After the Supreme Court removed federal protections for abortion in its Dobbs decision last June, the state’s attorney general immediately petitioned a federal judge to enforce a 2019 law that banned abortion after six weeks. It included an exception for when the mother’s life is at stake but not for instances of rape or incest. The six-week ban remained in effect for nearly three months, until a lawsuit brought by abortion providers led to an indefinite stay of the law. During that 82-day window, the costs associated with abortion care skyrocketed, and people were forced to cross state lines to seek the procedure—including, notoriously, a ten-year-old whose heartbreaking story became embroiled in a national controversy. 

The Abortion Fund of Ohio jumped into action, helping hundreds of Ohioans seek care elsewhere, in states where they could access abortion. The fund helped reroute them “out of state to be able to get the care that they were entitled to,” recalls Maggie Scotece, a doula and attorney who is currently serving as the organization’s interim executive director. (The organization is part of the coalition supporting Issue 1.)

But the organization, which helps people fund and access abortions, also received confused calls from, or on behalf of, people who could not travel: minors in group homes or juvenile justice centers, and people on probation and parole. 

Hundreds of thousands of Ohioans have their freedom of movement greatly restricted because they’re under some form of state supervision, and the stakes of Issue 1 may be highest for them. 

 According to data collected by the Prison Policy Initiative, Ohio ranks fourth nationally in the share of its population under any form of carceral control (this includes prisons, jails, probation, and parole), behind Idaho, Arkansas, and Georgia—“and that’s largely due to the massive number of people who are on probation,” said Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist at PPI.

A 2023 PPI report found that, at any time, some 191,000 state residents are on probation, which is an alternative to incarceration that comes with heavy restrictions and surveillance, while around 22,000 more are on parole, a form of post-release supervision that in Ohio is baked into prison sentences. “Probation is handed out like candy here in Hamilton County,” said Sean Vicente, a Hamilton County (Cincinnati) public defender. 

Abortion is currently legal up to 21 weeks and 6 days in Ohio because of the legal dispute over the 2019 law. Meanwhile the campaign to pass Issue 1 and permanently codify abortion rights has raised millions of dollars and gained traction; recent polls have found that between 52 percent and 58 percent of prospective voters supported the measure. 

But Issue 1 has also garnered many opponents, especially among the state’s Republican leadership. If it fails, Scotece predicted that the state supreme court, which has a GOP majority, will “almost certainly” reinstate the six-week ban. 

If that happens, people on probation or parole would face an impossible choice, Vicente said: “Do I travel out of state to take care of that health care issue and possibly get locked up? Or do I have an unplanned pregnancy? Do I have an ectopic pregnancy? Do I have a child via rape?” 

“It’s going to put poor people in a really tough spot where they have to truly decide between health care and liberty,” he told Bolts. 

Parole and probation are often conceived of as alternatives to incarceration that can keep more people in their communities. But both systems are so full of delays, requirements, and catch-22s that Vicente says he and his fellow public defenders often fear they are “setting up our clients to fail.” 

“The restrictions that are placed on people—and the ban on traveling out of state, which is common, is one of these—are often so onerous that people say that they would just rather be in prison,” Bertram said. 

At any given time, 39 percent of the people in Ohio’s jails are being detained because they violated the terms of their probation or parole, according to the PPI report. That’s double the national average of 20 percent. 

“I can understand it being that high, because anything can get you [violated],” said Malika Kidd, who helps women navigate reentry as the Program Director for the Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry in Akron and Cleveland. “You can be around another person that was in prison and you can get violated, just in the same area with them. Somebody in your family can have a gun with them and you’re around it, you could be violated. If you get a traffic ticket and don’t let them know, you can be violated.”

Though women are generally proportionally underrepresented within the criminal legal system, they are far more likely to be on probation than under other forms of correctional control, and both parole and probation compliance present special challenges for women. “Women are more likely to be the primary caregivers of children—all of the requirements that supervision imposes that get in the way of childcare are going to fall harder on women,” Bertram said. “That takes a huge amount of time out of your day.” There are fewer reentry programs serving women, who are more likely to be homeless upon their release—another factor that would make it difficult to comply with the often onerous requirements that accompany supervision. “It’s a combination of a lot of stuff that can overwhelm anybody,” said Kidd. 

