The Campaign to Outlaw Abortion
The campaign goes beyond abortion to the continuing Republican drive in Texas and other states to close down Planned Parenthood clinics that provide critical services like birth control counseling and cancer screenings. So far, nine states have acted to defund Planned Parenthood, threatening preventive care relied upon by hundreds of thousands of people. A pending bill in Arkansas takes the ultra-extreme approach of barring any company that contracts with a health center that provides abortions or gives women information about all their pregnancy options from receiving any state contracts or public funds.
In addition to the outright six-weeks ban, Mr. Dalrymple also approved a copy of a 2012 Mississippi statute (which is under federal court challenge) that requires doctors performing abortions to get admitting privileges at a local hospital. That medically unnecessary requirement could shut down North Dakota’s sole abortion provider.
A third approved measure bars abortions for gender preference and also has the first bar on abortions based on genetic defects.
And this is on top of the North Dakota Legislature’s decision to put on next year’s ballot a so-called personhood measure that would give a fertilized egg the full range of individual rights, and could outlaw abortion and threaten access to fertility treatments as well as to widely used forms of birth control. Voters have defeated similar measures in Mississippi and Colorado.
The clear message is the need for a stepped-up effort to hold state officials electorally accountable for policies that harm women in states where right-wing Republicans control the machinery of government.