If there’s any one indication the pro-life movement is winning the abortion battle lately, it’s in the passage of pro-life laws protecting women and unborn children from abortion. In the last five years total, state legislatures have approved more pro-life laws against abortion than in the previous 15 years combined.
This information comes from a new report from the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion organization formerly affiliated with the Planned Parenthood abortion business.
Including the 57 abortion restrictions enacted in 2015, states have adopted 288 abortion restrictions just since the 2010 midterm elections swept abortion opponents into power in state capitals across the country. To put that number in context, states adopted nearly as many abortion restrictions during the last five years as during the entire previous 15 years. Moreover, the sheer number of new restrictions enacted in 2015 makes it clear that this sustained assault on abortion access shows no signs of abating.
The 288 new restrictions enacted since 2010 include a broad range of approaches, from banning some abortions to putting restrictions on the providers allowed to perform the procedures to limiting insurance coverage.
The pro-abortion group’s analysis indicates 10 states are largely responsible for the majority of pro-life laws passed in the last 5 years.
Thirty-one states—spanning all regions of the country—enacted at least one abortion restriction during the last five years. The 10 states that enacted at least 10 new restrictions together account for 60% of the 288 new abortion restrictions adopted over the last five years. These states are overwhelmingly located in the South and the Midwest, and it is likely that access to services for women in these regions has been impacted significantly. Four states—Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas and Oklahoma—each enacted at least 20 new abortion restrictions, making this handful of states, which together adopted 94 new restrictions, responsible for a third of all abortion restrictions enacted nationwide over the last five years. Kansas has the dubious distinction of leading the pack with 30 new abortion restrictions since 2010.
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Apart form the traditional pro-life laws banning some late abortions or holding shady abortion clinics accountable for hurting women, Guttmacher lamented that more states are seeking to cut off Planned Parenthood funding in the wake of the videos exposing the abortion company selling aborted baby body parts.
Mirroring events in Congress, five states—Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas—took steps to exclude Planned Parenthood from the Medicaid program in 2015. These efforts were blocked by federal courts in Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana; a challenge was just filed in November in Texas. Similar efforts made by Arizona and Indiana in recent years were also rebuffed by federal courts.
Following the release of the videos, North Carolina expanded its existing provision blocking state funding of “non-public” family planning providers to explicitly apply to family planning providers that also offer abortion services. (Similar measures to bar funding for family planning providers that offer abortion care were introduced in Illinois, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.) In addition, New Hampshire’s Executive Council, an administrative board charged with overseeing large funding streams in the state, excluded Planned Parenthood health centers from receiving federal Title X dollars that flow through the state.
States are also moving to stop the sale of body parts from aborted babies in the wake of the scandal:
As yet another consequence of the release of the Planned Parenthood sting videos, 10 states moved to regulate either the process for fetal tissue donation or biomedical research conducted in the state using fetal tissue resulting from induced abortions.
