New abortion rights heroes are emerging
New abortion rights heroes are emerging
An all-trimester clinic will be a safe-haven
Welcome to a big Sunday edition of Progress Report!
We just lived through a dismal week, even by post-2016 standards, and it’s likely that the clouds are still only starting to gather above us. These are increasingly bleak times, and so while silver linings don’t outshine the surrounding darkness, it’s critical to remember that a majority of Americans are outraged and many are already engaging in mutual aid.
On that note, I’m grateful and proud to say that together we have raised nearly $80,000 for abortion funds and clinics across the country since Monday evening. In an ideal world, health care would be freely available to everyone and these funds wouldn’t ever be necessary, but it’s been heartening to see people confront the reality of our dystopia head-on and help strangers entrapped by the systemic cruelty of our system.
Today, we’re going to examine the potential impact of the pending ruling with an abortion care doctor and activist, who is getting ready to launch a women-owned facility that will be even more critical in the months and potentially years to come.
Then, we’ll go over some election results, political headlines, and policy updates.
Thank you to our latest crowd-funding donors: Aine, Ron, Sandra, Stephen, and Tracy!
Diane Horvath was in Florida, wrapping up at a conference of abortion providers of all places, when she saw the news. A leaked draft of a decision written in February indicated that the Supreme Court plans to fully overturn Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion, and intends to do so with extreme prejudice. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion called Roe “egregiously wrong” and labeled a woman that ends her pregnancy a “murderess.”
“Using language like what's in that decision,” Horvath, a doctor who has spent 16 years working with women to end their pregnancies, says. “It creates an environment where it's very easy to perpetrate violence against people who need abortions, but also people who are helping them, and also to pass laws with a vigilante component, like SB 8 in Texas.”
There will be a myriad of consequences that arise from the end of Roe and a blitz of strict anti-abortion laws that will both go into effect as soon as the ruling is handed down and quickly pass red state legislatures in the months that follow. Regrettably, Democrats in power seem unable to do anything about the end of national abortion rights, and the coming fall elections, with so many states gerrymandered, offer little hope for relief in the near future.
First and foremost, the end of Roe will mean that more women will die from complications with their pregnancies or botched attempts to end them. Each loss will be tragic and infuriating, and just how many tragedies take place will be dictated by an ongoing war between emboldened right-wing legislators that pass ever more draconian laws and the advocates that devise underground workarounds to evade those laws.
The former has already started: Missouri is moving to ban IUDs and Plan B, a bill is advancing in Louisiana to make abortion a crime of homicide, and even contraception may be on the chopping block in some states.
Abortion medication is already becoming one of the more intense battlefields. As states pass laws to outlaw mifepristone and misoprostol, organizations like Jane’s Due Process have responded by creating anonymous guerrilla drop-off services to evade law enforcement and deliver pharmaceuticals to those that need them. As bans spread, more pills will be ordered from pharmacies abroad, and as enforcement is stepped up, pro-choice activists will find new ways to help those that seek to end their pregnancies.
“There will be mailing [pills] to drop sites at state borders so people can drive and pick them up outside of their states, there's talk about mobile clinics that could come close to people who need the care,” she says.
The grim reality is that even with these guerrilla measures in place, many women will have to wait longer to terminate their pregnancies or not be able to obtain them at all. Instances of both outcomes already began to rise after the Texas law went into effect in November, and with Roe repealed, the numbers should skyrocket. For women living in the south or parts of the midwest, the nearest clinics will be hundreds or even potentially thousands of miles away, and with fewer in operation, the waiting lists for urgent appointments will only grow longer.
About 1400 women a month left Texas to obtain an abortion between September and December, and many of them went to Oklahoma, which is no longer an option in the wake of its abortion ban.
With previous Supreme Court decisions having protected a woman’s right to choose up to only 22 weeks, later-term abortion is already banned in many places. In fact, there are only three clinics in the US that perform abortions during all three trimesters, which leads to long waiting lists and other adverse outcomes, so Horvath and a midwife named Morgan Nuzzo, are preparing to open another one in Maryland later this year.
“This is a patient population that is already a minority of people within a smaller group of people,” she says if abortions after 25 weeks. “There's not a lot of people every year who need this care, but when they need it, they need it like right now. In our work in the other clinics in the area that also saw patients at this point in pregnancy, the majority of the patients were not local.”
Late-term abortion has long been controversial even with people that consider themselves pro-choice, in part due to what Horvath says are major misconceptions about those that obtain them. Women don’t get very late abortions simply because they are indecisive or lazy, but because any number of circumstances dictate that they must.
Sometimes, it’s a matter of being forced to wait for more information about potential problems as a fetus develops, especially in places where prenatal care is hard to obtain in a timely manner. (This often includes New York City, where routine OB appointments book up months in advance.)
“Sometimes, something is seen on an ultrasound that gets worse and worse, and then they’re 30 weeks, and it's a really bad thing, and they don't want to have a baby that suffers,” she says.
She’s also seen a disproportionate number of tragically young patients, many of whom experienced a violation that took a long time to surface.
