The outcome of Tuesday's election is likely to make that map worse.
Over the past four and a half years, including the first half of 2014, states have enacted 207 laws restricting abortion. The peak came in 2011. But the slowdown in getting new laws onto the books doesn't mean the forced-birther movement is growing tired. As Amanda Marcotte at Slate
wrote last summer, for the movement's activists it's a matter of working smarter not harder in coming up with new laws and spreading duplicates of laws already on the books in some states enacted in others.
The results of Tuesday's election—putting at least 67 state legislative bodies in Republican hands—means more of the same. Molly Redden at Mother Jones writes:
Already, anti-abortion advocates are calling it a big win. Hundreds of the country's most extreme anti-abortion bills pop up in these statehouses every year, and Tuesday's results won't do anything to put a stop to that. But reproductive rights advocates also suffered big setbacks Tuesday in places where they had actually been playing offense. Now, Democratic losses in states like Colorado, Nevada, New York, and Washington could torpedo their efforts to expand reproductive rights.
One of the worst outcomes came in Tennessee. Not from any change in the legislature, where Republicans already had supermajorities of more than 70 percent in both houses. It was 53 percent voter approval of the dreadful Amendment 1, which gives the legislature a constitutional backing to pass more anti-abortion bills. The amendment states:
"Nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of an abortion. The people retain the right through their elected state representatives and state senators to enact, amend, or repeal statutes regarding abortion, including, but not limited to, circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest or when necessary to save the life of the mother."
There's more below the fold.
One major concern of reproductive rights activists is that many women hampered by laws in neighboring states now seek abortions in Tennessee. Five million dollars were spent on the campaign by friends and foes of Amendment 1. Brian Harris, president of the forced-birther organization, Tennessee Right to Life, said the amendment is a "necessary first step toward protection not only for the unborn but for women and girls who fall prey to people looking to profit from untimely or unexpected pregnancies."
Harris said his group's next step is returning to the legislature to persuade lawmakers to restore a package of laws stricken by a 2000 state Supreme Court decision, including requiring a short waiting period for women seeking an abortion, a requirement to provide educational materials and greater regulation of abortion facilities.
"Short" is in the eye of beholder. Three of the 26 states with waiting periods have set theirs at 72 hours. That presents hassles, especially for women who have to travel a long way to reach a clinic that will perform an abortion. South Dakota, which has a 72-hour waiting period that does not include weekends, has only one such clinic, in the southeast part of the state. Which means a couple of costly overnight stays or long roundtrips as well as time off work that many women cannot afford.
Those "educational materials" in many states are typically outright propaganda filled with exaggerations, lies and medical inaccuracies. Regulation of clinics that perform abortions are specifically designed to force their closure by making them adhere to hospital standards neither medically necessary nor required of other out-patient clinics.
Chipping away at women's right to control their own bodies eventually turns that right to dust. That's where we're headed in more than half the country.