Kidd is, in many ways, the face of women’s reentry in Ohio, but her experience with parole there illustrates how arbitrary and burdensome the system can be—and how it restricts people’s freedom of movement. In 2001, after police found cocaine in her car on a trip from Chicago to Cleveland, she was sent to prison for drug trafficking. Her son was just three years old; by the time she got out, he was 17. 

As part of her mandatory minimum sentence, Kidd was given a 5-year “post-control release” term. From the beginning, she says, her parole officer seemed biased against her and determined to make her life harder. The woman upped her risk level, calling her a flight risk because she is originally from Illinois, and forced her to wear an ankle bracelet, which tracked her movements and prohibited her from leaving Ohio. Some people on probation cannot even leave their county of residence without permission. 

Moreover, Kidd says her parole officer exacerbated the already toilsome process with delays in processing her requests for permission to travel outside the state. Ironically, some of Kidd’s requests were in order to speak at conferences about the myriad barriers associated with reentry. Her work was understanding about her spending hours at the parole office waiting for approval, she said, but “I’m sure there were plenty of other employers that weren’t as flexible as mine,” which could leave people to choose between potentially losing their job—a violation of parole conditions in itself—or giving up on the travel request. 

If abortion were once again banned in Ohio, people on parole or probation might be forced to choose between lying to the officer or judge assigned to their case about their reasons for travel, going out of state without permission, or being honest. The former two options both carry the risk of violating your supervision terms and being reincarcerated. 

Vicente said he couldn’t fathom any judges signing off on a travel request that involved going out of state to do something that would violate the law if done within state borders. 

He said, “You’re petitioning the court to say, ‘Hey, I know this is against the law here in Ohio, but I need my client to travel up to Michigan to get the care she needs. Judge, are you willing to allow her to travel out of state to break the law that’s currently in effect in Ohio?’ That I doubt any judges would sign off on.” 

“I think there’s gonna be a lot of frenzied and panicked calls, and it’s gonna put us in a tight spot as well,” Vicente added, wondering how his fellow public defenders would begin to advise their clients under such circumstances. 

An unexpected and unwanted pregnancy—and the stress, exhaustion, physical and hormonal changes, and increased number of health check-ups that tend to follow in its wake—could also make it harder to comply with the terms of supervision. “The medical needs are going to take priority over visiting the probation officer, which puts you in further jeopardy,” Vicente said. More people being forced to carry to term a pregnancy that they don’t want and can’t handle could ultimately contribute to the already high percentage of Ohioans jailed for violating the terms of their supervision.

With polling showing public support for abortion and other reproductive health rights, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine recently proposed to soften Ohio’s six-week ban if it were to come back into effect and to allow some exceptions, for example in the case of rape. But other Republican lawmakers have already resisted such changes. 

Republicans also tried to change the rules of the initiative process in Ohio to undermine this abortion rights measure, which was petitioned onto the ballot by organizers who collected hundreds of thousands of signatures. GOP lawmakers called a special election in August asking voters to raise the threshold to pass a constitutional amendment from a simple majority to 60 percent. That proposal failed by a wide margin in August.

The GOP’s proposal to change the rules in August was also called Issue 1, which has led to concerns of voter confusion as abortion rights proponents who fought the summer’s Issue 1 are now campaigning for people to approve the new Issue 1. 

If Issue 1 fails, it would add to the existing barriers that preventOhioans from accessing reproductive care. 

Even though abortion is currently legal up to nearly 22 weeks on paper, access is extremely limited in practice, Scotece of the Abortion Fund of Ohio said. While Ohio had more than 40 clinics in the ‘90s, anti-abortion groups have been “incredibly successful” in seeking to close them down, she told Bolts. The state now has just nine clinics concentrated in Ohio’s big cities, only three of which perform abortions up until the legal limit. 

Meanwhile, Scotece stressed that Ohio is already one of the leading states for the criminalization of pregnancy, whether it be arrests and prosecutions for self-managed abortions or the use of narcotics while pregnant. A 2021 study done by researchers at the University of California San Francisco that surveyed people who searched for abortion care via Google showed that intensifying abortion restrictions in the U.S. have led to an increase in self-managed abortions, including by attempting to hurt oneself or ingest drugs and alcohol—which would likely further expose people to criminalization. 

“We already know that folks who are low income, folks that are already under state scrutiny, whether it’s for parole or the family policing system, are more likely to be criminalized for pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes regardless of whether or not that is related to abortion,” Scotece said. 

