media mention

The Right’s Gory Plan to Gut State Abortion Protections

Conservatives are using stigmatizing language as an intentional tactic to demonize the people who need this care and to discredit those who provide it, said Ma’ayan Anafi, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center. “This is well-studied care. It’s care that’s provided according to well-established standards,” Anafi said. “The goal of this kind of inflammatory language is to make it sound experimental and dangerous.” Framing abortion and gender-affirming care this way creates a chilling effect that can lead to violence against providers and threats against health care clinics. “This strategy of vilifying providers has a real-world impact,” they said. “It both discourages providers from offering care that they want to provide, and it means that patients need to also be weighing their own safety and their own privacy when they’re trying to access the care they need.”

… To Anafi, the fact that conservatives are looking to the Gonzales ruling to restrict care like medication abortion is telling: Now, as then, medical opinion is not on their side. “Gonzales teaches us that our opponents will often resort to disinformation, to inflammatory rhetoric, to outright lies,” they said. “But what’s more important than the lies is the stories of real people who seek care.” Still, the current media environment and the 6–3 supermajority on the court mean “there is more opportunity for a lot of these false narratives, both about gender-affirming care and about abortion, to lead to really harmful decisions,” Anafi said.

… After passing bans for children, they can use the momentum to restrict care for adults and call it protection. “These laws are driven by a lot of that paternalism, by a lot of that belief that people should be protected from themselves,” Anafi said. That framing is implicitly about the specter of regret, which is “belied by the evidence that we have.” A 2021 review of data from nearly 8,000 teens and adults who had gender-affirming surgeries found that an average of 1 percent expressed regret.

… Lawmakers claiming their intention is to prevent regret purposely ignore how long it can take for trans people of any age to get gender-affirming hormones or surgery. “There’s this misconception that someone can just pop into a clinic and say, ‘I want all the gender-affirming care’ and then automatically get it, when the fact of the matter is that people need to go through a very long process,” Anafi said. In reality, people need evaluations and letters from mental health providers and, depending on where they live, may have to wait months before a provider has availability.

… To Anafi, the fact that attacks on abortion and gender-affirming care come from the same groups and lawmakers is an opportunity for solidarity. “They are coming from that same place of trying to take away people’s ability to determine their own futures, decide what happens to their bodies, their access to health care, and to live free from gender stereotypes,” they said. “These principles might bring together the anti-abortion and anti-trans movements, but they also create a basis for the movements that fight for our rights.”