USA – Radical Attempts to Ban Abortion Dominate State Policy Trends in the First Quarter of 2019

Radical Attempts to Ban Abortion Dominate State Policy Trends in the First Quarter of 2019

Guttmacher Institute
First published online: April 3, 2019

Abortion rights took center stage in state legislatures during the first three months of 2019. While a number of states took steps to protect abortion access, these efforts were overshadowed by attempts to restrict abortion access. Indeed, antiabortion policymakers wasted no time revealing their true agenda: banning abortion.

Although the overall number of abortion restrictions introduced so far in 2019 was essentially the same as in the first quarter of 2018, the extreme nature of this year’s bills is unprecedented. In particular, conservative state legislatures are looking to enact abortion bans in the hopes of kick-starting litigation that will give the U.S. Supreme Court, and its majority of conservative justices, ample opportunity to undermine or eliminate abortion rights. Legislation under consideration in 28 states would ban abortion in a variety of ways:

Continued: https://www.guttmacher.org/article/2019/04/radical-attempts-ban-abortion-dominate-state-policy-trends-first-quarter-2019