Oklahoma’s Republican-controlled state legislature has approved a Texas-style ban on abortions at six weeks of pregnancy, before many women know they are even pregnant, that abortion advocates warn will lead to a dangerous and dramatic decrease in abortion care across both states.
The measure will take effect immediately once it is signed into law by Republican Governor Kevin Stitt, who has pledged to “outlaw abortion” in the state.
Abortion care providers in the state already are reeling from a series of abortion restrictions approved by GOP legislators, including a law that makes abortion care a felony punishable up to 10 years in prison, set to take effect in August.
After the state’s House of Representatives approved the six-week ban on 28 April, Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights pledged to fight it in court.
“This ban, like all abortion bans, will harm real people,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “Oklahoma politicians may have abandoned their constituents – but we won’t. We’re asking the court to block this ban.”
National advocacy group Physicians for Reproductive Health said the measure is a “devastating blow to Oklahoma communities and communities across the South.”
“This bill is incredibly cruel and that is exactly the point,” the group said. “They’re not even trying to hide it anymore: this is an impossible and medically inaccurate parameter for abortions.”
The measures join a wave of anti-abortion bills from Republican state lawmakers across the US, emboldened by the US Supreme Court’s anticipated ruling in a case that could determine the fate of healthcare protections for women if the decades-old precedent from the ruling in Roe v Wade is overturned.
The court also has declined to intervene in a Texas case seeking to block that state’s ban on abortion care at six weeks of pregnancy.
Planned Parenthood reported that Oklahoma abortion providers saw a massive per cent increase in abortion patients with Texas addresses compared to the previous year. Further eroding abortion access in Oklahoma could have dangerous health consequences for people seeking an abortion in the entire region, advocates have warned.
“We’ve already been living with a crisis because of the Texas ban,” Emily Wales, interim president of Planned Parenthood Great Plains told The Independent earlier this month. “We’re very aware that if we also lose access in Oklahoma, the system that has been strained for too long, with too few provides, will break, and there will be more patients than ever before that there just isn’t room on the schedule for you, and you’ve got to try to get further from home [for care].”
Patients will have to travel several hours one way to Illinois, New Mexico or other nearby states where there are not debilitating restrictions on abortion care, but “the logistics are overwhelming for people,” Ms Wales said.
In the wake of the Texas law, the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City “has been inundated” with patients from Texas to access abortion care, according to the group’s advocacy director Myfy Jensen-Fellows.
“The volume of patients has not decreased, and the impact on Oklahomans’ access to abortion care in their own communities has been significant,” she said in a statement earlier this month. “Patients from Oklahoma are now routinely traveling out of state to access timely abortion care, including many who are visiting our clinic in Wichita, Kansas.”
In Idaho, the first state to approve an abortion ban mirroring the Texas law, the state’s Supreme Court temporarily blocked the law following a legal challenge from Planned Parenthood. Both Idaho’s governor and the state’s attorney general have suggested that the ban is unconstitutional.
A federal judge in Kentucky also has temporarily blocked a sweeping anti-abortion law with myriad restrictions that effectively forced the state’s remaining clinics to close.
Should the Supreme Court reject precedent from the landmark Roe ruling, in which a decision is expected in the coming weeks, more than two-dozen states already have in place so-called “trigger bans” and other abortion restrictions that would immediately outlaw abortion care.