Codifying the right to abortion and other reproductive care, and creating legal protections for people and organizations that assist others in accessing abortions, won’t solve all of these problems, Scotece added. But it will create a new test that Ohio courts must use when considering the constitutionality of a law that restricts or criminalizes abortion in the state. 

Kidd is not actively campaigning for Issue 1, but told Bolts she supports it. “It’s a woman’s right and I think these good old boys should not decide what a woman should do with her body.”

Correction (Nov. 1): An earlier version of this article misstated a quote from the Abortion Fund of Ohio, and inaccurately stated the number of Ohioans who sought out-of-state care when the six-week ban was enacted.

The post If Abortion Measure Fails, Ohioans on Parole And Probation Could Face Graver Restrictions appeared first on Bolts.

Editor’s note: Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 2223 into law on Sept. 27.

On the night of December 30, 2017, a teary 29-year-old Adora Perez gave birth to a stillborn boy at Adventist Medical Center in Hanford, California. After Perez tested positive for methamphetamine, she admitted that she had relapsed while pregnant. A nurse wrote that Perez and her boyfriend were extremely upset, calling her “emotional” and “tearful” while saying that he “appeared to have been crying and was solemn.” 

Shortly after Perez gave birth, her son was taken away and tested for illegal drugs. While she slept, a nurse called child protective services, according to documents her lawyers later shared with CalMatters. Police arrived at the hospital to question her the very next day. A doctor told police that the stillbirth was caused by complications related to “extensive drug use by the mother.”

On the morning of January 1, 2018, Perez was released from the hospital and then immediately arrested and taken to jail. Kings County District Attorney Keith Fagundes, who is running for his third term in office this week, charged her with murder, which he argued was justified under California law. 

A few months later, Perez pleaded guilty to manslaughter in exchange for an 11-year prison sentence. According to Perez, her defense attorney, a private lawyer appointed by a judge and not a public defender, did not investigate her case.

Perez might have served that whole decade-plus sentence had Fagundes not charged 26-year-old Chelsea Becker with murder less than two years later under similar circumstances, which drew increased attention to his prosecution of pregnant women. California TV stations posted Becker’s photo and news that police were searching for a “troubled” young woman wanted for the “murder of her unborn baby.” A Kings County judge dismissed Becker’s charges last year, after she had already spent 16 months in jail, but stopped short of ruling that her charge was not permitted under state law, as her attorneys had argued. 

Community activism and legal advocacy, including from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, eventually convinced a judge to reopen Perez’s case and vacate her conviction earlier this year, ruling in an opinion, “There is no crime in California of manslaughter of a fetus.” 

Bonta has also issued a “legal alert” to all California prosecutors, police chiefs and sheriffs saying that state law should not be contorted to “punish people who suffer the loss of their pregnancy” and called the prosecutions of Perez and Becker “improper and unjust,” stating in a press conference: “In California, we do not criminalize pregnancy loss, we do not criminalize miscarriages, we do not criminalize stillbirths.” 

Fagundes eventually dropped the charge against Perez but claimed he would refile it. He is believed to be the only prosecutor in the state who has charged people over pregnancy loss in the last 30 years. Fagundes, who would not agree to an interview, has even said he tried to prosecute whoever gave Becker and Perez drugs, but they would not cooperate. 

California lawmakers are now trying to pass legislation reducing the chances of law enforcement involvement in someone’s pregnancy loss. Assembly Bill 2223, introduced this session by Assembly Member Buffy Wicks, a Democrat from Oakland, is a legislative attempt to codify Bonta’s guidance by preventing coroners, who often double as law enforcement officials in the state, from investigating pregnant people for stillbirths or miscarriages. It also includes a provision that would allow people criminalized for pregnancy outcomes to sue law enforcement civilly. Anti-abortion groups in California who oppose the bill have staged a public campaign falsely claiming it “decriminalizes infanticide.” 

Fagundes has insisted that AB 2223 would “invite murder constantly,” disparaged Bonta’s memo to state law enforcement, and defended his prosecution of pregnant women, turning pregnancy-related criminal matters into grist for his re-election campaign. “The fact that other DAs across the state are too weak to stand up to Rob Bonta and the liberal machine who want to kill our babies is not my problem. I’m gonna do what’s right and do what’s right here,” he said in a May debate, in which he set himself up as a bulkwalk against progressive Democrats like Bonta. “If you are going to be a puppet and a weak milquetoast person … if you want Rob Bonta to be your district attorney, then vote for the opponent. Rob Bonta is a liberal who doesn’t believe in our values.” 

