The Guttmacher Institute, which researches and advocates policy designed to advance sexual and reproductive health, periodically provides a summary of the new laws affecting reproductive rights, including abortion. This year’s tally of new abortion restrictions wasn’t the worst in the past four years. Forty-seven were added in 2015. In 2011, 92 new restrictions were added, and 2013, 70 more. But the 2015 total is still more than twice the number of new laws enacted in 2014.
The Center for Reproductive Rights has also published a new report—State of the States: Fighting Back by Pushing Forward—that includes a tally of new abortion laws. The authors state:
Extremist politicians prioritized bills that interfere with the patient-provider relationship despite overwhelming consensus from medical experts that those bills are medically unnecessary and ultimately harmful. State legislatures enacted dangerous laws requiring medical providers to give biased counseling based in junk science. Sixteen organizations that oppose inappropriate political interference in the practice of medicine, including the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and the National Physicians Alliance, criticized such bills in Arizona and Arkansas because they “requir[e] health care professionals to violate their medical training and ethical obligation to their patients.” These laws force doctors to This medically unnecessary and harmful requirement forces each patient to make two separate trips to receive the care that she needs and demeans her ability to determine the best decision for herself and her family. practice bad medicine. New measures were also enacted in Kansas and Oklahoma to criminalize doctors who provide safe abortion care with the most common and medicallyproven method of ending a pregnancy in the second trimester. Such laws force patients to undergo an additional invasive procedure, intrude in the patient-provider relationship and attack women’s health care and personal autonomy.
Since 2010, forced-birthers have pressured legislators in 43 states to pass more than 300 new restrictions on abortion. A few of these are hung up in court, but most are now law, part of a steady erosion of women’s reproductive rights that emerged soon after the Supreme Court legalization of abortion nationwide more than four decades ago.