#stop the bans

The biased language in these bills has no basis in medicine or reality. They’re written to divert attention away from the fact that they ban abortion and hurt women.

Politicians who support six-week bans on abortion — which amount to complete bans on abortion — have hoodwinked traditional news outlets into amplifying political talking points that mask their true, harmful intentions. Among such talking points: “fetal heartbeat,” a manipulative term deployed to justify banning abortion early in pregnancy.

We call these politicians’ bills what they are: abortion bans. Read below to learn why you should, too.

How “Heartbeat” Language Misrepresents the Facts

Why do politicians and opponents of reproductive rights deploy provocative phrases such as “fetal heartbeat”? Because they evoke false images in people’s minds — false images meant to make people view commonandaccepted health care as immoral and shameful.

In truth, the “fetal heartbeat” talking point is nonsense: misinformation intended to deceive the press and public. As gynecologist Dr. Jennifer Gunter explains, at six weeks of fetal development, there is no “heart” that beats — instead, there is detectable activity within a 4-millimeter wide growth known as a fetal pole:

“The politicians know exactly what they are doing as [the term ‘heartbeat’]  is a way of making a 4 mm thickening next to a yolk sac seem like it is almost ready to walk.”

—Dr. Jennifer Gunter

Why Politicians Want to Mislead You

Here’s why politicians manipulate public opinion with misleading terms: because they know their true agenda is deeply unpopular. Among proponents of six-week abortion bans are groups and individuals whose stated mission is to ban all abortion—even though support for Roe v. Wade and access to abortion is at a record high, with 73% of Americans in favor of protecting access to safe, legal abortion.

An ideologically extreme group called Faith2Action conjured the first six-week abortion bans in 2011. It bills itself as “the birthplace of the heartbeat bill,” and its website features model legislation for politicians to duplicate in their states.

Faith2Action is also an anti-LGBTQ hate group, founded by anti-abortion activist Janet Porter. Porter once served as legislative director at Ohio Right to Life, a group dedicated to banning access to abortion—and she subsequently led the Center for Reclaiming America, a group devoted to combating what it labeled the “radical homosexual agenda.” With full-page ads in major newspapers, Porter quoted gay people who “overcame” their sexual orientation through the dangerous, debunked practice of conversion therapy.

What to take from all this: The people behind six-week abortion bans need misleading talking points as cover for their dangerous—and unpopular—agenda.  

What Makes Misleading Anti-Abortion Language Dangerous

Writing an inaccurate phrase in legislation doesn’t convert it into a fact, or into a legitimate description of what politicians intend to do. Six-week bans block access to abortion before many women know they’re pregnant. Anti-abortion politicians’ talking points are crafted to mislead people about this basic fact.

If these laws take effect, depriving women of the constitutional right affirmed in Roe v. Wade, women will face the heartbreaking—and life-threatening—consequences of losing access to safe, legal abortion. Remember: In 1965, one out of every six women who died from pregnancy-related causes had obtained an illegal abortion—and that’s just according to official reports (doctors believe the actual number was higher).

Real Public Health Crises Ignored—or Made Worse

Some politicians pushing these six-week abortion bans have given lip service to promoting healthy pregnancies, but done nothing to confront real—and life-threatening—public health challenges that face people in their states. Maternal mortality rates across much of the United States have exceeded levels experienced in every other wealthy country — with people of color, especially Black women, dying at the highest rates. Yet anti-abortion politicians have lifted scarcely a finger to address this widespread, growing public-health crisis.

Consider the big picture in three states: Georgia, whose six-week ban awaits the governor’s signature; Missouri, which has a six-week ban moving through its legislature; and Ohio, whose governor has signed a six-week ban into law.

• In Georgia, maternal mortality rates rank second-worst in the country. Cardiovascular issues like cardiac arrest are a leading cause of death in childbirth. That includes a young Georgia mother named Kira, who bled for hours in the hospital before dying from cardiac arrest. The state of Georgia also has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country. Georgia politicians have made these problems worse by refusing to expand Medicaid. The resulting funding shortfall has contributed to hospital closures in rural areas, depriving many women of color of access to maternal health care. Today, half of Georgia’s 159 counties have no obstetric providers.
• In Missouri, maternal mortality rates are 50% higher than those recorded in the nation at large. Missouri also ranks among the nation’s 10 worst states for infant mortality. Experts say that a contributing cause is the state’s number of OB-GYNs per capita, which is among the lowest in the nation. A study of the country’s biggest cities, in fact, has found the most overworked OB-GYNs—those carrying the highest patient loads of areas without providers—are in St. Louis, Mo.
• In Ohio, women face a triple threat: Abortion could be banned before many women know they’re pregnant, the state is “defunding” vital preventive reproductive-health care services, and President Trump’s gag rule could bar 76,000 low-income Ohioans who get preventive care like birth control through the Title X program from accessing that care at Planned Parenthood health centers.

