From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Progressives in Southern Cities Vow To Protect Abortion Access
Date June 26, 2022 12:05 AM
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[Some local officials in the region are taking steps to do what
they can to protect peoples ability to end unwanted pregnancies. ]
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PROGRESSIVES IN SOUTHERN CITIES VOW TO PROTECT ABORTION ACCESS  
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Elisha Brown
June 24, 2022
Facing South
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_ Some local officials in the region are taking steps to do what they
can to protect people's ability to end unwanted pregnancies. _

Austin City Council members will introduce an abortion
decriminalization resolution in July. , (Official photos.

 

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned _Roe v. Wade_ on Friday, striking
down nearly 50 years of precedent that secured a constitutional right
to abortion. The long-awaited ruling
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_Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization_, a case that
challenged the constitutionality of Mississippi's 15-week abortion
ban, was authored by Justice Samuel Alito, who called _Roe_
"egregiously wrong from the start" and said it's time to "return the
issue of abortion to the people's elected representatives." 

The decision makes accessing safe abortion — already difficult
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in most Southern states — much harder. But some local officials in
the region are taking steps to do what they can to protect people's
ability to end unwanted pregnancies. 

Minutes after the high court handed down its decision, Austin City
Council members announced they would call a special meeting to
decriminalize abortion in the Texas capital. Austin City Councilors
José "Chito" Vela and Vanessa Fuentes will introduce The GRACE Act
(Guarding the Right to Abortion Care for Everyone) the week of July
18. The proposal directs the police department to make criminal
enforcement related to abortion its lowest priority and restricts city
funds and staff from being used to investigate, catalog, or report
suspected abortions, Vela's office said in a statement. The ordinance
now has a total of five sponsors on the 11-member council, including
Mayor Steve Adler. 

"Unlike the conservative Supreme Court or the Texas state government,
the Austin City Council serves the interests of our people," Vela
said. "Banning necessary medical care like abortion endangers women's
health. The City of Austin will not be complicit."

Austin officials are not alone in taking action to protect abortion
access in the post-_Roe_ South. Days after Politico published the high
court’s leaked draft opinion
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last month, several progressive prosecutors in major Southern cities
released statements vowing to do what they can to protect abortion
access. District attorneys in Orleans Parish
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Louisiana; Durham County
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North Carolina; Davidson County,
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Tennessee; DeKalb County
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Georgia; and Fairfax County
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Virginia, said they will make prosecuting people under state
anti-abortion laws a low priority in their communities.

In addition, district attorneys in five major counties in Texas —
Bexar, Dallas, Fort Bend, Nueces, and Travis — released a joint
statement
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earlier this year saying they will not "prosecute or criminalize
personal healthcare decisions." They were responding to Starr
County's April murder indictment of 26-year-old Lizelle Herrera for an
alleged self-induced abortion
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which was dropped following public outcry. It was unclear why she was
arrested in the first place, as Texas' criminal homicide statute
explicitly excludes abortion. The state currently has in place a
so-called Heartbeat Act, which prohibits essentially all abortions
after six weeks of pregnancy but is enforced through private civil
lawsuits. Now that _Roe_ has fallen, the state's Human Life Protection
Act of 2021 will also take effect, and that does bring criminal
charges for anyone who performs an abortion.

Besides Austin, other Southern city councils have also passed or are
considering passing ordinances to protect abortion access. In March,
the council in Durham, North Carolina, passed a resolution
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declaring the city a "sexual and reproductive health care safe zone,
ensuring the people's right to reproductive freedom, and naming these
rights as fundamental." Abortion rights advocates say official
statements like this have real power. "Anytime you have a local
government or elected official making such a positive statement around
people seeking abortion, it works to help break down the stigma that
surrounds abortion," Tara Romano, executive director of Pro Choice
North Carolina, told Facing South. 

The city council in Raleigh, North Carolina, is also considering
action to protect abortion access. During a public meeting earlier
this month, abortion rights advocates made a number of requests
including buffer zones and noise ordinances to protect the city’s
two clinics, as well as a policy barring the Raleigh Police Department
from collecting data stored on menstrual cycle tracking apps,
according to the News & Observer
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The city attorney confirmed that some protective rules can be put in
place. Council is now considering further action.

Preempt the preempters?

Most of the officials speaking out in favor of abortion access are
concentrated in liberal urban enclaves, but so are clinics that
perform abortions.

In North Carolina, for example, most abortions performed in 2020 took
place in counties with big cities, according to the latest data
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from the state Department of Health and Human Services. Of the 30,004
abortions recorded in the state that year, 11,098 took place in
Mecklenburg County, whose seat is Charlotte; 6,752 in Wake County,
whose seat is Raleigh; and 2,800 in Guilford County, whose seat is
Greensboro. Those cities are the state's three most populous. State
data shows
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a similar pattern in Texas, where most abortions are performed in
Harris, Bexar, and Tarrant counties, home to Houston, San Antonio, and
Fort Worth, respectively.

But local efforts to protect abortion rights in the face of a state
push to restrict them could lead to conflict involving state
preemption laws, which block local ordinances from taking effect or
that dismantle ones already on the books. In recent years, liberal
cities in conservative Southern states have increasingly become the
targets of preemption
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ranging from the minimum wage to LGBTQ protections. For instance,
North Carolina's infamous and since-overturned anti-trans "bathroom
bill"
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by the Republican-controlled legislature and signed by former Gov. Pat
McCroy (R) in 2016 was a state preemption law, crafted to negate a
Charlotte ordinance that said people were free to use public restrooms
that align with their gender identity. 

Anthony Michael Kreis is a law professor at Georgia State University
who specializes in the law's treatment of vulnerable people. Abortion
protections passed by city councils in anti-abortion states "could
play out in a number of ways," he said. For one thing, he noted, it's
hard for states to make local entities affirmatively do something that
they don't want to do. However, anti-abortion state officials could
sue local governments or, in an extreme case, even create statewide
abortion bureaus to enforce restrictions, Kreis said.

But at the same time, abortion rights advocates are eyeing preemption
as a possible solution to protecting access to abortion —
specifically, medication abortion
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which is increasingly being targeted by state legislatures. The
argument holds that, because the FDA is the federal agency solely
responsible for regulating drugs, states don't have the power to
overrule its approval of abortion medication. The FDA approved
mifepristone, one of the abortion pills used along with misoprostol,
in 2000, and it's now available in all 50 states.

Rachel Rebouché, interim dean of Temple University's Beasley School
of Law, co-authored a forthcoming law review article
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post-_Roe_ legal landscape. She recently told Kaiser Health News
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that federal preemption is a "pretty novel argument for the abortion
space, and it hasn't been tested out, but I believe it's possible to
argue."

Elisha Brown is a staff writer at Facing South and a former Julian
Bond Fellow. She previously worked as a news assistant at The New York
Times, and her reporting has appeared in The Daily Beast, The
Atlantic, and Vox.

Facing South is the online magazine and weekly email update
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Institute for Southern Studies, featuring investigative reporting and
in-depth analysis of trends across the South. Facing South has earned
a national reputation for exposing abuses of power, holding powerful
interests accountable, and elevating the voices of everyday people
working for change in the South.

* abortion rights
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