News Recap: Recent Happenings in Abortion Rights

North Carolina passes ban, Washington State invests in abortion care

Last week, the North Carolina legislature overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill that will ban abortions after 12 weeks. It is set to go into effect on July 1. 

Tara Romano, executive director of Pro-Choice North Carolina, spoke to me about what happened in the state that led to the disastrous result for the abortion rights movement. 

“One of the things we want people to understand is that this bill was a very rushed process. They subverted their own rules and processes in order to rush this bill through. It was introduced on Tuesday night, and two weeks later, it's law even though the governor had vetoed it.” 

She said that the bill is 46 pages.

“Providers and clinics are looking through everything and seeing where they need to make changes in order to be able to be in compliance with the law and still provide,” Romano said. 

Whether there are court challenges depends on what the providers decide to do. 

Romano said they will focus on how local governments can support abortion seekers more. They may follow the model in Washington State, where certain counties and cities have approved funding to go toward abortion care. 

Romano said that most people support abortion access in the state. 

“We're also going to keep writing, we want people to remember what has happened, how this happened, and that this is not what North Carolinians want,” Romano said. 

Washington State Gets $21 Million Government Investment in Abortion Care

Earlier this month, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed a bill that provides $21 million for abortion infrastructure–helping to pay for security improvements, the salaries of abortion providers, treatment for out-of-state patients and medical training. 

Abortion rights activists had begun this year lobbying for certain bills to be passed, including the landmark investment. Ryan MacDonald, communications director for Pro-Choice Washington. He said that the movement in the state has been going on strong since the 1990s. 

“Since then, it's just been a generational movement to keep abortion and abortion rights legal,” MacDonald said. “And I think the public awareness has never been public interest has never really wavered.” 

One of the things that have led to the state succeeding where other states fail is the focus on lower government offices. The anti-abortion movement has worked to get local people elected for more than half a century. 

“We sort of use that same playbook,” MacDonald said. “We're trying to elect people who are pro-abortion champions from the get-go and we just kind of work with them to educate them on the issues,  how to talk about abortion, how to write laws about abortion, and then eventually work with them if they get elected to get those laws written and eventually passed.” 

The main focus going forward for Pro-Choice Washington will be to pass the Keep Our Care Act, which would address the problem of large corporate hospitals swallowing smaller ones and then instituting policies forbidding reproductive or gender-affirming care. The act would prevent some of the mergers from happening, the attorney general would oversee any that did and there would be public hearings for people to understand what the consequences would be and to have their concerns heard. 

“It would just create some more transparency around these mergers that have been happening a lot of the time in private and tried to be kept out of the public eye because they were concerned that the public would not like them,” MacDonald said.