Oklahoma lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a bill to make performing an abortion a felony punishable by 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. That is likely to land the bill on the desk of the Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, who has promised to sign all anti-abortion legislation.
Oklahoma’s bill is just one in a raft of Republican bills to severely restrict or ban abortion, all timed before a widely anticipated supreme court case that disrupts nearly 50 years of established protections for abortion rights. If Oklahoma’s bill passes into law, it will take effect this summer.
“When [patients] hear this is happening, and probably will happen soon, they are in shock,” said Dr Iman Alsaden, medical director of Planned Parenthood Great Plains.
“The implications of all of this is there’s going to be a few states that are relied on to provide abortion care to people, and those people who do not live in those states will have to wait enormously long wait times,” said Alsaden. “You’re just looking at really making people jump through extraordinary hoops.”
More than 781,000 women of reproductive age live in Oklahoma. However, the bill is also expected to have an outsized impact on the nearly 7 million women of reproductive age who live in Texas. Thousands of pregnant Texans have relied on legal abortion in Oklahoma since Texas outlawed abortion after six weeks gestation in September 2021.
Since Texas outlawed most abortion services, Planned Parenthood Great Plains’s caseload of Texas patients has gone from about four dozen from September to December 2020, to more than 1,100 in the same three-month period in 2021. Demand from patients in Texas has been so great it has already displaced some Oklahoma patients, Alsaden said, who she has seen travel to Kansas for care.
Alsaden said Planned Parenthood Great Plains intended to challenge any abortion bans in court. However, the fate of any such challenge and others like it are uncertain.
Before former president Donald Trump took office, federal courts routinely blocked abortion bans. However, Trump was able to confirm three conservative justices, which tipped the balance of the supreme court to the right.
Since then, the supreme court has shown a willingness to severely restrict or perhaps overturn the right to terminate a pregnancy, even though the majority of Americans support legal abortion. A supreme court decision in a crucial abortion rights case is expected in June.
“These legislators have continued their relentless attacks on our freedoms,” said Emily Wales, interim president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, a related reproductive rights advocacy group.
“These restrictions are not about improving the safety of the work that we do. They are about shaming and stigmatizing people who need and deserve abortion access.”
Republican legislators who sponsored the bill emphasized that the punishments outlined were for doctors, “not for the woman”, said the Oklahoma state representative Jim Olsen.
Notably, the bill was also unusual for being revived from the 2021 legislative session. During hearings in 2021, Olsen said he felt ending abortion was a moral duty and compared terminating a pregnancy to slavery.
Also Tuesday, the Oklahoma house adopted a resolution to recognize aborted fetuses as lives lost and urged citizens to fly flags at half-staff on 22 January, the day the supreme court established a legal right to abortion through the landmark 1973 case Roe v Wade.
“All of these laws are rooted in paternalism and racism and white supremacy, and they disproportionately affect people who are Black and brown and low-income, and they do that under the guise of quote-unquote helping people,” said Alsaden.
“If you wanted to help someone, there is something basic you need to do when you are helping them – which is listen to what they need,” she said.
