For the third time, Oklahoma has approved legislation to make it more difficult for women to access medication-induced abortion.

The post Oklahoma Won’t Stop Trying To Restrict Women’s Access To The Abortion Pill appeared first on ThinkProgress.

CREDIT: Shutterstock

Oklahoma lawmakers aren’t deterred when harsh abortion restrictions get overturned in court for violating the bounds of Roe v. Wade. They simply try again.

For the third time, the state has approved a measure that will severely restrict women’s access to the abortion pill, a non-surgical method of ending an early pregnancy. The move comes less than a year after the courts prevented Oklahoma from enforcing a similar law that was passed in 2011.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, the group that has repeatedly litigated against Oklahoma’s recent attempts to undermine reproductive rights, isn’t mincing words about how frustrating it is to keep fighting the same battles.

“Oklahoma politicians have yet again proven they are hell-bent on restricting women’s access to a safe and proven method of ending a pregnancy at its earliest stages,” Nancy Northrup, the group’s president, said in a statement. “Courts time and again have found these restrictions unconstitutional, and yet Oklahoma politicians refuse to give up their costly crusade of choking off access to safe, legal abortion care.”

Essentially, this type of legislation requires doctors to adhere to the FDA’s extremely outdated protocol for administering the medication used to induce an abortion. Even though women have been safely terminating pregnancies with a lower dosage of drugs for over a decade, these state laws force them to take an unnecessarily high dose. That ultimately makes the procedure more expensive, necessitates additional trips to a clinic, and prevents doctors from using their own judgment to follow the best medical practice available.

Last year, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that these abortion pill requirements are unconstitutional, noting that the regulation “restricts the long-respected medical discretion of physicians.” The court also determined that the vague language in the state law amounted to a total ban on medication abortion.

So now, the new law is more specific about the fact that it’s not intended to ban the abortion pill entirely, and state lawmakers hope that will help it to withstand a court challenge. But the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is currently challenging a similar law in Arizona, says the new law will still compromise doctors’ ability to administer the abortion pill — something that could force some women to have a surgical procedure even when they would have preferred a medication-induced abortion.

“Physicians know better than politicians how to best treat their patients,” Northup noted, “and medical decisions should be made according to their advice and expertise, not any politician’s ideological agenda.”

Nonetheless, this is a popular anti-choice strategy. Bolstered by Americans United for Life, a right-wing group that writes draft legislation for abortion restrictions, four other states have also attempted to require doctors to adhere to outdated regulations for administering the abortion pill. And 14 states in total have imposed some type of medically unnecessary restriction on this type of abortion service.

Oklahoma specifically has already enacted some of the harshest abortion restrictions in the nation. In addition to undermining women’s access to medication-induced abortion, lawmakers are also attempting to impose tighter regulations on abortion clinics that may force some of them to close.

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If Michigan's history is any guide, Grothman's amendment would drastically reduce minority admissions in Wisconsin's top schools. At the University of Michigan's flagship Ann Arbor campus, black enrollment dropped 30 percent after that state's affirmative action ban passed in 2006.

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CREDIT: (AP Photo/Al Behrman)

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court upheld a Michigan ballot initiative banning race-conscious affirmative action in that state’s university system. The decision surprised virtually no one, given this Supreme Court’s longstanding skepticism of affirmative action programs.

Nevertheless, Wisconsin state Sen. Glenn Grothman (R) waited only a few hours after the decision was handed down before taking a victory lap. Not long after Court delivered its opinions in this case, Grothman announced that he would reintroduce a similar ban on race-conscious admission in his home state. Grothman’s offered similar proposals in the past without success.

Because Grothman’s proposal is a state constitutional amendment, it would need to be approved by lawmakers in two consecutive legislative sessions before it was placed before the state’s voters for final approval.

If Michigan’s history is any guide, Grothman’s amendment would drastically reduce minority admissions in Wisconsin’s top schools. At the University of Michigan’s flagship Ann Arbor campus, black enrollment dropped 30 percent after that state’s affirmative action ban passed in 2006. At the campus’ elite law school, just 14 black students enrolled in 2008, and the number has not topped 18 since that year.

In 2003, prior to this ballot initiative, the Supreme Court upheld Michigan Law’s affirmative action program — although with retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor casting the key fifth vote. As Justice O’Connor explained in her opinion for the Court, affirmative action enriches all students on campus, including white students, by allowing them to learn from the diverse experiences of their classmates. “‘[C]lassroom discussion,” O’Connor wrote, “‘is livelier, more spirited, and simply more enlightening and interesting’ when the students have ‘the greatest possible variety of backgrounds.’â€�

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“Is climate change a fact?� the moderator asked. The questioned produced a brief flurry of laughter from the audience as well as several repressed snickers from the candidates.

The post All Four Of North Carolina’s GOP Senate Candidates Are Climate Deniers appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Rev. Mark Harris, right, was one of the four Republican primary candidates for North Carolina’s Senate seat who denied the reality of climate change Tuesday night.

CREDIT: AP Photo / Ted Richardson

On Tuesday, all four Republican candidates vying for North Carolina’s Senate seat were asked if climate change is a fact. All four said no.

It was the first televised debate of the primary campaign, and featured four candidates: State House Speaker Thom Tillis (R-NC), who is leading in funding and in the polls; physician Greg Brannon, a Tea Party member and Tillis’ main rival; Charlotte pastor Mark Harris; and nurse practitioner Heather Grant. It was the first of three scheduled debates, after which a primary election on May 6 will decide which of the four will face off against incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC) in the fall.

“Is climate change a fact?” the moderator asked in the video, which was posted by Buzzfeed. The questioned produced a brief flurry of laughter from the audience as well as several repressed snickers from the candidates. All four then followed with a curt “no” — though Brannon did append “God controls the climate” to his answer.

At the national level, over 58 percent of Congressional Republicans throughout the House and Senate have gone on record denying that climate change is happening.

North Carolina’s political culture specifically has long had problems with climate and environmental issues. In 2012, the state legislature banned officials from using sea level rise predictions in designing rules for coastal development. Meanwhile, Governor Pat McCrory worked 28 years for Duke Energy and received hefty financial support from the company during his campaign. Duke runs seven coal-fired power plants in the state, along with over 30 coal ash slurry ponds. Those ponds have been the subject of an ongoing lawsuit, with environmental groups charging that poor safeguards and lax oversight have allowed the coal ash slurry to pollute North Carolina’s drinking water.

A massive new spill from one of Duke’s ponds earlier this year generated renewed scrutiny of McCrory’s relationship with Duke, and sparked a federal investigation into whether the state’s environmental regulator — the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources — failed in its duty to properly oversee Duke’s activities.

It’s not clear if any of the four candidates in last night’s debate were asked about the issues with Duke, but several local reports make no mention of any such question.

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