News & Commentary

The last two weeks have been phenomenal weeks for all of the reproductive justice and abortion rights bills making their way through the state legislature. After a long wait, we finally saw movement on four bills addressing women's reproductive health. Two anti-abortion bills were soundly defeated and two bills supporting women’s reproductive rights were passed in both chambers of the legislature.

This Wednesday, May 13th, the Judiciary Committee will hear testimony on two anti-abortion bills.  Testimony for the two bills will be heard at 1:00 in Room 438 in the Statehouse. If you’re able to join us on Wednesday, please wear pink to show your support for defeating these bills. 

A few weeks ago, Girls actress Jemima Kirke shared her abortion story with Draw the Line – a national campaign launched in 2012 by the Center for Reproductive Rights. Her abortion narrative is common – her life wasn’t “conducive for raising a happy, healthy child.”  Kirke was frank about her experience, focusing on the financial toll seeking an abortion took on her, as well as the isolation that she felt after the abortion. Kirke’s shame about being pregnant drove her to pay for her abortion procedure out of pocket. Paying for the abortion herself meant emptying her bank account and forgoing the anesthesia because she couldn’t afford the additional cost. Towards the end of her video Kirke makes a profound statement, linking stigma to the inaccessibility of abortion: "It's the obstacles and the stigma that makes [abortion] not completely unavailable...and that's the tricky part. We think we have free choice...but then there are these little hoops we have to jump through to get them."

Update: LD 1013 becomes law!

Indiana has been in the news a lot recently, and, other than the NCAA basketball tournament, none of it has been good.

On Monday, RH Reality Check published the first article in their “Women, Incarcerated” series. This first article focuses on one former prisoner’s experience with a high-risk pregnancy, forced induced labor, and shackling, all while in prison. The woman in question, Keeley Schenwar, was arrested in the spring of 2013 – the same day she found out she was pregnant. Schenwar had been struggling with addiction and had been in and out of jail several times for crimes related to drug dependency. For her last offense – stealing from Walgreen’s – she was sentenced to a year in Logan Correctional Center.  

RH Reality, a daily publication providing news, commentary, and analysis on reproductive health and reproductive justice issues, just published a podcast that tackles the explosion of the so-called religious freedom bills that have been popping up all over the country. This podcast might be of particular interest to those of us here in Maine because, during this legislation session, we’re facing with a Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of our own.

Senate Democrats have threatened to pull their support from a bipartisan anti-trafficking bill this week. The reason? They just found out that anti-abortion provisions were slipped into the bill language without their knowledge.

The editorial board at the Portland Press Herald just published an editorial expressing their support for LD 319. I wrote about this bill in a post a couple of weeks ago.