Fagundes faces off this week against Sarah Hacker, a one-time prosecutor and defense lawyer. Hacker is a self-described conservative, which makes sense for a candidate running in one of California’s most staunchly Republican counties. She told Bolts that she doesn’t support AB 2223 because it would curtail law enforcement discretion.

But Hacker is also making the case that Fagundes has twisted the law to fit his personal beliefs and ignited a totally unnecessary legislative and political maelstrom in the state. In a recent debate, Hacker said Fagundes “has illegally prosecuted women for stillborn deaths, knowing his actions are against the law.” 

Hacker, who even attended a local rally to protest Perez’s conviction, told Bolts that she doesn’t want to prosecute people for pregnancy outcomes. She also worries that Fagundes’ actions will keep victims of abuse or assault from seeking help from prosecutors. “When there is a sexual assault victim, I want them to feel comfortable coming forward,” she said.

The Kings County prosecutions for pregnancy loss speak to the ways that pregnancy is already policed, even in a blue state like California. An array of local officials, from DAs to sheriffs and coroners, have long enjoyed the power to target pregnancy outcomes with criminal charges.

Last year the organization National Advocates for Pregnant Women compiled at least 1,700 cases across the country since 1973 where women have been criminally punished for reasons related to pregnancy. Samantha Lee, a staff attorney for the group, says the criminal legal system treats pregnant people fundamentally different from others. 

“Society reduces pregnant people to vessels without their own rights and lives, so criminalizing them for behavior people incorrectly think is harmful to a fetus is an unfortunate progression that creates inequities and leads to the misapplication of laws,” Lee said. “These women would not have been charged if they had not been pregnant.”

In 1999, South Carolina police arrested and charged a woman with homicide by child abuse after she had a still birth. In 2008, a New York state prosecutor charged a woman with manslaughter for her failure to wear a seatbelt while pregnant. In 2015, Georgia prosecutors charged a young mother with murder for taking misoprostol, commonly used for self-managed abortions. In 2020, an Oklahoma prosecutor charged a woman with manslaughter when she had a miscarriage at around 15 weeks, well before the third trimester. In April, a young woman near the Texas-Mexico border was charged with murder because she sought medical care after an alleged self-managed abortion. Others have been criminally charged for falling down stairs, contracting HIV, or delaying a cesarean section.

Like in Kings County, many charges against pregnant people are linked to the failed “war on drugs,” attempts to punish substance use during pregnancy despite a distinct lack of evidence that they cause fetal harm and contrary to the recommendations of medical professionals, who fear pregnant people will resist prenatal care if they think it will draw police attention. 

Some states have taken this approach even further. Tennessee, for example, enacted a “fetal assault” law under which prosecutors charged at least 100 pregnant women for using illegal drugs. (The law has since expired.) Alabama has prosecuted at least 500 women between 2006 and 2015 under its “chemical endangerment law,” which includes criminalizing exposing a fetus at any age to any amount of a controlled substance, even legal ones like Valium. 

In many cases, prosecutors admitted the goal was to coerce pregnant people into rehab. As with most prosecutions, most of the defendants have come from marginalized groups at greater risk of both poor pregnancy outcomes and criminalization: poor people, people of color, LGBTQ people, and immigrants. 

“Unfortunately, the reality we see across the country is that health care providers, coroners, police, and sheriffs believe the misinformation that controlled substances cause pregnancy losses,” said Lee, a staff attorney with the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. “In addition to being inaccurate, this type of policing very clearly deters pregnant people from getting the health care they need—and from bringing their children in for health care—because they are afraid of being policed.”

The “fetal murder” law Fagundes used to justify Perez’s manslaughter charge dates to 1970, after the California Supreme Court held that the homicide statute in place at the time did not apply to a fetus. In response, lawmakers revised the statute to criminalize intentional injuries to a fetus as a form of homicide. The same law was used in 2003 to charge Scott Peterson for both the death of his wife Laci and that of her unborn son. The law was not intended to criminalize the outcomes of one’s own pregnancy, and prior attempts by prosecutors to do so have been dismissed by trial courts.