“They have a lot of barriers to care — young folks sometimes don't know they're pregnant, because they don't have regular periods,” Horvath explains. “So I’ve taken care of 11 and 12-year-olds, and if my child were pregnant at age 11, I would want them to get compassionate care, I would want them to be able to be seen in a timely way.”
The aim is to have the clinic, called Partners in Abortion Care, open sometime this fall. The only real obstacle is financing, which is particularly precarious for this kind of venture. A steady flow of patients doesn’t guarantee a steady revenue required to keep the doors open and lights on; many insurance companies don’t cover abortions, and abortion funds, with whom Horvath and Nuzzo will partner closely, take quite a while to send reimbursements for the medications and procedures necessary late in pregnancy.
They’re looking at starting costs of about $1.25 million for a service that will be priceless for women up and down the east coast. With Virginia swinging to the right last November — it was one state senate seat away from a Republican trifecta — and North Carolina likely to go red this fall, Maryland could wind up one of the southernmost points where abortion is still legal. It will be a health care sanctuary for millions, and because Partners in Abortion Care will see patients in all three trimesters, it will provide a crucial resource for overwhelmed clinics.
All abortion care is emotional and exhausting, and it only gets magnified as the pregnancy wears on. Horvath has spent years absorbing the pain of others, and she’s preparing to shoulder even more for people who will have to go through hell just to get to her new clinic.
“There are people who are dealing with really sad things when they come to us,” she says. “We provide their care and sometimes they want to hold their baby, and we're here for that, we're here to help you have the experience that's most meaningful for you. I realize that if I'm ending a potential life, and I'm okay with talking about that. The most important thing for me is that this person who's in front of me is able to make the decisions that are best for their own health and their own life.”
A deluge of direct democracy stories was understandably overshadowed this week, so let’s run down the highlights. With an unaccountable Supreme Court dominated by justices appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote preparing to strip Americans of popular rights that won’t be restored by a minoritarian government, it’s especially nice to see policy determined by those who will be governed by it.
Texas: Our friends at Ground Game Texas just scored a big victory in Austin, where they passed a ballot initiative to decriminalize marijuana and ban no-knock police warrants.
Missouri: Lots of good ballot initiatives out of the Show Me State. Activists qualified initiatives that would create a statewide ranked-choice voting system and legalize marijuana for people aged 21 and older. And in long-awaited news, this coming year’s state budget will actually fully fund the Medicaid expansion approved by voters in 2020.
Unfortunately, the budget does not provide funds for Planned Parenthood, which is no surprise given the extreme anti-abortion laws that the state is about to pass.
South Dakota: After a voter-approved constitutional amendment was tossed out by the state Supreme Court in 2021, pro-weed activists are giving it another go. Last week, they handed in what should be enough signatures required to qualify another marijuana legalization initiative for this year’s ballot.
Idaho: The tireless activists behind Reclaim Idaho are at it again. Last week, they handed in the signatures necessary to qualify the Quality Education Act for the November ballot, giving voters the opportunity to do what their far-right government never will.
The Quality Education Act would raise more than $300 million per year for public education by bumping the corporate income tax by 2% and creating a new tax bracket for the state’s high-earners. It’s similar to what Arizonans passed in 2020, only to see their state Supreme Court nix it for purely ideological reasons.
Los Angeles: Speaking of wealth taxes, Angelenos will have an opportunity to vote on a tax on the sale of giant mansions in a city with more than a few of them.
Unite Here is one of more than 130 organizations that came together to support the ballot measure that would charge a 4% tax on property transfers valued between $5 and $10 million and 5.5% for properties valued at more than $10 million. Its backers say the measure would affect 3% of property sales in the city and raise about $875 million annually, or $8 billion over 10 years.
If a simple majority of LA voters approve the ballot measure in November, United to House LA will use the proceeds of the so-called mansion tax to buy and build new affordable housing. The measure will provide 69,000 affordable housing units for individuals who are homeless or at risk of becoming unhoused within its first 10 years, the group says.
Cities across the country are seeing a spike in homelessness, and many of them, including Los Angeles, are responding with brutal police violence. Building homes is an infinitely better solution.
Massachusetts: Uber and Lyft have poured millions into a campaign to pass a Prop 22-style initiative in Massachusetts, but based on hearings held by the state Supreme Court last week, it may not even make the ballot.
Justices on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court expressed concern that a ballot measure that a coalition of app-based service providers hope to put before voters in November goes too far by limiting their liability for accidents caused by their drivers.
Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt said she was "troubled" by the fact the initiative would not only make drivers independent contractors, but also make it so that they are not agents of the companies, which could prevent customers from suing them.
The state constitution allows initiatives to go to a vote only if they cover a single policy question and not unrelated subjects, Wendlandt said, but the measure's backers are "dumping in all sorts of things and then you’re labeling it as related."
Looks like they may have gotten too greedy, and at this point, there wouldn’t be enough time for the companies to readjust and get an altered version of the initiative on the ballot. Quite a shame.
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