5 Serious Consequences Awaiting North Dakota If Republicans Ban All Abortions Under ‘Personhood’

Last week, the North Dakota legislature passed the most stringent abortion ban in the nation, cutting off access to reproductive services after just six weeks of pregnancy — before some women even know they’re pregnant. But Republicans in the state aren’t stopping there. The legislature is also considering even more stringent “personhood” measures, which would endow fertilized eggs with the full rights of U.S. citizens and outlaw absolutely all abortion services.

Two personhood bills — Senate Bill 2303 and Senate Concurrent Resolution 4009 — have already passed the Senate, and the GOP-controlled House is expected to take them up sometime this week. But if North Dakota successfully enacts a total abortion ban, there will be serious consequences for the state that extend even beyond women’s reproductive freedom. Here are five ways the state will suffer under personhood:

1. There will be fewer doctors in the state available to provide medical care. In a historic move for the North Dakota Medical Association, the nonpartisan organization has come out against personhood. The group points out that the anti-abortion measures go too far to “interfere with the physician practice,” and they suspect it will be harder to find qualified medical professionals willing to practice in North Dakota if the state imposes so many complicated restrictions on doctors. Some doctors have already testified before state lawmakers to say they will leave North Dakota if the abortion bans pass.

2. Maternal health care will be compromised. Doctors could be charged with criminal negligence if anything happens to an embryo — which could prevent them from making quick decisions that could help save women’s lives. The tragic case of Savita Halappanavar, a woman who died after being denied an abortion in a Catholic hospital because her doctors were reluctant to provide care that could get them in trouble with the law, highlights the serious consequences of state lawmakers coming between a woman and her doctor.

3. Women could be forced to resort to illegal abortion procedures. Under a personhood law, women will end up resorting to dangerous “backroom” abortions, one former pediatrician warned North Dakota lawmakers last week. That Fargo-area doctor did his medical training before Roe v. Wade, when women were dying of bacterial infections after botched abortion procedures — and he warns that the passage of the proposed personhood measures would pull North Dakota back into “the stone age of medicine.” There’s evidence to back up that claim. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the legality of abortion has absolutely no correlation to abortion rates around the world, because women will continue to seek to terminate pregnancies regardless of the law.

4. Women won’t be able to use in vitro fertilization to try to have a family. Ironically, in addition to compromising medical procedures for the women seeking to terminate a pregnancy, personhood measures also place restrictions on the women who are trying to get pregnant. “These bills will stop the practice of in vitro fertilization in this state,” Dr. Stephanie Dahl, an obstetrician-gynecologist and reproductive medicine specialist in Fargo, explained to lawmakers. Doctors wouldn’t be able to perform any procedure that carries the risk of damaging some embryos, so women would be forced to travel to South Dakota or Minnesota for in vitro treatment, a six-week process that requires multiple sonograms and up to 12 visits to the doctor.

5. The state will become embroiled in expensive lawsuits. North Dakota’s six-week abortion ban already runs afoul of Roe v. Wade, and will certainly invite several costly legal challenges. A total abortion ban would lead to similar consequences. Two personhood bills were recently struck down in Oklahoma, suggesting that the courts won’t take kindly to North Dakota’s push to restrict women’s constitutional rights, either. Nevertheless, even the self-proclaimed “fiscally conservative” Republicans in the state are willing to defend their abortion bans on the state’s dime.

So far this session, Republican majorities in both chambers of the state legislature have successfully advanced a radical anti-abortion agenda in North Dakota — and that’s on top of the existing abortion restrictions. Women already have to undergo a mandatory 24-hour waiting period before having an abortion, and there’s just one last abortion clinic left in the entire state.

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Five Facts To Remember As Anti-Choice Activists Launch Attacks Against ‘Webcam Abortions’

Abortion opponents have rushed to introduce a slew of new abortion restrictions in the 2013 legislative session, attacking reproductive rights from all angles. But it’s not just about restricting access to existing medical procedures. Anti-choice activists are also looking ahead to the future, attempting to prevent medical technology from advancing to better accommodate women’s reproductive care.

Even though telemedical abortion services — which rely on new technology to allow doctors to meet with patients over video conferences, and distribute abortion pills with a remote control — can help expand reproductive care to women who wouldn’t be able to access it otherwise, abortion opponents are scaling a coordinated attack against it. Decrying “webcam abortions” as an unsafe medical procedure, despite the significant evidence to the contrary, anti-abortion lawmakers are increasingly advocating legislation to outlaw the practice. Here are five facts to keep in mind as the anti-choice community gears up for this fight:

1. Telemedicine is increasingly becoming a routine medical practice, and abortion is the only type of telehealth procedure that is tightly restricted. Telehealth, which first began being used in the 1960s to treat astronauts in space, has advanced over the past few decades to become a standard medical practice. In the past five years, telemedicine’s reach has quadrupled to treat 10 million Americans. The federal government has adopted the practice to treat chronically ill veterans. According to the chief executive officer of the American Telemedicine Association, abortion is the only area where lawmakers have restricted telemedicine. As Jordan Goldberg, the state advocacy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, explained to Bloomberg, “There is a very clear division: Women are different, women who are attempting to access medication abortion are different.”

