In anticipation of extra hostility towards abortion below President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, California lawmakers introduced two new items of laws Monday aimed toward defending medicine abortion and punishing native governments that intrude with entry to reproductive well being care.
California Lawyer Normal Rob Bonta introduced the payments at a press convention, saying Californians are in an “urgent and dangerous situation” with Trump returning to workplace and Republicans quickly controlling each chambers in Congress.
One of many legislative proposals, the Remedy Abortion Entry invoice, seeks to make sure that medicine abortion ― a two-pill routine of mifepristone and misoprostol ― is protected and accessible in all places in California, together with in its so-called well being care deserts the place medical suppliers are more durable to come back by.
“Rights don’t really do us any good if we can’t access them,” mentioned Assemblymember-elect Maggy Krell, who co-authored the invoice with Majority Chief Cecilia Aguiar-Curry. The objective of the invoice is to make sure that medicine abortion ― the commonest approach of terminating a being pregnant ― is “not just a constitutional right that lives in a constitutional document on paper,” she mentioned.
The laws “will ensure that patients and providers have access to what they need, to mifepristone, to misoprostol, and protect the transportation, the mailing, the supplying of everything that would be needed for a medication abortion,” Krell continued at Monday’s press convention.
The total textual content of the invoice and its methods haven’t but been launched.
The laws comes as reproductive rights advocates warn that Trump might invoke the the Comstock Act ― a 150-year-old legislation that criminalizes sending “obscene” supplies within the mail, together with something “intended for producing abortion” ― to ban medicine abortion, which has turn into a vital entry level for the reason that fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
After months of strain for him to make clear his stance, Trump mentioned on the marketing campaign path that he wouldn’t implement the Comstock Act. However critics are skeptical of such a promise on condition that a lot of his allies, together with Vice President-elect JD Vance, have advocated for utilizing it to crack down on medicine abortion.
The opposite California laws introduced Monday would broaden Bonta’s powers to implement the Reproductive Privateness Act, an current statute banning the state from interfering in a affected person’s determination to entry abortion. If handed, Bonta would be capable to slap those that violate it with monetary penalties.
“This is not a hypothetical,” Bonta mentioned Monday, saying metropolis officers in Beverly Hills illegally colluded earlier this yr to cease an abortion clinic from opening there.
“We were able to prevent Beverly Hills from taking this type of action again, but we weren’t able to seek financial penalties that would in turn further disincentivize government actors from violating the law,” Bonta mentioned.
The payments’ announcement comes the identical day California Gov. Gavin Newsom convened a particular session on Trump-proofing a number of the state’s legal guidelines. He plans to ask the legislature to approve further funding to Bonta’s workplace in preparation with authorized fights with the Trump administration.
“We’re not going to be caught flat-footed,” Newsom mentioned at a press convention earlier this month. “We want to be prepared as early as Jan. 20.”
Talking Monday, Bonta mentioned it’s California’s obligation to encourage each state to its east.
“At times in this nation, when people’s rights and freedoms are under attack, when they’re at risk ― as is so often the case ― people look west across this country,” he mentioned. “They look west to California to see what the largest state in the nation, the fifth-largest economy in the world, the most diverse state in the nation, is doing. And here’s what they’ll see.”
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He famous that his workplace sued the earlier Trump administration greater than 120 instances and received a supermajority of these instances.
