As I reported, though, leading legal scholars begged to differ: The platform invokes the Fourteenth Amendment, which the GOP has, for decades, cited as the key to enshrining fetal personhood in the law. That would amount to a de facto national abortion ban by establishing embryos as US citizens entitled to “equal protection of the laws,” among … Read more
“Our compliance with the law is clear and well-documented,” Lauren Cowles, executive director of Arkansans for Limited Government, said in a statement. “The secretary of state’s refusal to count valid signatures is an affront to democracy and an attempt to undermine the will of the people.” Read more at The Guardian
“The key to their true agenda here is the suggestion that the 14th Amendment of the federal constitution somehow empowers states to ban abortion,” Kolbi-Molinas said. “They are signaling that embryos and fetuses are persons under the 14th Amendment, which is simply not true. And if that were the case, if embryos and fetuses had … Read more
Arkansans for Limited Government announced Friday that it collected the signatures of more than 100,000 registered voters — more than the approximately 90,700 it needed before the deadline that day — to move forward with getting its proposal on the general election ballot. In his letter, Thurston said the lack of required paperwork affected 14,143 … Read more
One bill was aimed at protecting the freedom to travel across state lines to access abortion care. Another bill would have protected doctors in states where abortion is legal from being held liable for providing services to patients from other states, and a third bill was meant to support training more abortion care providers. Read … Read more
In addition to cutting funding for the Office on Women’s Health, this year’s Republican budget would fully eliminate the Title X Family Planning Program, the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, and Healthy Start, the federal program meant to address infant mortality. Read more at Rolling Stone
“Coast-to-coast abortion desert”: Experts slam media for claiming GOP “softened” abortion platform As for increasing access to birth control: No one, least of all a member of a GOP platform committee, actually thinks the Republican Party will do anything to promote the use of condoms or other forms of contraception. The Heritage Foundation, the hard-right … Read more
After Roe was overturned in June 2022, doctors said a wave of young people like Ferst started asking for permanent birth control like tubal ligations, in which the fallopian tubes are removed, or vasectomies. New research published this spring in JAMA Health Forum shows how big that wave of young people is nationally. Read more … Read more
Arkansas abortion rights groups collect enough signatures to advance ballot measure Passage of the amendment in November would effectively undo the 2022 law. That outcome, however, faces an uphill climb. Abortion opponents in the ruby red state have fought the effort to advance the proposed amendment at every turn. Read more at NBC News Nebraska … Read more
A team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University has spent the two-and-a-half years since SB8 took effect crunching data on infant deaths in Texas and other states, then re-crunching it to confirm their results. They found that as women whose access to abortion was drastically curtailed by SB8 began to give birth in 2022, those … Read more
