Jessica Valenti: Abortion, Every Day (1.30.23) Daily round-up of abortion issues

[Nevilledog]

https://jessica.substack.com/p/abortion-every-day-13023

In the states…

Well this is wild: A bill in North Dakota would require any sex ed classes in the state to show students a “high-definition ultrasound video” of a fetus and a “high-quality, computer-generated rendering or animation showing the process of fertilization and every stage of human development inside the uterus.” Something tells me that we can’t count on those ‘renderings’ to be very accurate—and that Republican legislators wouldn’t be as keen to show students images of what early pregnancy and abortion actually look like.

South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace says that her party is going to alienate and lose voters if they don’t adopt a more ‘centrist’ agenda on abortion—a sort of hilarious take from someone who just proposed a bill that would create a website to collect the data of pregnant women and share it with crisis pregnancy centers. That said, she’s not wrong; when Mace says that “millions of women, millions and millions” were outraged over Roe being overturned, she’s absolutely dead on. And Republicans’ denial (see ‘In the nation’ below for the latest) is going to continue to cost them. But while Mace’s vision for “common ground” may help the GOP with their public image, it will do absolutely nothing to help women. Because—and you know what I’m going to say next—abortion exceptions aren’t real.

Also in South Carolina, Attorney General Alan Wilson filed a petition for the state Supreme Court to reconsider the state’s abortion ban, saying, “The framers of our privacy provision did not conceive this provision as creating a right to abortion.” (This comes as Republicans across multiple states are making the argument that their state constitutions’ right to privacy don’t include the right to abortion.)

This weekend, Minnesota codified abortion rights via the PRO Act. Abortion is already legal in the state, but the legislation adds an extra layer of reproductive rights protections—a smart move in a time when Republicans across the country are trying to circumvent the courts and voters to restrict abortion.

*snip*