On May 8, 2015, AUL staff counsel Anna Paprocki provided comment to the New York Times in an article entitled “State Legislatures Put Up Flurry of Roadblocks to Abortion.” An excerpt is copied below.
Oklahoma’s governor this week approved a law extending to 72 hours the mandatory waiting period before a woman can have an abortion. Here in Florida, lawmakers enacted a 24-hour waiting period that requires two separate appointments — one for an ultrasound and information about fetal development and another for the actual procedure.
These are just two laws in a surge of bills passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures this year that make it harder for women to have abortions.
Arkansas led the nation with six new abortion-related laws, including one requiring minors to present a notarized consent from a parent and another saying that a woman more than 20 weeks along must be told that her fetus can feel pain…
…“State legislatures are restricting how doctors provide medical care related to abortion, where doctors can provide that care, what doctors can say to patients when they provide that care and more,” said Suzanne B. Goldberg, the director of Columbia Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law.
But Anna Paprocki, staff counsel for Americans United for Life, which opposes abortion, said, “The Supreme Court has been clear on this: Not every burden is unconstitutional.” She added, “A lot of the arguments made by the abortion industry against any regulation are red herrings.”
Ms. Paprocki’s group drafted 50 pieces of “model legislation” this year, which made their way to statehouses across the nation. The most frequently proposed bills from these suggestions included limitations on later-term abortions, clinic regulations, hospital admitting privilege requirements for clinic doctors and regulations on abortion-inducing drugs, Americans United for Life said in a report on the 2015 legislative session.
