Backlash Against the Misogynists

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abortion access, abortion laws, Citigroup, Lyft, Maryland, reproductive health, Texas, Uber, Yelp

According to the Guttmacher Institute, the year 2021 saw the passing of the largest quantity of anti-abortion legislation since 1973, when a woman’s Constitutional right to have an abortion was established in the U.S.  And the U.S. Supreme Court still seems on track to either drastically weaken or overturn Roe v. Wade this summer.  Amid all the depressing news, however, there are some bright spots.  Most of the positive developments are outside of the U.S.—the vocal and successful women’s reproductive rights campaigns in various countries of Latin America, for example.  But a few recent actions in the U.S., including several by companies in the state of Texas, have pushed back against the vicious misogyny of many state legislators and their supporters.

Citigroup, a major financial enterprise with over 8,000 employees in Texas, has announced that it will pay travel costs for any of them who are affected by SB-8.  This is the Texas law that not only bans abortion after six weeks, but also threatens lawsuits against anyone involved in assisting someone to circumvent the law (for example, by facilitating travel of a Texas resident to a more woman-friendly state). 

The transportation companies Lyft and Uber have also announced policies in defiance of SB-8.  They have offered to pay expenses for any of their Texas-based drivers who might get sued for taking a woman to an abortion clinic.

Yelp, the online search and review company, has said that their over 200 employees in Texas will be reimbursed for expenses if they need to travel out of state for abortion care.  Moreover, representatives of Yelp have stated that the reproductive health guarantees offered to their Texas workforce will be extended to their employees in any state who might face “current or future action that restricts access to covered reproductive health care.”  Employees will be able to submit their requests for reimbursement of abortion-related medical expenses directly to Yelp’s health insurance provider, so neither fellow Yelp workers nor officious misogynists trying to enforce SB-8 or similar legislation will be able to track the persons involved.  This latest action builds upon several years of Yelp’s efforts in support of abortion rights.  The company does not allow anti-abortion entities of the “crisis pregnancy center” type to portray themselves neutrally or masquerade as abortion clinics.  And in the months leading up to the passage of SB-8 Yelp offered to double-match employees’ donations to reproductive health rights organizations opposing the legislation.

Yelp and Citigroup will support the expenses of employees in Texas who need to travel out of the state for abortion or other reproductive health needs; Uber and Lyft will cover the expenses of any driver who is sued for transporting a woman to get an abortion.

Meanwhile, back in the state of Maryland legislators are the latest to take a stand in defense of reproductive health rights.  A bill scheduled to take effect July 1 of this year allows nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, and trained physicians’ assistants to perform abortions, requires insurance providers to cover abortion costs, and apportions $3.5 million per year for abortion training.  Maryland’s Republican governor Larry Hogan vetoed the bill, but under the leadership of the Speaker of Maryland’s House of Delegates, Democrat Adrienne A. Jones, the House overrode the veto by a vote of 90 to 46; and the state Senate concurred with a 29 to 15 override.  Maryland joins California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia in permitting abortion to be performed by medical professionals other than physicians, and it is one of sixteen states that provide at least some state funds for abortions.

Sources for this piece include the Guttmacher Institute website and April 10 and April 12 articles in the New York Times.

Adrienne A. Jones, Speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates

Women of Texas: South of the Border for Reproductive Rights

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abortion, abortion access, abortion laws, Mexico, reproductive health, Supreme Court of Mexico, Texas, U.S. Supreme Court

The U.S. border with Mexico

As anyone knows who follows the status of women’s reproductive rights in the U.S., access to safe, legal abortion is becoming more and more difficult.  Onerous laws are increasingly widespread, especially in Republican-dominated states.  The worst of them is the recently passed Texas SB-8, which prohibits all abortion after fetal heartbeat can be detected (approximately six weeks gestation)—a time at which most women are not even aware that they are pregnant.  Moreover, SB-8 deputizes private citizens to sue not only anyone who performs an abortion, but also anyone who “aids and abets” the procedure, be they clinic staff, counselors, nonprofit employees who arrange financing, even Uber drivers taking women to appointments.  The law has been described as a “bounty hunter system.”  Plaintiffs, who do not have to show any connection to the abortion recipient nor do they even have to live in Texas, are awarded $10,000 plus legal fees if they win their case; successful defendants get nothing.

Abortion rights protest in Washington DC

Health rights activists fear that the Supreme Court, whose three Trump appointees are extremely reactionary, will overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision affirming women’s constitutional right to abortion. In response to appeals to block the Texas law pending judicial review, the Supreme Court ruled 5-to-4 to let the law go into effect. The dissenting justices included the normally quite conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who called SB-8 “not only unusual, but unprecedented,” and said that the law should have been blocked while appeals were underway.  Justice Sonia Sotomayor labeled SB-8 “a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights.”  Justice Elena Kagan called her five colleagues’ refusal to block the Texas law “unreasoned, inconsistent and impossible to defend.”

