In anticipation of extra hostility towards abortion below President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, California lawmakers introduced two new items of laws Monday geared toward defending medicine abortion and punishing native governments that intervene with entry to reproductive well being care.
California Legal professional Common Rob Bonta introduced the payments at a press convention, saying Californians are in an “pressing and harmful state of affairs” 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 out there all over the place 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 actually do us any good if we will’t entry 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 only a constitutional proper that lives in a constitutional doc on paper,” she mentioned.
The laws “will be certain that sufferers and suppliers have entry to what they want, to mifepristone, to misoprostol, and defend the transportation, the mailing, the supplying of the whole lot that will be wanted for a medicine 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 may invoke the the Comstock Act ― a 150-year-old regulation that criminalizes sending “obscene” supplies within the mail, together with something “supposed for producing abortion” ― to ban medicine abortion, which has grow to be an important 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 Privacy Act, an current statute banning the state from interfering in a affected person’s determination to entry abortion. If handed, Bonta would have the ability to slap those that violate it with monetary penalties.
“This isn’t a hypothetical,” Bonta mentioned Monday, saying metropolis officers in Beverly Hills illegally colluded earlier this 12 months to stop an abortion clinic from opening there.
“We have been in a position to forestall Beverly Hills from taking one of these motion once more, however we weren’t in a position to search monetary penalties that will in flip additional disincentivize authorities actors from violating the regulation,” Bonta mentioned.
The payments’ announcement comes the identical day California Gov. Gavin Newsom convened a particular session on Trump-proofing among 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 said at a press convention earlier this month. “We wish to be ready as early as Jan. 20.”
Talking Monday, Bonta mentioned it’s California’s obligation to encourage each state to its east.
“At occasions on this nation, when individuals’s rights and freedoms are below assault, after they’re in danger ― as is so usually the case ― individuals look west throughout this nation,” he mentioned. “They give the impression of being west to California to see what the biggest state within the nation, the fifth-largest financial system on the planet, probably the most numerous state within the nation, is doing. And right here’s what they’ll see.”
He famous that his workplace sued the earlier Trump administration greater than 120 occasions and gained a supermajority of these instances.
