In Four Months, Republicans Introduced 916 Bills Against Women’s Right To Choose

It’s almost an unbe­liev­able fig­ure — 916. That’s the amount of leg­is­la­tion that has been intro­duced so far this year, in an attempt to reg­u­late a woman’s repro­duc­tive sys­tem, and we’re only in April.

This infor­ma­tion comes from a report by The Guttmacher Insti­tute, and it finds that 49 states have con­tributed to this num­ber with var­i­ous bills geared towards reg­u­lat­ing abor­tions and a woman’s right to choose. The report says that in 15 states, the fol­low­ing mea­sures became law:

• expand the pre-abortion wait­ing period require­ment in South Dakota to make it more oner­ous than that in any other state, by extend­ing the time from 24 hours to 72 hours and requir­ing women to obtain coun­sel­ing from a cri­sis preg­nancy cen­ter in the interim;
• expand the abor­tion coun­sel­ing require­ment in South Dakota to man­date that coun­sel­ing be pro­vided in-person by the physi­cian who will per­form the abor­tion and that coun­sel­ing include infor­ma­tion pub­lished after 1972 on all the risk fac­tors related to abor­tion com­pli­ca­tions, even if the data are sci­en­tif­i­cally flawed;
• require the health depart­ments in Utah and Vir­ginia to develop new reg­u­la­tions gov­ern­ing abor­tion clinics;
• revise the Utah abor­tion refusal clause to allow any hos­pi­tal employee to refuse to “par­tic­i­pate in any way” in an abortion;
• limit abor­tion cov­er­age in all pri­vate health plans in Utah, includ­ing plans that will be offered in the state’s health exchange; and
• revise the Mis­sis­sippi sex edu­ca­tion law to require all school dis­tricts to pro­vide abstinence-only sex edu­ca­tion while per­mit­ting dis­cus­sion of con­tra­cep­tion only with prior approval from the state.

The report continues;

In addi­tion to these laws, more than 120 other bills have been approved by at least one cham­ber of the leg­is­la­ture, and some inter­est­ing trends are emerg­ing. As a whole, the pro­pos­als intro­duced this year are more hos­tile to abor­tion rights than in the past: 56% of the bills intro­duced so far this year seek to restrict abor­tion access, com­pared with 38% last year. Three topics—insurance cov­er­age of abor­tion, restric­tion of abor­tion after a spe­cific point in ges­ta­tion and ultra­sound requirements—are top­ping the agenda in sev­eral states. At the same time, leg­is­la­tors are propos­ing lit­tle in the way of proac­tive ini­tia­tives aimed at expand­ing access to repro­duc­tive health –related ser­vices; this stands in sharp con­trast to recent years when a range of ini­tia­tives to pro­mote com­pre­hen­sive sex edu­ca­tion, per­mit expe­dited STI treat­ment for patients’ part­ners and ensure insur­ance cov­er­age of con­tra­cep­tion were adopted.

Four months, 916 bills intro­duced. Sounds like a new record is about to be set. What­ever hap­pened to Roe v. Wade? You know, the 1973 deci­sion by the Supreme Court that gives women the right under the 14th amend­ment of the Con­sti­tu­tion to have a choice? The law that has guided this issue for the last four decades.
Why is Roe v. Wade now a mute issue?