In addition to legislative attempts to limit policing of pregnancy, prosecutors across California have pledged not to prosecute women for pregnancy outcomes, as have DAs across the country, in states red and blue. California Governor Gavin Newsom has also reiterated his support for abortion rights and promised new legislation protecting abortion access. 

Still, if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, as a leaked draft opinion has suggested it will, efforts to criminalize pregnancy outcomes will almost certainly intensify around the country, says Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director at If/ When/ How, which is pushing for AB 2223’s passage in California. If Roe falls, 26 states are prepared to outlaw abortion entirely. Some states are considering additional criminal laws that would impose penalties on women for abortions, for seeking care after an attempted abortion or miscarriage, or for stillbirths. 

Advocates for pregnant people fear that this will lead to an increase in criminal charges filed against people across the country for all sorts of pregnancy outcomes, including stillbirths, miscarriages, and treatment for dangerous or unviable pregnancies.

“We’re likely to see an escalation of criminalization and arrests of people who have ended their pregnancies, and to create additional stigma that makes it more likely that people will be entangled in criminalization, irrespective of what the law says,” Diaz-Tello said. “Situations like what’s happening in California, I think, are more likely to proliferate.”

To a large extent, the debate over AB 2223 is centered in Kings County, located in the heart of California’s Central Valley with a population of 150,000, including three state prisons. The conservative county voted to recall Governor Newsom last year, 64 to 36 percent, while the state at large overwhelmingly opted to keep him. The San Francisco Chronicle recently dubbed the area “the anti-San Francisco.” 

Fagundes, whose actions inspired the legislation, has deep roots in the county (his father sits on the Kings County Board of Supervisors) and switched parties to Republican when he first ran for office in 2014. In a recent debate, he accused both women he prosecuted for stillbirths of “murder,” drawing vigorous cheers and applause from the crowd. 

Hacker, Fagundes’s challenger, also points to scandals on his watch, including a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by a chief investigator in his office alleging that the DA sent him his sexually inappropriate videos, texts, and photos; the lawsuit also accused Fagundes of keeping “blackmail folders” and abused his power by interfering with cases to be unfairly tough or lenient on people he knew. (Fagundes has denied the allegations and filed a lawsuit of his own against the county in a spat over his legal representation in the case.)

Fagundes isn’t alone in objecting to AB 2223 and spreading misinformation about it. During an April legislative hearing in Sacramento, groups of anti-abortion activists testified noisily in objection to the bill. Many were from groups like the People’s Convoy and Freedom Angels, which have tapped into an anti-government conservatism that is growing in parts of California, opposing COVID-related lockdowns and supporting the effort recall Newsom. 

A number of people objecting to AB 2223 came from Calvary Chapel Church, an Evangelical congregation led by Pastor Jack Hibbs, who also sells a booklet called “Countdown: All Eyes on God’s Ultimate Endgame.” Hibbs has been outspoken in his opposition to the bill and held an impromptu religious service on the capitol steps during the recent hearing.

Hibbs also recently brought Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco onto one of his weekly talk shows to discuss the bill, introducing the sheriff by calling him an example of “law and order and a passion for life.” Bianco, a former dues-paying member of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia group involved in January 6 attack in Washington, D.C., called AB 2223 “anti-public safety,” suggested it would prevent him from doing his job, and linked the bill to other criminal justice reform measures that he has opposed in the past: “[I]t doesn’t matter how many people you kill; there is no consequences for it.”

Bianco is also up for re-election this week and faces Michael Lujan, a retired sheriff’s captain, in the June 7 election. Hibbs is among the right-wing anti-abortion, anti-lockdown leaders—including Pastor Tim Thompson, who hosted Marjorie Taylor Greene at his church—supporting Bianco in the race. Both Fagundes and Bianco have benefitted from the rise of far-right politics in California that supported the recall campaign against Newsom and launched massive protests against COVID-related business closures and restrictions.

As sheriff, Bianco also serves as the county’s coroner, which is the case for most counties across California. Under AB 2223, coroners would be explicitly barred from investigating mothers for stillborn deaths. Other legislation under consideration this year, AB 1608, would separate the office of coroner from sheriff entirely to assure that deaths in police custody get an independent inquiry. 

Both Bianco and Fagundes follow the lead of a certain subset of Christian leaders in California who, like other political figures relying on a sense of religious fervor, argue against AB2223 as a tenet of faith and a way for the right to push back against the left in the state. The bill is still in motion for now. 

