#trap laws

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day:

I couldn’t be more thrilled to write this sentence: the Wyoming Supreme Court ruled today to protect abortion rights, striking down the state’s two (yes, two!) abortion bans. The judges held that the bans violate the state constitution, which protects people’s right to make their own healthcare decisions. Just as important, the court states plainly that abortion is healthcare. At a moment when conservatives across the country are trying to divorce abortion from medicine—insisting that “pregnancy isn’t a disease” and that abortion is never medically necessary—this ruling could prove vital for all of us, not just those in Wyoming. First, some background: After Roe was overturned, Wyoming Republicans passed two abortion bans—one that banned abortion generally, and another specific to abortion medication. Abortion providers and advocates, including those from Wellspring Health Access and Chelsea’s Fund, challenged the laws. They pointed to a 2012 constitutional amendment passed by Wyoming voters, ensuring people’s right to make their own healthcare decisions. In 2024, a Teton County judge agreed, ruling that the laws violated the state constitution. Judge Melissa Owens said that the bans “impede the fundamental right to make health care decisions for an entire class of people, pregnant women.” But the state appealed, arguing that abortion isn’t healthcare because “it’s not restoring the woman’s body from pain, physical disease or sickness.”1

The bans were blocked while the case made its way through the courts, but conservative lawmakers were desperate to stop anyone from getting care. So they passed new TRAP laws aimed at shuttering the state’s lone abortion clinic, Wellspring Health Access. These laws were blocked, too. Now, here we are—with Wyoming’s Supreme Court rejecting Republicans’ argument and protecting abortion rights. Noting that the state failed to cite any legal precedent suggesting abortion isn’t healthcare, the judges pointed to the Merriam-Webster definition of health: “the condition of being sound in body, mind, or spirit; especially: freedom from physical disease or pain.”  The court also points out that the state focused only on the part of the definition related to restoring someone from disease or pain, conveniently ignoring the rest. Which makes perfect sense—because when have Republicans ever given a shit about women’s body, mind, or spirit?

Wyoming Supreme Court struck down a pair of reactionary anti-abortion laws, such as the state’s abortion ban and the mifepristone ban. In a twist of irony, a 2012 anti-Obamacare referendum helped aid the striking down of the anti-abortion law.

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In 2013, Texas passed House Bill 2 (HB2), which placed new, more stringent regulations on abortion clinics. The World Health Organization has classified abortion as a safe procedure for outpatient clinics and physician’s offices, which is where 95% of abortions take place in the U.S, according to the National Abortion Federation (NAF), the professional association for abortion providers. But HB2 mandated, among other things, that providers must come into compliance with ambulatory surgery center (ASC) standards. ASCs are a step up from medical offices and provide outpatient surgeries that do not require hospital stays—think knee replacements—requiring facilities to include at least one dedicated operating room. HB2 meant that abortion providers across Texas had to upgrade corridor widths, door and exam room sizes, and HVAC systems, among other things. HB2, proponents argued, would help protect women with a higher standard of care. “This is an important day for those who support life and for those who support the health of Texas women,” said then-Governor Rick Perry when the legislation passed.

For Hagstrom Miller and opponents of HB2, the true intent of the law was obvious, and it wasn’t about patient well-being. The legislation has “nothing to do with the actual procedure that we’re providing,” Hagstrom Miller says. The statutes “were imposed on us because the opposition knew it would be extremely difficult to comply, and it would be incredibly onerous and expensive.”

HB2 is what’s known as a Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers—or TRAP—law. TRAP refers to legislation specifically related to the physical building, equipment, and staffing requirements of a facility that performs abortions, according to Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual and reproductive health and rights research and policy nonprofit. The term was coined by the Center for Reproductive Health in the 1990s, Nash says, but zoning and building codes were used to limit abortion clinics as soon as the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in 1973. Following the 2010 midterm elections, when many state and local legislatures went red, hundreds of new TRAP laws were passed in the U.S. Far from being motivated by a question of safety, Nash says, TRAP laws in the last decade have become the primary tool used to hinder access to legal abortion care in America.

Florida House bill a barrier to legal abortions

by Sarah Fosburg

Who is Lucia? We don’t really know. We know she works at a summer camp, we know she can do a pretty good fake Southern accent, and we know she had a long drive to get where she’s going. We know she wants an abortion, but we don’t know why. We see her touch arms briefly with the woman next to her in the waiting room. We see—and feel—her exasperation as she’s told she must wait twenty-four hours and undergo an ultrasound before her procedure.