Justices Sonia Sotomayor (above) and Elena Kagan (below) of the U.S. Supreme Court

On September 9 Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the U.S. Department of Justice was filing a challenge to SB-8, which he called “clearly unconstitutional” in part because it allows individuals to infringe upon the constitutional rights of others.  Meanwhile, however, abortion services in Texas are in complete disarray.  Dr. Bhavik Kumar (a Planned Parenthood physician who is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against SB-8) has had to turn away numerous panicked women whose pregnancies are past the SB-8 cut-off, and he worries that they will have to resort to unsafe means to end their pregnancies.  Dr. Kumar stresses that it’s plain to all who know anything about women’s reproductive decision making that “banning abortion does not change the need for abortion.”  The women Dr. Kumar’s clinic usually helps will have to go elsewhere.

A Great Step Forward in Mexico

Ironically, for many Texas women, the closest accessible, safe, and reasonable abortion possibility might be across the border in Mexico.  At the same time that five U.S. Supreme Court justices are callously displaying their disregard for the safety and constitutional rights of women, on September 7 the Mexican Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, ruled that making abortion a crime is against the constitution.  Mexican Chief Justice Arturo Zaldivar noted that the decision “is a watershed in the history of the rights of all women, especially the most vulnerable.”  The decision opens the way for challenges to the laws in most Mexican states that criminalize abortion, and also allows activists to petition for the release of women jailed for the procedure.  Mexican feminist organizations are hopeful that the twenty-eight states that ban abortion under most circumstances will soon be compelled to join Oaxaca, Hidalgo, Veracruz and Mexico City in allowing first trimester abortion.  Mexico will become the fifth Latin American country (joining Argentina, Cuba, Guyana and Uruguay) to decriminalize the procedure.

Chief Justice Arturo Zaldivar of the Supreme Court of Mexico

Some feminists are fully aware that the unanimous decision of Mexico’s Supreme Court stands in stark contrast to what Justice Sotomayor called the “stunning” irresponsibility of her Supreme Court colleagues in the U.S.  Paula Avila-Guillen, executive director of the Women’s Equality Center, said that the Mexican decision is a bright spot in the fight to protect women’s reproductive rights worldwide.  Avila-Guillen saw reason for optimism in Latin America “even as we see the U.S. Supreme Court and Texas walk women back into darkness.”  She also pointed out that the Mexican court’s decision specifically struck down the state of Coahuila’s anti-abortion law.  Coahuila borders Texas, so it could very well be that Texas women will be among those to benefit from Mexico’s ruling favoring women’s reproductive rights.  Avila-Guillen mused: “Could the safest way for Texan women to have access to a safe, legal abortion soon be to make their way to Mexico?”

(Sources consulted include pieces in The New York Times, Axios, CNN and NPR.)

U.S. Politicians Use Pandemic As Excuse to Attack Abortion Rights

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abortion restrictions, COVID-19, misogyny, pandemic, Supreme Court, Texas, TRAP laws, United States

Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder and CEO of Whole Women’s Health. Miller was the lead plaintiff in suing Texas to stop newly passed extremely restrictive laws designed to force the closure of abortion providers. In 2016 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that those laws were unconstitutional. See the post “Cautious Optimism after a U.S. Supreme Court Decision”

It’s happened again. All reputable commentators are agreed that the medical and social consequences of the coronavirus pandemic will disproportionately affect the poor and people of color. Yet politicians in Texas, Ohio, Mississippi and elsewhere are seizing upon the excuse of the pandemic to make further attacks against the reproductive rights of the most vulnerable populations. Texas, for example, has banned all abortions other than to save the life of the woman on the grounds that abortion is a “non-essential surgical procedure.” First, this ignores the fact that an increasing number of abortions are not surgical at all; rather, they are medical. Moreover, the “non-essential” designation by the Texas attorney general flies in the face of the opinion of the experts of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology, who have issued a statement warning against calling abortion non-essential. On the contrary, these highly-respected physicians say that abortion should be viewed as “an essential component of comprehensive health care” and as such should not be subject to COVID-19 restrictions. But of course, the Texas lawmakers and their ilk are less concerned with the public health of their most vulnerable citizens than they are with pushing through increasingly extreme anti-abortion measures.

Amy Hagstrom Miller (pictured above) is the founder and CEO of the Whole Women’s Health group of clinics, three of which are in Texas. Ms. Miller said that her clinics were forced to cancel more than 150 scheduled abortion appointments in one day, despite the tearful pleas of desperate women who needed the procedure, some of whom had traveled hundreds of miles because many abortion providers in Texas have been forced out of business by the state’s TRAP laws.

Ms. Miller and other reproductive rights advocates and health professionals have noted that it is absurd for the Texas officials to claim that their bans on abortion are intended to free up medical personnel and facilities to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. If it weren’t for draconian restrictions on abortion providers (insisting that the pills used for medical abortion be administered by a physician in person, demanding that patients make two or even three visits to a clinic for ultrasounds and anti-abortion propaganda lectures, for example), clinics could provide early (up to 11 weeks) abortions with one quick visit. Indeed, as some physicians have observed, the procedure for administering early medical abortion could even be handled online. Thus, the rational non-political response would have been to suspend enforcement of the TRAP laws for the duration of the pandemic.