But still, when Fagundes told the debate audience that he would follow his faith over the law and accused the pregnant women he prosecuted of “murder,” applause thundered through the room.

Diaz-Tello says that the debate emerging over AB 2223, and the criminal prosecutions of pregnant women that triggered the legislation in the first place, illustrate how policing and criminalizing pregnancy is nationwide issue, not one reserved for red states: “I would not want people to be lulled into a false sense of security that, just because it isn’t The Handmaid’s Tale on day one, that that’s not the ultimate direction.”

The post California Prosecutions for Pregnancy Loss Spark Outrage, and a Bill to Stop Future Investigations appeared first on Bolts.

State Representatives John Jacob and Curt Nisly were among a large slate of far-right candidates running on Tuesday in Indiana, as part of a confrontation between the already-conservative GOP establishment and advocates who were angry at COVID-19 regulations and what they saw as an insufficiently aggressive approach to transforming the state into a conservative haven.

Nearly all non-incumbent candidates who ran as part of this far-right takeover effort lost as well, alongside Jacob and Nisly.

But the results do not shake hardline conservatives’ hold on the mainstream of GOP politics. The Indiana legislature, which is run by the Republican leaders who clashed with Jacob and Nisly, appears likely to adopt new anti-abortion bills in months ahead. Pro-choice activists rallied on behalf of reproductive rights in front of the federal building and courthouse in Indianapolis yesterday.

A similar dynamic played out in Ohio. Former Republican lawmaker John Adams, who ran for secretary of state by touting the Big Lie, the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, lost by a large margin on Tuesday to incumbent Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who pushed back against Trump in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. This was the first secretary of state election this year featuring a Big Lie candidate, though Adams never caught fire like some of his counterparts in other states.

But LaRose’s victory hardly reflects a last stand by moderate forces. He has himself ramped up talk of voter fraud over the past year, and his tenure has included numerous clashes with voting rights groups over restrictions to ballot access. 

Indiana and Ohio’s GOP primaries on Tuesday show that the party’s establishment can still secure wins over an emboldened far-right. But it also signals just how aggressively the party’s mainstream is taking aim at civil rights. The night was headlined, after all, by the U.S. Senate victory of the Trump-endorsed J.D. Vance over far-right candidate Josh Mandel. 

Jacob and Nisly’s ousters in Indiana are still significant setbacks for the state’s far right, which lost two of its most visible figures. 

Jacob and Nisly joined forces in January 2021 as the main sponsors of House Bill 1539, which sought to ban abortion in Indiana; Jacob was already known for protesting abortion rights at the statehouse wearing red-stained medical scrubs and a partially dismembered child’s doll prior to his election in 2020. Both lawmakers lost one day after Politico reported that a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court had voted to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

Also in January 2021, in the aftermath of Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, Jacob and Nisly also introduced a bill to extensively review voting machines and introduce new restrictions on how elections are run. 

Jacob also has a history of staunchly discriminatory comments, including public remarks disparaging Catholics and Muslims.

While neither of Jacob and Nisly’s bills has advanced, new laws that curtail reproductive rights in Indiana could pass later this year. 

The legislature’s GOP leaders have said that, if the court rules against Roe, they would likely meet in a special session to advance anti-abortion laws. Republican Governor Eric Holcomb has not said whether he will call a special session, and observers say the 2022 elections could shape what final legislation looks like. But Holcomb has signed many laws that restrict abortion during his tenure, including in 2018, 2021, and 2022.

Indiana lawmakers have also passed staunchly conservative legislation recently, including a bill targeting young transgender athletes; Holcomb vetoed that bill in March, but the legislature could override his veto. 

Still, conservative activists in Indiana have claimed that the state is too hostile to their views. And they have called for passing the kind of abortion ban that Jacob and Nisly authored. (Twenty-two states have “trigger laws” on the books that would immediately ban abortion if the Supreme Court overturns Roe vs. Wade, but Indiana is not among them.) 

“Defy Roe. Abolish Abortion,” Jacob wrote in December in a Facebook post that also shared the address of a Planned Parenthood clinic. Jacob also attacked the governor for not closing abortion clinics during the pandemic.

The founder of Hoosiers for Life, an anti-abortion group in Indiana, created the Liberty Defense PAC, with the goal of moving the Indiana legislature even further to the right. Besides demanding a quick ban on abortion, Holcomb’s COVID-19 regulations were among the group’s chief targets. The PAC endorsed 23 state House candidates it dubbed “liberty defenders;” many of whom ran against incumbent lawmakers. 

