The Republican-backed law contains numerous anti-choice measures, including forced counseling and mandatory ultrasounds for abortion patients, regulations on physicians who provide abortion care, and a ban on fetal tissue donation.
Many anti-choice policies flout established medical standards, disrupt a woman's ability to seek and act on counsel from her trusted health-care provider, and make accessing abortion care more expensive. But one bill recently signed into law in Utah, SB 234, managed to encapsulate a number of troubling harms.
The statistics “reflect a dramatic increase in hate speech and internet harassment, death threats, attempted murder, and murder, which coincided with the release of heavily edited, misleading, and inflammatory videos beginning in July.”
As the GOP's subpoenas continue, inflammatory language and repetition of false allegations of profit-making around fetal tissue procurement have alarmed abortion providers who may find themselves the subject of investigation.
Taking Ted Cruz’s assertion that banning abortion should be a decision left up to voters at face value ignores the candidate's drumbeat of extremism on the topic.
Rep. Jason Dawkins (D-Philadelphia) said during the committee hearing that lawmakers had no place inserting themselves in a conversation between a pregnant person and a doctor. "If we put certain restrictions on a woman's choice, will they start looking for that other option?" Dawkins said.
Writing for the unanimous court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Texas’ method of drawing districts based on total population was in line with “constitutional history, the court’s [previous] decisions and longstanding practice” of states drawing legislative districts based on total population.
“Our state is among the most difficult states in the nation for women to access abortion care .... With an overabundance of barriers and hoops to jump through, abortion has become nearly impossible to access for many women,” University of South Dakota senior Kerstin Tuttle wrote about the anti-choice measure just signed into law.
