News & Commentary

A trial began yesterday for a lawsuit that challenges Alaska’s regulations that restrict abortions for low-income women. The lawsuit was filed by the ACLU, the Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Susan Orlansky, an Anchorage attorney, on behalf of Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest. It takes issue with a 2013 regulation that circumvents a 2001 decision by the Alaska Supreme Court ordering the state Medicaid program to cover all medically necessary abortions. 

On Monday, Rep. Joyce “Jay” McCreight, a new representative from Harpswell, introduced the bill LD 319: An Act to Strengthen the Economic Stability of Qualified Maine Citizens by Expanding Coverage of Reproductive Health Care and Family Services. The bill title is long, but the goal of the bill is simple. If passed, LD 319 will allow uninsured, under-insured, and low-income women to access important preventative health care services such as cancer screenings, annual exams, Pap tests, birth control, and STD testing. The bill would provide publicly funded preventative health care to adults who are at or below 209% of the federal poverty level, which translates into approximately $23,000/year for a household of one.

On Monday, President Obama rolled out his plan for the next year’s federal budget. The budget plan includes two specific gains in the area of women’s reproductive health care.

Advocates for Youth – an organization that advocates for the reproductive rights of young people – has produced a new play called Out of Silence: Abortion Stories from the 1 in 3 Campaign. The play, designed for use on college campuses, is a dramatization of 14 stories submitted to the Advocates for Youth’s 1 in 3 Campaign, a grassroots movement invested in the stigma-defeating power of storytelling.

Update: On the night of January 21, Congressional leadership decided to pull the vote on a 20-week abortion ban scheduled for today. They instead plan to vote on H.R. 7, "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion," which threatens women’s health and access to abortion by denying access to health insurance coverage that includes coverage of abortion beyond the most narrow of circumstances. The ACLU will oppose all attempts to interfere with reproductive rights.

The bill titles for Maine's upcoming legislative session were published this week, and we’re now getting a sense for what our reproductive rights fights are going to look like for the next few months. As far as we can tell, we’ve got two bills related to reproductive rights and one bill related to religious freedom that might have implications for reproductive rights. One bill is proactive – i.e., expanding and protecting reproductive rights. We'll be on the defensive on the other two bills that threaten to restrict reproductive rights.

In comparison to 2013, 2014 brought us a reduction in the amount of anti-abortion bills that went before state legislatures. It’s early yet, but it looks like 2015 will see a re-opening of the floodgates for legislation that restricts abortion. Anti-abortion advocates in at least nine states have prefiled bills that would unnecessarily regulate and restrict abortion. 

In late July of this year, Tamara Loerstcher went to a Eau Claire, Wisconsin hospital seeking medical treatment for her untreated thyroid condition. Loerstcher had suspicions that she was pregnant – she was also using this hospital trip to get confirmation about her pregnancy. She was uninsured; she did not have a primary care physician. Loerstcher, who had used drugs in the recent past, disclosed her drug history to hospital workers. When the hospital workers found out that Loerstcher was 14 weeks pregnant, they had her placed in jail for endangering her fetus. You can read more details about her story here.

Earlier this week, the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology published a study done by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco that investigated post-abortion complication rates. Between 2009 and 2010, researchers traced rates of major complications following 54,911 legal abortions. They defined major complications as issues that would require “hospital admission, surgery or blood transfusion.” Out of 54,911 abortion procedures, only 126 required treatment for major complications, or .23 percent. The press release accompanying the published study likened the safety of legal abortion procedures to the safety of colonoscopies – major complications occur in both procedures less than a quarter percent of the time.