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Inside the Supreme Court’s Negotiations and Compromise on Idaho’s Abortion Ban

CNN, July 29, 2024

The Supreme Court began the year poised to build on its 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade and to deliver a new blow to abortion access. In January, the court took the extraordinary step of letting Idaho enforce its ban on abortion with an exception only to prevent the death of a pregnant woman, despite an ongoing challenge from the Biden administration arguing that it intruded on federal protections for emergency room care. During the April 24 hearing, signs that the conservative bloc was splintering emerged. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who had earlier voted to let the Idaho ban be enforced, challenged the state lawyer’s assertions regarding the ban’s effect on complications that threatened a woman’s reproductive health. She said she was “shocked” that he hedged on whether certain grave complications could be addressed in an emergency room situation. Barrett’s concerns echoed, to some extent, those of the three liberals, all women, who had pointed up the dilemma for pregnant women and their physicians. Judging from the public arguments alone, there appeared a chance the court’s four women might vote against Idaho, and the five remaining conservatives, all men, in favor of the state and its abortion prohibition. But at the justices’ private vote two days later, Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh shattered any split along gender lines. They expressed an openness to ending the case without resolving it. They worked with Barrett on a draft opinion that would dismiss the case as “improvidently granted.” Barrett had come to believe the case should not have been heard before lower court judges had resolved what she perceived to be discrepancies over when physicians could perform emergency abortions, even if a threat to the woman’s life was not imminent. She would eventually deem acceptance of the case a “miscalculation” and suggest she had been persuaded by Idaho’s arguments that its emergency rooms would become “federal abortion enclaves governed not by state law, but by physician judgment, as enforced by the United States’s mandate to perform abortions on demand.” In essence, Barrett, along with Roberts and Kavanaugh, were acknowledging they had erred in the original action favoring Idaho, something the court is usually loath to admit. They attributed it to a misunderstanding of the dueling parties’ claims – a misunderstanding not shared by the other six justices, who remained firm about which side should win.

Iowa Abortion Ban Taking Effect as Residents Flee Out of State for Care

The Washington Post, July 26, 2024

Planned Parenthood says it will continue providing abortions in Iowa but only in the very limited circumstances allowed by the state’s six-week abortion ban, which goes into effect at 8 a.m. Monday after a year of legal wrangling. The law restricts the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy, the point when fetal cardiac activity can be detected, with the only exceptions being cases of rape, incest, a fetal abnormality “incompatible with life” or if the life of the mother is in danger. Iowa had previously permitted abortions until 22 weeks of pregnancy. Reproductive care groups in neighboring states where the procedure remains legal are already seeing an influx of patients from Iowa. The Chicago Abortion Fund received more than 60 support requests from Iowa residents during the first three weeks of July, a 165 percent increase over previous months. The Iowa Supreme Court’s sweeping decision on June 28 left abortion rights with the lowest level of constitutional protection, a ruling that reversed an injunction on the 2023 statute and paved the way for the near-total ban to take effect. The court on Monday declined a request for a rehearing from Planned Parenthood, the state’s largest abortion provider and one of the plaintiffs in the case. The following day, a district court judge lifted the injunction. “Our hearts are heavy as Iowans have lost the ability to make personal, private medical decisions,” said Ruth Richardson, president of Planned Parenthood North Central States. “We will continue to fight to restore their bodily autonomy.” Richardson estimates that the number of abortions performed in Iowa will drop by at least 97 percent starting Monday morning. More than 4,000 procedures were done in the state in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a policy and research organization that supports abortion rights.

Are Patients From Florida Going Elsewhere for Abortions – Or Staying Pregnant?

The 19th, July 30, 2024

Jennifer knew she couldn’t have a second child. She already has a 10-year-old daughter. They don’t have money to spare. Her husband works long, unpredictable hours managing a condominium and she recently lost her job. They only have one car, which her husband drives to work; how would she make it to prenatal visits? If she was pregnant, could she find a job that would give her the flexibility to leave early to pick up her daughter after school or go on maternity leave? So when Jennifer’s period was two days late and her pregnancy test was positive, she and her husband had a conversation. They were a team. They would figure this out together. And once they did, it was obvious for both of them that what their family needed was an abortion. But it wasn’t until she called a clinic in Miami that Jennifer learned that a law that took effect May 1 in Florida made abortion illegal after six weeks of pregnancy. Stunned, she made an appointment for the following Wednesday. If there was even a chance she had miscounted, and that her pregnancy was past six weeks, Jennifer would be out of options. She didn’t know if abortion was legal later than six weeks in nearby states, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t have the means to travel, or someone to watch her daughter or pick her up from summer camp. Jennifer resigned herself to the fact that if she couldn’t get an abortion in Miami, she would have to carry out her pregnancy. “I can’t afford to do that,” she said. “It would mean a lot of sacrifices.” It has been nearly three months since Florida’s six-week abortion ban took effect, so it is still too early to discern how many people have been denied abortions and may have had to carry unplanned pregnancies to term. Data from Georgia and South Carolina, which currently ban abortion at six weeks, and Ohio, which used to until that law was blocked, suggests that such laws cut legal abortion availability roughly in half. Florida voters will have a chance to overturn their law this November through a ballot initiative that would amend the state’s constitution to protect abortion rights. But until then, signs suggest that the state’s six-week ban is layering distinct new challenges onto the patchwork of workarounds that patients and health providers have had to resort to since Roe v. Wade fell in 2022.