We see her go to a bar and drink a beer, and our first reaction is horror—before we remember that it doesn’t matter. We see her race out without paying, and we grow frustrated with her.

S.P. Rogers at RePro-Truth:

Back in 2013, “more than 300 provisions were introduced across the country to prevent access to abortion” under the guise of protecting women's health and safety.2 In August of that year, J. Pepper Bryars, the former press secretary and speechwriter for Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, authored an op-ed in which he proudly admitted that “abortion opponents' true goal [was] not to make abortion clinics safer [for women], but to close all abortion clinics.”3 "Our goal should remain… to make all abortion illegal and inaccessible… And our strategy and arguments should always support that long-term goal,” he added.4 Woman-protective anti-abortion arguments (WPAA) emerged as a strategy in the 1990s, “fueled by anti-abortion market research. According to John Willke, head of the National Right to Life Committee and pioneer of the 1970s' fetal-focused arguments, he embraced WPAA early in the 1990s when research showed that the movement's fetal-focused arguments were falling on deaf ears.”5 The prevailing public sentiment, Wilke discovered, was that “pro-life people were not compassionate to women and that we were only ‘fetus lovers’ who abandoned the mother after the birth. They felt that we were violent, that we burned down clinics and shot abortionists. We had to convince the public that we were compassionate to women.”6 In response to this research, Wilke created the now familiar slogan “Love Them Both,” and the anti-abortion movement began to argue that abortion harms women.7 “For audiences concerned about protecting women’s rights, woman-focused antiabortion argument was potentially conflict resolving: it could reassure those who hesitated to prohibit abortion because of concerns about women’s welfare that legal restrictions on abortion might instead be in women’s interest.”8 But WPAA fused “talk about women’s health and women’s rights with some very old forms of talk about women’s roles: Abortion must harm women because women are by nature mothers. Choosing against motherhood and subverting the physiology of pregnancy will make women ill—and in all events cannot represent what women really want, because any real woman wants what is best for her child. Women who seek abortions must have been confused, misled, or coerced into the decision to abort a pregnancy—because the choice to abort a pregnancy cannot reflect a normal woman’s true desires or interests. Using law to restrict abortion protects women from such pressures and confusions—and frees women to be true women.”9

WPAA is aimed at protecting fetuses by restricting women’s choices, which is said to be “good” for women. Advocating for restricting women’s rights because doing so is “good for women is advocating on the basis of a sex-role-based belief that, as Dorinda Bordlee [and other anti-abortion activists] emphasized,... ‘What’s good for the child is good for the mother. So now we’re advocating legislation that is good for the woman.’ On this sex-role-based view, there is no conflict of interests between women and the unborn life they bear because, as Bordlee explained, what is good for the child is good for the mother. A state can restrict abortion to protect the unborn and it is good for women’s health because what is good for children is good for women’s health. The descriptive claim is also a normative claim about sex roles that are ‘good’ for women.”10

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Despite the contemporary anti-abortion movement's emphasis on “science,” WPAA remains grounded in gender-paternalism. “Women’s decisions about abortion are shaped by circumstances that women face before conception and can foresee after birth.”13 “In fact, global studies show that highly restrictive abortion laws make abortion unsafe for women but do little to lower abortion rates.”14 “WPAA offers abortion-restrictions as a one-size-fits-all cure for the many social circumstances that lead women to end a pregnancy. The claim is that by restricting all women, government can free women to be the mothers they naturally are. Woman-protective antiabortion argument is gender-paternalist in just the sense that the old sex-based protective labor legislation was. It restricts women’s choices to free them to perform their natural role as mothers.”15

Since the Dobbs decision, groups that oppose reproductive rights and autonomy are laser focused on prohibiting access to safe and effective medications that induce abortion, particularly targeting mifepristone and misoprostol. Proponents have consistently framed their efforts to cut off access to these medications as a benign effort to “safeguard[] the health and safety of women.”16 Given the anti-abortion movement's history of cloaking its goals in woman-protective anti-abortion arguments (WPAA), it is prudential to ask, “Is the anti-abortion movement’s goal of cutting off all access to mifepristone and misoprostol truly a benign effort to protect women’s health and safety?”

[...] Unfortunately, Roe v. Wade didn't magically mean that safe abortion was acceptable to everyone who needed it. TRAP laws, or Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers laws, enacted under the guise of protecting women's health and safety created tremendous hurdles for low income and minority women. Some who were unable to access abortion turned to unsafe methods.