It shouldn’t surprise you that Ohio also has among the nation’s worst maternal mortality rates,infant mortality rates, and OB-GYN shortages.

The takeaway: If politicians in these places cared about pregnant women and babies, they would work to increase access to health care.

When Do Anti-Abortion Politicians Mislead? All the Time

Politicians at the highest levels have used misleading talking points, misinformation, and outright lies about abortion and pregnancy to further their efforts to outlaw safe, legal abortion. Inflammatory language about abortion later in pregnancy, and claims of “abortion until birth,” remain part and parcel of efforts by anti-abortion politicians to shock Americans into supporting dangerous abortion bans nationwide.

Deceptive, medically unsound rhetoric about six-week abortion bans has to be examined with this track record in mind. Politicians and activists who spread these talking points have one motive: to ban abortion. They use pithy, attention-grabbing talking points in an effort to draw people — including the media, as well as everyday Americans — into giving their agenda the oxygen of amplification.

Why do anti-abortion politicians rely on such rhetorical tricks? Simple: they know their true agenda is outside the mainstream, and deeply unpopular. We’ve said it before, and will say it again: Support for Roe v. Wade and access to abortion is at a record high. In fact, 73% of Americans do not want women to lose their access to safe, legal abortion.

Abortion is also very common. Nearly one in four women in America will have an abortion in her lifetime. Every day, women across the country face the deeply personal decision of whether or not to continue their pregnancy.

Bottom Line: It’s a Ban

Don’t fall for disinformation. And don’t let the anti-abortion movement get away with hiding its agenda. Call these bills what they are: six-week abortion bans. There is no more accurate way to say it.

Attempts To Ban Access to Safe, Legal Abortion Have Soared to an All Time High

BREAKING: As this post was published, Georgia became the third state this year—after Kentucky and Mississippi—to pass a ban on abortion before many people know they are pregnant. The bill passed by one vote. Georgia is just one of 32 states to introduce abortion bans this year as part of a national strategy to outlaw safe, legal abortion. 

2019 is barely one-fourth behind us, but one fact is clear: anti-abortion politicians have dropped all pretense of wanting anything less than a ban on access to safe, legal abortion.

In state after state, lawmakers have rushed this year to try to ban abortion access—at a point before most people even know they’re pregnant. These new laws run counter to long-standing Supreme Court precedents, and amount to an effort—in the wake of the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh and other Trump judicial nominees to lifetime appointments—to invite the Supreme Court to overturn or eviscerate the finding, in Roe v. Wade, that access to safe and legal abortion is a constitutional right.

Abortion is health care. But with outrageous bill after outrageous bill—from six-week bans to attacks on crucial reproductive health services such as those funded by the Title X program—politicians have signaled an aggressive new phase in their attacks on reproductive rights.

Here’s what you need to know about this expanding attack on reproductive health care.

1. Opponents of safe, legal abortion are mounting a concerted campaign

News accounts have covered the laws advancing in state legislatures one by one—but when one steps back, a troubling pattern emerges. Through March of 2019, state lawmakers in Georgia, Kentucky, and Mississippi banned access to abortion at six weeks. Four other states—Missouri, Ohio, South Carolina, and Tennessee—stand poised to soon follow suit. Politicians have filed proposals for similar bans in eight other states: Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Texas, and West Virginia.

2. A “six-week ban on abortion” = a ban on abortion

The rationales offered by politicians in support of six-week bans belie a simple fact: at the six-week point in pregnancy, most people don’t even know they’re pregnant. For those with regular menstrual cycles, such a ban would stop access to safe, legal abortion a mere two weeks after a missed period.