This far-right slate had a very bad night on Tuesday. Twenty of its endorsed candidates lost; only two won. (The final district remains too close to call as of publication, though the “liberty” candidate leads narrowly.) Jacob and Nisly were the only incumbents on the “liberty” slate; Nisly faced a fellow lawmaker after their districts were combined due to redistricting.

Traditional conservatives also held the line further up the ballot in a key congressional election: Erin Houchin, a former lawmaker, won the Republican primary for Indiana’s deeply red Ninth Congressional District. Houchin ran as a staunch conservative, but the far-right Freedom Caucus rallied behind the candidacy of former congressmember Mike Sodrel.

In Ohio, a Republican candidate who attended the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally in D.C. emerged victorious in the GOP primary for the Ninth Congressional District. J.R. Majewski will now face Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a longtime incumbent whose district was just redrawn by Republicans to favor their party.

LaRose’s win in the secretary of state primary will at least prevent a candidate who had vowed to “fight back” against a purportedly stolen election to become Ohio’s chief elections official.

But LaRose himself had mirrored Trump’s rhetoric against mail voting in 2020 when he restricted each county to only having one drop box location for mail ballots. This year, LaRose indicated that he would back calls to impeach the state’s GOP chief justice because she voted to strike down his party’s gerrymander, and he also defended Trump’s false claims that voter fraud is a widespread problem, which triggered a worried rebuke from the editorial board of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

LaRose’s efforts earned him Trump’s endorsement in late April, one week before the primary.

In November, LaRose will face Democrat Chelsea Clark, who this week seized on the news that the Supreme Court was poised to overturn Roe. “I’ll do everything in my power when elected to ensure that Ohioans know their Secretary of State will continue to advocate for their reproductive freedom,” she tweeted yesterday. 

The post Indiana Lawmakers Who Introduced Full Abortion Ban Lose GOP Primaries appeared first on Bolts.

A Supreme Court majority has signed on to a draft opinion that would end federal protections for abortion rights, Politico reported last night. “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote, saying it was time to “return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” If issued in coming weeks, such a ruling would immediately criminalize abortion in states like Michigan that already have anti-abortion laws on the books, with other states sure to follow.

The end of Roe would spark conflicts in all 50 states, with governors and legislatures newly empowered to set their state’s course on reproductive freedom. But even within each state, county officials would end up with a great deal of discretion, sparking an uneven patchwork of policies that would vary from one locality to the next.

In states with newly-enforceable laws criminalizing abortion, prosecutors would decide how harshly to target people who provide or receive an abortion, and in some cases local officials have already shown their eagerness to use the criminal code to go after reproductive rights. But prosecutors could also draw a protective line in the sand and refuse to bring abortion-related charges. 

From Michigan to Texas, some prosecutors are already vowing that they will not prosecute abortion. And similar questions may quickly reverberate across prosecutors’ offices nationwide, including some like Arizona or Tennessee that have both “trigger laws” on the books and prosecutors’ races this fall.

Eli Savit, prosecuting attorney of Michigan’s Washtenaw County (home to Ann Arbor and nearly 400,000 people) is among the prosecutors already vowing to not prosecute abortion in a state that could soon criminalize it. A progressive who first won in 2020, Savit joined six other prosecutors last month promising to support reproductive freedom and declaring that Michigan’s 1931 law making abortion a felony—a so-called trigger law that’s on the books in some form or another in 21 other states— is unconstitutional. 

Bolts talked to Savit about the importance of prosecutors when it comes to abortion rights—and also the limits of their power as those rights are under threat.

You signed a letter just a few weeks ago, alongside six other prosecutors, stating that you “cannot and will not support criminalizing reproductive freedom.” What concrete policy would your office adopt if Roe is overturned? Would you ever bring charges under Michigan’s 1931 anti-abortion law if it goes back into effect?

I can’t speak for the other prosecutors, but I’ve been very clear about this. Categorically, we’re not prosecuting abortion in Washtenaw County. We’re not prosecuting people that obtain abortions. We’re not prosecuting doctors. We’re not prosecuting medical providers. We’re not prosecuting under that law. 

What leads you to take this position?

A prosecutor’s job should be to protect the health and welfare of people in their communities. And what we know is that the potential overruling of Roe vs. Wade, and in Michigan the recriminalization of abortion, will set the health and welfare of our community back a great deal. 

