In a reversal from last year, Colorado lawmakers on Thursday approved a state budget that includes funds for a program credited with reducing the teen birth rate by 40 percent and the teen abortion rate by 35 percent.
Dilation and evacuation bans are a strategy by the anti-choice movement to target specific abortion procedures. Medical professionals criticize these bans as substituting politicians’ agendas for the judgment and expertise of doctors.
"It is deeply, deeply concerning that in 2016 we are talking about jailing women’s healthcare providers for protecting their patients’ privacy," said Mary Kogut, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood's St. Louis affiliate.
The Republican-backed law contains numerous anti-choice measures, including forced counseling and mandatory ultrasounds for abortion patients, regulations on physicians who provide abortion care, and a ban on fetal tissue donation.
Many anti-choice policies flout established medical standards, disrupt a woman's ability to seek and act on counsel from her trusted health-care provider, and make accessing abortion care more expensive. But one bill recently signed into law in Utah, SB 234, managed to encapsulate a number of troubling harms.
The statistics “reflect a dramatic increase in hate speech and internet harassment, death threats, attempted murder, and murder, which coincided with the release of heavily edited, misleading, and inflammatory videos beginning in July.”
As the GOP's subpoenas continue, inflammatory language and repetition of false allegations of profit-making around fetal tissue procurement have alarmed abortion providers who may find themselves the subject of investigation.