These unconstitutional laws would be awful enough if they stopped there—but they don’t. For instance, the six-week ban proposed in Georgia would subject a person to criminal liability for termination of a pregnancy—exposing a mother to the potential risk of criminal charges over a miscarriage. As a Georgia state senator who spoke out against this outrageous banexplained:

In other words, a pregnant woman who suffers a miscarriage could be subjected to criminal investigation, indictment, prosecution long before a jury is asked to determine whether she intentionally did anything to cause the loss. And if you think everything I just said was exaggeration or hyperbole, I read it directly from a Georgia court case where the implications of prosecuting women for seeking abortions was laid out in no uncertain terms.

3. Efforts to restrict or ban abortion are spreading quickly

Here’s a startling statistic: since January 1, 2019, lawmakers have proposed more than 250 separate restrictions on abortion in state legislatures across the country.

The six-week bans moving through states are part of this wave of anti-reproductive health legislation. The rate at which such unconstitutional bans have spread this year is without precedent:

Prior to this year, six-week bans were rarely enacted, as antiabortion activists and politicians publicly focused their efforts on other restrictions, like targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) laws, that severely undermine access but are designed not to appear to be frontal assaults on abortion rights.

4. Low-income people and people of color are among those disproportionately affected

States where unconstitutional bans have advanced in 2019 are among those with the nation’s largest populations of people of color.

• In Georgia, the nation’s eighth-largest state, nearly 10% of the population identifies as Hispanic or Latino—and a full 32% identifies as Black.
• In Ohio, the nation’s seventh-largest state, 13% of the population identifies as Black.
• In Mississippi, 38% of people identify as Black.

Median household incomes in those states — Georgia, Mississippi, and Ohio — fall below the national average. All three of them report higher poverty rates than the nation as a whole. Georgia and Mississippi have refused the federal Medicaid expansion funds offered under the Affordable Care Act—and both states have among the nation’s highest percentages of residents living without health insurance.

People in these states often already have to travel hundreds of miles, cross state lines, and wait for weeks to get an abortion—if they can access services at all. For many women, these barriers effectively ban abortion, and women of color—who already face significant barriers to health care and attacks on their bodily autonomy—bear the brunt of it.

This in part explains why these unconstitutional bans feel so infuriating and needless: in the states attempting to enact them, maternal health outcomes rank among the nation’s worst. Mississippi has the nation’s worst infant mortality rate, and Georgia has the nation’s worst maternal mortality rate. In both states—as in the country as a whole—African-Americans face a disproportionate share of the consequences of those public-health failures.

5. The goal: Permitting every state to ban abortion

The logic behind the rush to enact these unconstitutional abortion bans is simple: with senators confirming judges with views hostile to reproductive health and rights to the federal courts—including the Supreme Court—Roe v. Wade is at risk like never before.

Trump has installed more federal appeals court judges in his first two years than any other president—and has installed as many Supreme Court justices in two years as President Obama installed in eight.

Trump promised as a candidate to choose judges who would “automatically” overturn Roe, and has worked since to keep that promise. Trump nominee Brett Kavanaugh has already acted to restrict access to abortion during his brief tenure on the Supreme Court—writing to say that courts should let a state proceed with abortion restrictions that that were ruled unconstitutional just a few short years ago.

That explains why a state like Mississippi, which courts blocked from enforcing an unconstitutional 15-week ban in 2018, would advance an even more stringent ban on safe, legal abortion a year later. Anti-abortion politicians believe that Trump’s judicial nominees may overturn Roe v. Wade—and intend to test just how far judges will let them go to restrict people’s ability to access their constitutional right.

There have been more than 250 abortion restrictions introduced in this country since January.

Pair those with the effort to undermine Title X—the nation’s only program dedicated to affordable reproductive health care—by gagging doctors from referring patients to abortion services, and the pattern is undeniable. Even as seven in 10 Americans consistently say they favor abortion access, opponents of safe, legal abortion think they can achieve a ban on abortion nationwide within the next few years.

These attacks are only the beginning. We can count on politicians to introduce unconstitutional abortion bans in other states. It’s up to us to stand united against this unprecedented effort—and to fight back.

Tell lawmakers to STOP using six-week abortion bans to make YOUR choices for you – add your name here!

More than *300* abortion restrictions have been introduced since JANUARY.

Tell lawmakers to STOP using six-week abortion bans to make YOUR choices for you – add your name here!

Shame on Brian Kemp.