This week, leaked documents showing Donald Trump’s budget calculations revealed plans to eliminate all funding for the State Department’s Office of Global Women’s Issues, a program that supports women’s rights initiatives around the world. Trump also walked back a child-care proposal that would have given average American families less than $20 in tax discounts while granting high earners like his wealthy Upper East Side pals a several thousand dollar-cut. He’s reportedly considering a new plan the would shift some of those benefits away from the wealthy and toward people who are actually having trouble affording child care, though it would still come once a year as a tax cut or refund, leaving parents to foot bills year-round with money they may not have.
That’s the update on how the White House is bungling policies that could help people who are women. Meanwhile, state houses kept busy this week with their usual slate of abortion bills. In Indiana, minors have to get parental consent or a judge’s sign-off to get an abortion, and a bill Gov. Eric Holcomb signed on Tuesday will make it even harder for a juvenile to get confidential care. The new law allows a judge to tell a minor’s parents she sought judicial permission to get an abortion, whether or not the judge okays the procedure, and compels abortion providers to file a report with the state for every pregnancy they terminate. On Monday, the Minnesota House passed two pieces of abortion-related legislation that Gov. Mark Dayton has said he would veto, as he did similar bills passed in 2011 and 2012. One would prevent state-funded health-care programs, including state employee insurance and Medicaid, from covering abortion care. The other would establish new licensing and inspection requirements for abortion providers. Abortion-rights advocates say the law would put unnecessary burdens on health-care providers and would make clinic staff names public, putting them at risk of targeted harassment.
Public funding for abortion care also came up this week in Illinois, where the House passed legislation on Tuesday that would let state-funded health insurance cover abortions. It passed narrowly along party lines, 62-55, with just a few Democrats voting against it. Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner claimed in his 2014 campaign that he supported abortion access for women of all income levels, but walked back his support in recent weeks, saying he opposes the just-passed bill. Leaders in the state Senate say the bill is likely to pass there, too, which would put Rauner in the undesirable position of having to decide whether veto the bill to maintain his conservative bona fides, which would give Democrats fuel to call him a flip-flopper in his reelection campaign. The Illinois bill also strikes down a provision in a current law that would immediately criminalize abortion if Roe v. Wade ever gets overturned. Rauner has said he supports legal abortion and would not veto an attempt to dispose of that “trigger” law.
The Louisiana legislature took bold action this week against a thing that is currently not happening there: The House of Representatives voted 87-0 (!) to pass a bill that prohibits the state from delicensing adoption agencies that refuse to place children with same-sex couples for religious reasons. The state Senate approved the measure last week, so the bill is now on its way to the governor’s desk. Republican Rep. Rich Wingo, who proposed the bill, justified it with stories of other states that had passed measures specifically prohibiting religious adoption agencies from turning away prospective parents for being gay or bisexual. That hasn’t happened in Louisiana, making the enthusiasm around this bill rather suspect. Wingo said the bill is actually an anti-discrimination act—it protects religious agencies from being discriminated against for keeping children out of homes that “go against their faith” by housing queer parents.
On the upside, a federal district court on Wednesday stopped another no-good Louisiana law from doing any more damage. A judge permanently blocked an abortion restriction that required providers to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles, mirroring a Texas law that was struck down by the Supreme Court last summer. Louisiana’s restriction “places an unconstitutional undue burden on women seeking abortion in Louisiana,” the judge ruled. And in a victory both substantive and symbolic, a clinic run by the abortion provider at the center of that Texas Supreme Court Case, Whole Woman’s Health, reopened in Austin this week for the first time since Texas’ former restrictions shut it down.
