The Repro Rundown

The good: Last week, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek signed into lawprotections for trans health care and abortion care. Ben Botkin, a reporter for the Oregon Capital Chronicle, explains:

House Bill 2002 was Oregon’s response to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last year and makes Oregon one of the states with the strongest reproductive health care rights in the nation. Conservative and Republican-dominated states have passed abortion restrictions as the front lines of the battle for reproductive health care access moved from the U.S. Supreme Court to statehouses across the country.

“A patchwork of abortion bans across the country has put people’s lives in danger and caused disproportionate harm to individuals who have limited income or come from marginalized communities,” Kotek said. “Oregon is not immune from these attacks. Neighboring states are banning and criminalizing essential health care, threatening patients and providers, cutting off access to care in rural communities and targeting access to lifesaving health care for transgender and non-binary individuals.”

The fair-to-middlin’: This headline made me, what is it the kids say these days, lolsob? Mississippi Today reports that “Mississippi politicians appear afraid to let citizens vote on abortion like in other states.” This has been a consistent topic of conversation in this newsletter—time and time again, when abortion is put directly to voters via the ballot, voters side with abortion rights. Mississippi, of course, has its own history with what its conservative leadership would deem a “conundrum.” In 2011, the state put forth a ballot initiative that sought to legally define human life as beginning at the moment of fertilization. It failed by…a very wide margin. It’s hard to imagine the same scenario  playing out much differently now, more than a decade later.

The damn ugly: On Monday, the Indiana Supreme Court declined to rehear a case challenging the state’s near-total abortion ban. The Associated Press reports:

The denial of the rehearing means the ban will take effect once a June 30 ruling upholding the ban is certified, a procedural step expected to take just days, court spokesperson Kathryn Dolan said in an email to news media.

The state’s highest court ruled June 30 that the abortion ban doesn’t violate the Indiana constitution. That removed a major hurdle to enforcing the ban Republicans approved last summer ahead of a wave of restrictions by conservative states in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

In a 4-1 decision Monday, the Supreme Court reaffirmed its order that Planned Parenthood and other health care providers “cannot show a reasonable likelihood of success” with their challenge to the abortion restrictions.

Abortion has essentially been inaccessible in Indiana while abortion rights advocates have sought to appeal the court’s original decision upholding the ban. As I reported earlier for this newsletter, all six clinics in Indiana stopped providing care at the end of July.