Anti-choice activists have been using state legislatures as a testing ground for bills aimed at restricting access to abortion and reproductive health services. These activists work to pass harmful legislation in individual states, and then try to leverage their influence by pushing similar bills in other states and on the national level. This strategy has already made access to abortion more difficult for many women around the country. If this strategy becomes successful on a national level, it would erode reproductive rights and threaten the health of all American women. What follows are the core issues that anti-choice activists have advanced in the states.

Mandatory Delay, Biased Counseling and Scare Tactics
In recent years, anti-choice legislative efforts have varied in scope. One ongoing effort has been the creation of bills that place roadblocks in the path of women seeking to exercise their right to choose. For example, many state legislatures have considered bills that require a woman to delay her abortion a certain number of hours or days after receiving state-mandated information designed to discourage abortion. The forced delay may require the woman to make several trips to the clinic and may increase medical risks. Furthermore, much of the state-mandated information is biased, irrelevant and often misleading.

Parental Consent
Anti-choice forces have also focused on burdening minors' access to abortion by encouraging legislatures to impose parental consent or notice requirements for abortion. Such statutes are currently enforced in 33 states. These laws harm young women in numerous ways, including increasing the risk of potential physical and emotional abuse, interfering with access to confidential medical care, creating delays in access to medical care, and forcing teens to carry to term. Anti-choice forces have also attempted to enact similar requirements for contraceptive services. These attempts have been largely unsuccessful, either because the requirements have been struck down by courts or rejected by legislatures.

Funding Roadblocks
Most states and the federal Medicaid program already prohibit the use of public funds for abortion except in cases where the woman’s life is at risk or the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. This severely limits the ability of low-income women to obtain medically necessary abortions. Further threats to women’s access to reproductive health care come in the form of attempts to reduce and restrict funding for family planning services.

TRAP
Another legislative trend is consideration of Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) bills. These bills attempt to regulate the medical practices or facilities of doctors who provide abortions by imposing burdensome requirements that are different and more stringent than regulations applied to comparable medical practices. These measures are unnecessary and have neither the purpose nor effect of improving the quality of abortion care. By burdening providers with increased costs and compliance requirements, TRAP laws make it impossible for some physicians to continue to provide abortion services and result in price increases that pose another roadblock to access.

Abortion Bans and Restricting Women's Options
In addition to creating obstacles to access, state legislatures have also considered bills that regulate abortion methods or the provision of services. In the past few years, states have considered bills with broad bans on safe abortion techniques (for example, so called "partial-birth abortion" bans). Some states have also considered outright bans on abortion.

Biased State Funding and "Choose Life" License Plates
"Choose life" license plate bills have also swept across the country. Legislatures that approve these plates have refused to provide "pro-choice" plates, thus discriminating against the pro-choice viewpoint in violation of the First Amendment. Additionally, these bills require that funds raised by the sale of pro-life license plates be given to anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers that deceive women by appearing to provide a broad range of reproductive rights, but actually refusing to offer information on abortion because of what is often a religious agenda. Other state bills similarly direct state funds to religious organizations to promote abstinence-only education, thereby diverting money away from much needed comprehensive sex-education programs and family planning centers

Pregnant Women's Rights and Fetal Rights
A recent trend among state legislatures has been the consideration of bills that would criminalize conduct harmful to a fetus. These bills range in scope from fetal homicide laws to wide-ranging measures that seemingly permit punishment for any action that harms a fetus. Other bills directly propose to regulate pregnant women’s conduct and would create criminal penalties for certain behavior during pregnancy, despite unanimous opposition by every major medical group in the United States. Such punitive measures will only harm pregnant women and the fetus because they will discourage women from seeking prenatal care and discourage open communication between the woman and her physician. Many of these bills are especially troubling because they vest certain rights in the fetus, often to the detriment of the pregnant woman's rights.

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The Center for Reproductive Rights uses the law to advance reproductive freedom as a fundamental right that all governments are obligated to protect, respect and fulfill.

The Center’s state legislative program works with state legislators, governors, partner organizations, lobbyists, and coalitions to prevent the passage of laws that would harm women’s reproductive health and to promote the passage of laws that protect women’s reproductive rights. The program monitors and analyzes pending legislation, providing an "early warning system" on bills that may require legal challenges. It also offers model legislation, legal tools, and strategic advice to more than 650 state contacts.

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Anti-Choice Measures of the Bush Administration