States Break Out New Tactics To Thwart Abortion Ballot Measures

Politico, July 31, 2024

Former President Donald Trump and much of the GOP insist abortion be left to “the will of the people” at the state level. Anti-abortion groups and Republican state officials are working to make sure that doesn’t happen. In nearly every state where the question of abortion rights could be put to a popular vote this November, conservatives are deploying several strategies – from suing to have signatures thrown out in Montana and South Dakota to refusing to count signatures in Arkansas – as they attempt to block ballot initiatives that would restore or expand access to the procedure. The aggressive moves underscore the challenging position anti-abortion activists face more than two years after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. They have suffered a string of losses in red and purple states – including Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan and Ohio – that voted decisively in favor of abortion rights. Now, in an effort to blunt one of progressives’ most effective post-Roe tools, Republican officials and anti-abortion groups are filing a new wave of lawsuits just ahead of summer deadlines for counting and verifying signatures in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Montana and South Dakota. As these legal and bureaucratic battles play out, Republican candidates from Trump on down the ticket are maintaining a careful silence on abortion. And when the issue does arise, most stick to the position recently enshrined in the party platform: that the GOP should “protect and defend a vote of the people, from within the states, on the issue of life.” Yet many conservatives seeking to block the ballot measures argue that voters should not be allowed to weigh in directly on when and whether people can terminate a pregnancy. “We are working to make sure it doesn’t get on the ballot in the first place,” said Jill Norgaard, a board member of Arizona Right to Life and former Republican member of the Arizona House of Representatives. “When you enshrine something in the state constitution, it ties the hands of future legislators. If this is in the constitution, there’s no way to back it out. It’s literally stuck.”

Woman Sues Kansas Hospital Over Alleged Denial of Emergency Abortion

ABC News, July 31, 2024

A Missouri woman is suing a Kansas hospital where she says she was denied an emergency abortion after she went into premature labor at 18 weeks of pregnancy, alleging she was denied emergency health-stabilizing care. The lawsuit comes a year after a government investigation by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that hospitals in Missouri and Kansas violated federal law when they refused to provide Mylissa Farmer with abortion care. Farmer is now suing the University of Kansas Health System and the hospital authority that governs it under a law – Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, EMTALA – that federally mandates emergency stabilizing care for all patients in hospitals funded by Medicare. In a lawsuit, Farmer alleged that she suffered preterm premature rupture of membranes – when a pregnant woman’s water breaks before the pregnancy is viable – in August 2022 and she had lost all her amniotic fluid by the time she arrived at the Kansas Hospital. She alleges she had been sent to the hospital after being turned away from a Missouri hospital due to the state’s abortion ban. Without treatment, she was at risk of severe blood loss, sepsis, loss of fertility and death, according to the suit. Farmer alleged that physicians at the hospital “refused to perform even routine emergency checks such as taking Ms. Farmer’s temperature and assessing per pain,” according to the lawsuit. Physicians at the hospital told her of the risks she faced without an emergency abortion, but still turned her away without any treatment, Farmer alleged. Farmer got abortion care two days later in Illinois, but her prolonged miscarriage “caused extensive damage to her health,” according to the suit. She is seeking a “declaration that the hospital violated federal and Kansas law by turning her away and financial compensation for the harm she suffered,” the National Women’s Law Center, which is representing her, said in a statement. “What happened to me should never happen to anyone. Denying me care not only put my life at risk but inflicted irreparable trauma, physical and mental suffering, and financial hardship on me and my husband,” Farmer said in a statement Tuesday.

ICYMI: In Case You Missed It

Our roundup of this term’s #SCOTUS cases details just how harmful some of the decisions were to women – and what we’re watching for in the next term. https://t.co/UFflmw9kHd

— National Partnership (@NPWF) July 30, 2024

 

 

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Note: The information contained in this publication reflects media coverage of women’s health issues and does not necessarily reflect the views of the National Partnership for Women & Families.