abortion with a wire coat hanger. You'll have to read the Salon article about the episode, but, intentionally or not, the show's producers built a case for abortion-as-necessary so over the top that it almost  undermines itself. Second, the owner of a dry cleaning business in Ohio placed pro-life messages on the coat hangers that go back to customers with their clothes. The owner of the business seemed genuinely obtuse regarding the symbolism at work, although there is some evidence that people had been complaining about the hanger messages for a couple of years. A blogger who broke the story called this "the worst marketing decision ever." I posted a link to the article on a Facebook page I maintain for my students, and one of them...

I saw this headline as I was reading the news about reproductive politics: " Bishop, pro-lifers concerned that abortion may widen in Ireland. " The headline is from an article in the Catholic News Service. The pro-life activists and Catholic religious leaders quoted in the article say all of the things one would expect. In particular, they take the position that the recent controversy over Ireland's abortion law and concomitant guidelines for physicians are clear enough as is and therefore do not need to be revised-- and were not the cause of Dr. Savita Halappanavar's death from a miscarriage. Like many people, I've been watching and analyzing events in Ireland with close interest, and perhaps we are getting to diminishing returns in discussing it. Still, it seems to continue to yield insights about reproductive politics generally. For example, the situation in Ireland shows how the terms of the debate over reproductive politics can differ so widely from co...

The state of Mississippi has enacted a classic "TRAP" law and it might shut down the state's only abortion clinic. A TRAP law is a targeted regulation of an abortion provider-- essentially, imposing regulatory requirements on an abortion clinic that the clinic cannot meet. Instead of directly outlawing abortion, one regulates abortion providers out of existence. The regulations are framed as common sense medical protections for the women that would receive abortions. This is a popular conceit and a favorite of pro-life activists, who charge that the uncaring abortion industry injures many women through shoddy medical practices. Mississippi's version would achieve its intended effect by requiring all abortion doctors operating in the state to have hospital privileges, on the premise that this would be useful in case a problem occurred during the abortion procedure that would require a women to receive emergency or follow-up treatment at a hospital.  The pr...

Reporters, analysts, and advocates are all discussing newly released abortion data from the Centers for Decease Control and Prevention (CDC): After years of holding steady, new Center for Disease Control  data  shows that the United States abortion rate has fallen to an all-time low. It dropped 5 percent between 2008 and 2009, the most recent years for which data is available, the largest decline in the past decade. (Source: The Washington Post )  So, why did abortions go down so much between 2008 and 2009? Analysts and pundits have offered the following explanations: Better contraception = fewer abortions. More women are using more effective methods of contraception. As a result, fewer pregnancies that do occur are unwanted, and therefore fewer pregnancies are terminated. A recent, much-discussed study indicated that, when women have greater access to more effective contraception-- when it was provided for free-- pregnancy and abortion rates went down. From th...

The death of Dr. Savita Halappanavar in an Irish hospital is provoking a great deal of analysis and argument. The editor in chief of RH Reality Check , Jodi Jacobson, wrote two insightful articles. Among her observations: The unwillingness of Irish politicians to create clear legal guidelines for abortion in life-threatening situations is unacceptable. In Dr. Halappanavar's case, however, the primary problem was that she was a patient in a Catholic hospital. Given the clear medical needs of Dr. Halappanavar, Catholic doctrine , and not Irish law, was the primary culprit in causing Dr. Halappanavar's death. This is not an isolated case: In other countries with restrictive abortion laws (and cultures), women have died as a result of being denied an abortion. Could this happen in the United States? One would think, "no," given our relatively open laws and high public support for life-saving abortion care. But consider Jacobson's suggestion: This might have...

This post is the first of a two-part discussion on how abortion services are provided in the United States and how that model might be improved. The right of abortion in the United States is a 'negative' right: A government's power to prevent a woman from obtaining an abortion is limited. Put another way, the right of abortion in the United States is a right of government non-interference. It is not, however, a right to  abortion: Governments are not required to help women obtain  abortions, only stay out of the way. It falls on individual women, civic groups, and the market to determine how easy or difficult it is for women in practice  to access abortion services. Since Roe v. Wade  in 1973, pro-choice activists, journalists, and scholars have noted that abortion access has been spotty, in particular for poor women and women who live in rural areas. A long-standing topic of discussion in the pro-choice community is how to improve access. In recent years on...