2. Nearly 95 percent of women who have telemedical abortions feel “very satisfied” with the procedure. Several studies have proven that telemedical abortions are safe and effective. Despite anti-choice activists’ insistence that women must be face-to-face with their doctors, there is no difference between the women who visit a doctor’s office for a follow-up appointment after an abortion and the women who simply call to follow up instead. And 94 percent of women who terminate a pregnancy with the help of video technology report they feel “very satisfied” with their procedure.

3. Restricting telemedical abortions disproportionately hurts low-income women in rural areas. Women who live in rural areas typically lack access to nearby abortion providers, and low-income women in particular often can’t afford the transportation to the closest health clinic. That problem is exacerbated by the mounting number of restrictions imposed on abortion providers, which narrows the pool of available abortion doctors even further. But after Iowa piloted the nation’s first telemedical abortion program, rural women’s abortion access significantly increased.

4. Allowing health clinics to practice telemedicine decreases the number of second-trimester abortions. If women in rural areas have more readily available options to access the reproductive care they need, they won’t have to put off having an abortion until they can travel to a surgical abortion clinic. The case study in Iowa proved that expanding telemedical abortion services can help lower second-trimester abortions. While abortion is still a very safe procedure when it is performed in the second trimester, earlier abortions do have a slightly lower chance of complications — and, of course, women who decide to terminate a pregnancy should not be forced to wait months to have the voluntary medical procedure.

5. Most of the states that are restricting telemedical abortions don’t offer those services in the first place. At least ten states have banned the use of telehealth services to provide abortion care over the past several years, and another five are considering passing legislation to do so this year. But Bloomberg points out that telemedical abortions weren’t even being offered in the majority of those states the first place; Iowa is the sole state where lawmakers are considering a ban that would restrict a procedure that is already in place. The anti-choice community — led by Americans United for Life, the anti-abortion group that drafted the language for the telemedicine bans — is working proactively to prevent the expansion of telemedical abortion services, particularly through indirect abortion restrictions that would require doctors to show women an ultrasound in person.

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California Introduces Bill To Expand Access To First-Trimester Abortions

As states across the country impose restrictions to limit women’s access to abortion, California lawmakers are taking the opposite route. On Wednesday, Democratic lawmakers introduced legislation to expand the availability of first-trimester abortions by allowing more medical professionals — such as nurses and midwives — to perform the procedure.

Assembly Bill 154 revives last year’s push to allow nurses to perform nonsurgical abortions. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) ended up signing a watered down version of that bill, which only allowed non-doctors to perform early abortions after going through training in a specific pilot program. The California’s Nurses Association opposed the initial version of last year’s bill because they wanted to see the results from a multi-year study on early abortion that researchers were conducting at the University of California-San Francisco — but since the results from that study were published last week, lawmakers say the political landscape is different now.

The six-year study led by UCSF found that first-trimester abortions are just as safe when they are performed by professional nurses, physician assistants, and midwives as when they are performed by doctors. In a press release about their results, the researchers explained that expanding the abortion procedure beyond doctors could ultimately help eliminate the economic and racial barriers that prevent some women in California from accessing early abortions:

Nationally, 92 percent of abortions take place in the first trimester but studies find that black, uninsured and low-income women continue to have less access to this care, according to the researchers.

In California, 13 percent of women using state Medicaid insurance obtain abortions after the first trimester. Because the average cost of a second trimester abortion is substantially higher than a first trimester procedure and abortion complications increase as the pregnancy advances, shifting the population distribution of abortions to earlier gestations may result in safer, less costly care, according to the research team.

“Increasing the types of health care professionals who can provide early aspiration abortion care is one way to reduce this health care disparity,” said lead author Tracy Weitz, PhD, MPA, a UCSF associate professor and director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the UCSF Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health. “Policy makers can now feel confident that expanding access to care in this way is evidence-based and will promote women’s health.”

In a press conference on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade to unveil the bill, California lawmakers said they are committed to ensuring that women can access reproductive care no matter where they live in the state. According to the bill’s sponsors, 52 percent of California counties don’t have an abortion provider other than hospitals, which may have limited services. “California will not go back. We are going to go forward,” said state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D).

But other states across the country are going back, as women’s access to first-trimester abortions continues to be threatened. In states like Iowa, Texas, and Wisconsin, anti-choice lawmakers are imposing unnecessary barriers to early abortion — even though restrictions on first-trimester abortions simply lead to a rise in more costly later term abortion procedures.

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