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LetMyPeopleVote

(145,130 posts) Wed Mar 22, 2023, 09:00 PM Mar 2023

How Attacks Against Obamacare Turned Into Tools to Protect Abortion Access

This makes me smile

Link to tweet

https://boltsmag.org/abortion-access-and-measures-against-obamacare-ohio-wyoming/

A decade ago, when conservatives were attacking President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act as government encroachment in health care, they worked to amend state constitutions around the country to affirm a broad right for people to control their own medical decisions.

“Each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions,” reads section 38(a) of the Wyoming constitution’s Declaration of Rights, under the header “Right of healthcare access.” The provision was placed on Wyoming’s ballot by state lawmakers and approved by voters in 2012; voters saw ballot language that described the measure as preserving this right “from undue governmental infringement.”

Now these anti-ACA provisions—and their broad affirmations of a right to decide—have turned into an unlikely weapon in progressives’ fight against restrictions on abortion.

Reproductive rights advocates in Wyoming have sued to strike down the state’s abortion ban, saying that this “right to make . . . health care decisions” protects abortion access. A lawsuit in Ohio has made the same case using a similar provision in Ohio’s constitution that was adopted by voters in 2011.

“If you have an amendment that says you have the freedom to choose your health care, then that’s going to apply to all health care: that’s the argument being made,” says David Cohen, a professor of law at Drexel University who studies constitutions and abortion. “It’s like, ‘you used broad words, and these broad words have certain meanings, and we’re just applying those meanings to this context.’”

In both Ohio and Wyoming, these claims have seen early success in courts.

A trial court in Ohio issued a preliminary injunction against the state’s abortion restrictions in October. The judge found that the Health Care Freedom Amendment “bolsters the Ohio Constitution’s protection of liberty and personal autonomy and reinforces that these protections extend to Ohioans… the right to make decisions about their own bodies—including the fundamental right to make a decision as private and as central to a person’s bodily integrity as the decision to have an abortion.”