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Nearly everywhere I go, I get asked about the changing abortion landscape, and what we can be doing to protect women’s healthcare across the nation. To me, it’s important to recognize that overturning Roe was the front door to restricting women’s access to abortion. And now, we’ve seen Republicans try to use the back door in 5 big ways:
The first is through IVF and family planning. Legislators — including in our race —have sponsored legislation that says an embryo is a person, which definitionally threatens IVF, as we saw with the Alabama Supreme Court decision. But what’s less understood is that these same proposals could also impact contraception: Many of the same legal issues that would prohibit IVF also affect women’s access to birth control pills, IUDs, and Plan B.
The second category is threats to the medication used to carry out abortions. Right now, we’re waiting for a decision from the Supreme Court that could overturn FDA approval of Mifepristone, the drug most commonly used in abortions. If you’re in a state that has legal abortion – like Michigan, where we’ve codified Roe into our Constitution – but clinics can’t get the medications necessary, then you don’t have real access.
The third category is restricting a woman’s right to travel to another state for an abortion. For nearly a year, Senator Tuberville from Alabama held up over 400 senior military confirmations as he tried to restrict the Pentagon from providing women servicemembers with paid leave and travel reimbursement to go to another state to receive abortion healthcare.
Number four is outright bans on abortion in individual states. Right now, 14 states have either banned or have major restrictions on abortions. Luckily, we have seen efforts in Michigan, in Kansas, in Ohio, and other states to protect abortion, but we still have states carrying out full abortion bans — in Idaho, Texas, Arizona. It’s a constant attack at the state-level, which is why we need federal legislation.
And the fifth category is threats to life-saving care for pregnant women. As we saw in the Supreme Court just this week, it is now an open question in America whether a woman can walk into an ER and have the doctor prioritize the life of the mother over the life of the fetus. We’re now seeing women in the middle of miscarriages being told to wait in hospital parking lots until they’re sick enough for doctors to care for them.
The newest example of this approach is in the Supreme Court this week. The case the Court heard this week came out of Idaho, where the state legislature passed a ban criminalizing nearly all abortion, including in situations where abortion is necessary to treat threats to the mother’s health. So for example, a patient can rush to the hospital, at risk of losing their reproductive organs, but doctors will still have to deny that patient care.
That reality clashes with a federal law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which guarantees stabilizing treatment for emergency medical conditions at virtually all hospitals. For many conditions, abortion is the necessary “stabilizing treatment.”
The Constitution’s Supremacy Clause means that federal law should override state law, but the Court nevertheless let the Idaho ban go into effect. Idaho’s new regime has had consequences. In just a few months, 6 pregnant patients have had to be airlifted to other states to receive emergency care. At least two hospitals have shut down their maternity units and one survey indicated that 22% of OB-GYNs have left the state since laws became more restrictive.
It’s yet another proof point that the extreme anti-choice movement was never going to stop with overturning Roe. So while Michigan voters made their voices heard on reproductive freedom in 2022, we need that same energy in 2024 because the reality is that these threats to abortion care across the country could still affect us. In the Senate, I’ll vote to protect the rights that Michiganders voted for and restore the Roe standard nationwide.
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Thank you,
Elissa
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