I do not want to be presiding over a prosecutor’s office that has anything whatsoever to do with criminalizing people for exercising reproductive freedom, with criminalizing doctors for providing abortion, with reviving the days in which abortion was done in the shadows without proper health and safety techniques being utilized. People died regularly from abortion before Roe vs. Wade. To not take the stand that we did, to not say very clearly that we will not prosecute abortion, there could be blood on our hands. That’s something that I don’t find acceptable in any way, shape or form.

If Michigan’s 1931 law takes effect, who could face criminal charges where prosecutors choose to enforce it?

It is not exactly clear at this point. Very obviously, the law would criminalize providers; the law has archaic language relating to inducing a miscarriage. Is there a criminal liability potentially under that law for women, for people that are seeking abortions? Potentially. My understanding is that that’s an open question but the threat is there. And the very ambiguity in the law makes it in some ways even more pernicious, because there’s so much uncertainty about what it means if the Supreme Court overrules Roe.

As the Supreme Court stated in Casey, “liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt.” By the same token, nobody in my community should have any doubt as to whether they’ll be facing criminal charges as a result of an abortion. 

A prosecutor in a neighboring county criticized your letter, saying it’s beyond the role of a prosecutor to say they will not apply a law. You have taken the similarly categorical stance of declining categories of charges on other issues, such as sex work. What is your response to that type of criticism, and why do you think it is the role of a prosecutor to take the stand you are taking?

If people think that categorical declination to enforce an archaic law somehow violates the oath of office, then they’ve got problems with prosecutors across this state for not prosecuting adultery. That is still a law on the books in Michigan; there’s a law that criminalizes adultery, and not a single prosecutor is spending any time and any resources prosecuting people for cheating on their spouses. I think there’s virtually unanimous consensus that whatever you might think about infidelity, it’s not something that is the proper provenance of the criminal legal system. 

Prosecutors do this all the time. We elect prosecutors precisely to exercise their discretion in line with the community’s values and in line with their views as to the health and safety of the community. That’s what I’m doing here. 

Certainly, I think that the [1931 anti-abortion] law needs to be overturned—we have ballot amendments here in Michigan that would do that, there’s litigation going on—because a prosecutor’s discretion is only good until the next election. And if people don’t like it, I’m answerable at the ballot box. But right now I’m doing what I believe is in the best interest of my community, what the people of Washtenaw County elected me to do, and that’s what prosecutors do day in and day out. 

As long as Michigan’s law stands, are you concerned about other law enforcement or state government preempting your discretion? 

I do think it’s important to be honest about the limits of my authority. ounty prosecutors exercising their discretion not to charge abortion is great. But discretion only goes so far. So long as our 1931 abortion ban remains on the books, law enforcement could investigate and even arrest people for abortion—notwithstanding what the prosecutor ultimately does with charging. Similarly, Michigan law already allows the attorney general to prosecute any state-level case in Michigan, so there’s already the theoretical possibility that a state-level prosecutor will step in. Our current AG, [Democrat] Dana Nessel, has made it abundantly clear that she won’t prosecute abortion, either. But it’s a structural concern here in Michigan.

That’s why this is really an all-hands-on-deck approach. That’s why I’m strongly supporting the ballot initiative in Michigan to amend the state constitution to expressly protect abortion. It’s why I’m supportive of both the governor and Planned Parenthood’s lawsuits seeking to strike down the 1931 law under the Michigan Constitution. And it’s one of many reasons why we need to elect pro-choice majorities in the Michigan Legislature, and re-elect our pro-choice state-level officials.

What would you say to prosecutors around the country who may have pro-choice views? How should they respond to Roe being overturned?

Every jurisdiction is different, and I don’t purport to tell other prosecutors what to do. But every prosecutor I know wants to do what they can to keep their communities safe, and to ensure that people feel safe and secure.

People are scared right now—scared that a fundamental right that’s been expressly recognized for nearly 50 years is about to be swept away, scared they’ll no longer have full control over their own bodies or their decision whether to have a child, scared that they may be investigated, arrested, and prosecuted for exercising a right they believed was sacrosanct. So, for me, the position was an easy one. I’ll be damned if I’m going to prosecute anyone for exercising a right that I believe is fundamental. And I think it’s important to let my constituents know that, in no uncertain terms.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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