States are doing a lot more this spring to limit abortions than expand access to them.
For several years, state legislatures have put abortion rights advocates on the defensive, and that trend is continuing as they meet in 2015. A handful of liberal states are moving on bills requiring insurers to cover abortions, but many more conservative-led states are advancing legislation regulating when, where or how abortions are performed.
Arkansas has banned doctors from administering medication abortions remotely through what’s known as “telemedicine.” South Dakota passed a law prohibiting abortion providers from collecting payment until after the state’s 72-hour waiting period. West Virginia has barred abortion past 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Some bills are still gaining momentum as they move through statehouses. The Kansas and Oklahoma Houses have approved legislation banning abortions performed through a method called “dilation and extraction,” in which a fetus is partially removed from a woman’s uterus.
The Idaho House has approved a ban on telemedicine abortions. Another bill requiring medication abortions to be administered only as prescribed by the Food and Drug Administration is moving through the Arkansas legislature.
“In terms of the numbers, we’ve had a pretty good run of it these last few years, and this year we will pass substantive legislation as well,” said Mary Spaulding Balch, state policy director for National Right to Life. “At the end of the day, I would bet we’ll have a pretty good year.”
The Susan B. Anthony List, another group that opposes abortion, chalked up West Virginia’s new 20-week ban as a major victory. “It was pro-life women lawmakers who led that charge,” said the group’s president Marjorie Dannenfelser. “Their passion is emblematic of the pro-life momentum building nationwide.”
The South Carolina and New Mexico Houses also have approved 20-week bans, and similar bills were introduced last week in the Ohio House and Senate.
It’s not surprising the legislative scales are tipping in favor of abortion opponents, at least when it comes to the number of bills filed so far this year. As of March 1, state lawmakers had introduced 244 abortion-restricting bills, compared with 44 bills that would roll back limits on abortion or expand access to the procedure, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that collects reproductive health data.
The turf has recently become friendlier to abortion opponents, as Republicans expanded their control of state legislatures in the November elections, seizing the majority in 11 more chambers. They now control the legislature in more than half the states.
In recent years, the number of abortion regulations or restrictions that states have passed has skyrocketed, especially in odd-numbered years when all state legislatures meet. Two years ago, nearly two dozen states enacted 70 anti-abortion laws and in 2011, 135 such measures were made law.
It’s too early to tell whether states will be as active this year. But Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues associate for Guttmacher, said there’s still a lot of movement.
“I don’t think we’ll be seeing the levels we were seeing in 2011,” Nash said. “[But] we were expecting a fairly robust year around abortion restrictions and we’re getting it.”
As states have tightened their laws, the abortion rate has been falling. About 730,000 abortions were performed in 2011, compared with 850,000 a decade earlier, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Certain types of abortion regulations have gained especially strong traction over the last few years, with a number of states banning abortions past the midpoint of pregnancy or requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. But this year there has been no discernible trend, with all kinds of laws moving through the pipeline.
“There’s quite a bit of stuff moving and it isn’t very thematic,” Nash said.
That is contributing to the hodgepodge of state laws regulating abortion, where certain procedures may be legal in one state but not in the next. Erin Davison-Rippey, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, said that makes it harder to operate clinics.
“There have always been differences and different regulations state by state,” she said. “But it does make it a bit of a challenge from a business perspective to figure out how do you operate when the climate is so different, like any other business that has to navigate very different regulations.”
Meanwhile, states with Democrat-led legislatures aren’t nearly as active with bills pushing back on regulations or expanding access. In Oregon, lawmakers have introduced a bill requiring all health insurance plans to cover abortion along with a host of health care services. In February, the Washington House cleared a bill requiring all plans that cover maternity care to also cover elective abortions.
But many of those bills are reactionary in nature, introduced by Democrats in states where lawmakers are focused on passing new restrictions — making it unlikely they will ever become law.
“When we’re thinking about pushing back, in a sense, against all these abortion restrictions, you end up looking at bills that do things like repeal abortion restrictions or putting in buffer zones to protect access or requiring abortion coverage in health plans,” Nash said.