Many women are likely to think that the coming months are not a good time to have another child. Because of the economic impact of the pandemic, which has already caused massive unemployment and especially affects poor and working-class women, the demand for abortion will probably increase. In addition, there are reports that pregnant women are at higher than average risk from COVID-19, especially if they have hypertension, which often occurs during pregnancy, or gestational diabetes. There are also predictions that the pandemic could last for as long as 18 months, particularly if there are two or three waves of infection. In that case some health care systems in underserved regions would be hard-pressed to handle routine medical matters such as prenatal care and childbirth.

In Ms. Miller’s words: “Abortion is essential health care, and it is a time-sensitive service, most especially now in this public health crisis when many people are already financially insecure and futures are uncertain.” She added: “We cannot sit idly by while the state is forcing Texans to be pregnant against their will” (quoted in the Huffington Post).  On March 25, Women’s Whole Health once again sued Texas in federal court. We can only hope that they will be successful. But time is running out for those women whose appointments have been canceled. They will be forced to spend more time, energy, and money in an attempt to secure the procedure in another state that adheres to the ACOG recommendation that abortion be considered an essential part of health care.

As of this writing, it seems that the epidemic has run its course in China with a death toll of under 3,300. In the U.S. projections are grim. A March 25 report from the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation gave an estimate of 40,000 to 160,000 deaths, assuming a nationwide lockdown. One of the reasons for the human tragedy that’s being played out in the U.S. is that many politicians have refused to respond promptly and appropriately to the pandemic. Instead, they see COVID-19 as an opportunity to advance their anti-women agenda by attacking reproductive rights.

Cautious Optimism after a U.S. Supreme Court Decision

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abortion, abortion access, abortion restrictions, anti-abortion movement, reproductive health, Texas, TRAP laws, U.S. Supreme Court, Uruguay

Over the past few days, the news media as well as social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have been abuzz with news of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-to-3 decision in the Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt case. The court struck down the Texas state legislature’s 2013 restrictions on abortion clinics; these restrictions had already caused half the abortion clinics in Texas to close, and threatened many more. A June 27 article in The New York Times called the decision “the court’s most sweeping statement on abortion since Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, which reaffirmed the constitutional right to abortion established in 1973 in Roe v. Wade.”

Justices Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Kagan. There was a gender gap in the 5-to-3 decision. The women justices voted 3-to-0 to throw out the Texas TRAP law; the men voted 3-to-2 in favor of the Texas restrictions.

People interested in women’s reproductive health have heralded the decision as signaling the likely end of most of the so-called TRAP laws (targeted restrictions on abortion providers) so beloved by right-wing state legislators all over the country. Indeed, anti-abortion forces view Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt as a shocking defeat. (The Washington Superior Court ruling against the Skagit County hospital district for failing to provide abortions that I was so pleased about last week seems like very small potatoes in comparison.)

I have to admit that when I first heard of the Court’s decision, I was as ecstatic as anyone else, and did not particularly cavil at the descriptions of Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt as being a death-blow to the U.S. anti-abortion movement. Upon reflection, however, my enthusiasm has become more measured. Such court decisions are welcome, of course. But history has shown us that one cannot rely upon the courts to ensure fair treatment. After all, the Miranda v. Arizona court decision of 1966 (which limited police powers and required that arrested persons be informed of their right to a court-appointed lawyer) has not notably resulted in equal justice for the poor. And anyone who knows anything about the recent history of abortion in the U.S. is well aware that neither Roe v. Wade nor Planned Parenthood v. Casey ensured access to abortion for women of scarce resources outside of certain major metropolitan centers.

Anti-abortion zealots are already regrouping, and strategizing about what their next moves will be. Their onslaught against the health rights of women over the past few decades has been unceasing, and there is no reason to assume that they will view Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt as anything other than a temporary setback. The TRAP laws have certainly been an effective tactic. But women are also denied access to abortion through intimidation of health care professionals and patients at the doors of clinics, cuts in funding to clinics that provide reproductive health services to the poor, and the failure of more than a handful of medical schools to require their students to learn procedures to terminate pregnancy.

It is, of course, far better for abortion to be legal than illegal. But that is not the end of the story. Sometimes a place where abortion is illegal can have better access than certain other places (such as many rural regions in the U.S.) where it is legal. Take, for example, the South American country Uruguay, which in 2012 became the second country in Latin America and the Caribbean (after Cuba) to legalize abortion under a broad range of circumstances. Interestingly, already for a decade or so before legalization, Uruguay had succeeded in drastically reducing maternal mortality from unsafe abortions by means of “before” and “after” appointments for poor women at the public hospital. Physicians would see women contemplating illegal abortions to instruct them in the correct administration of misoprostol/Cytotec, though they would not provide information on how to acquire the drug (which in any case was freely available over the internet). After the women self-aborted chemically, Uruguayan physicians would confirm completeness of the procedure and if necessary perform a uterine aspiration if there were any complications. This subtle skirting of Uruguay’s abortion prohibitions has come to be known as the “Uruguay Model,” and has been informally adopted by doctors in other countries with restrictive abortion laws, such as Uganda, Tanzania, and elsewhere. See the article by Patrick Adams in The New York Times.