Abortion In New Hampshire

Abortion in New Hampshire is legal. Abortion was criminalized in the state by 1900. In June 2003, the state passed a parental notification law, repealing it four years later before passing a new one in 2011. New Hampshire's abortion laws have been heard before the US Supreme Court, including the case Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England in 2006. The number of abortion clinics in New Hampshire has declined over the years, with eighteen in 1982, sixteen in 1992 and four in 2014. In 2010, there were three publicly funded abortions in the state, of which three were federally funded and zero were state funded. There are active abortion rights and anti-abortion rights activists in the state.

Terminology

The abortion debate most commonly relates to the "induced abortion" of an embryo or fetus at some point in a pregnancy, which is also how the term is used in a legal sense. Some also use the term "elective abortion", which is used in relation to a claim to an unrestricted right of a woman to an abortion, whether or not she chooses to have one. The term elective abortion or voluntary abortion describes the interruption of pregnancy before viability at the request of the woman, but not for medical reasons.

Anti-abortion advocates tend to use terms such as "unborn baby", "unborn child", or "pre-born child", and see the medical terms "embryo", "zygote", and "fetus" as dehumanizing. Both "pro-choice" and "pro-life" are examples of terms labeled as political framing: they are terms which purposely try to define their philosophies in the best possible light, while by definition attempting to describe their opposition in the worst possible light. "Pro-choice" implies that the alternative viewpoint is "anti-choice", while "pro-life" implies the alternative viewpoint is "pro-death" or "anti-life". The Associated Press encourages journalists to use the terms "abortion rights" and "anti-abortion".

Context

Free birth control correlates to teenage girls having fewer pregnancies and fewer abortions. A 2014 New England Journal of Medicine study found such a link. At the same time, a 2011 study by the Center for Reproductive Rights and Ibis Reproductive Health found that states with more abortion restrictions have higher rates of maternal death, higher rates of uninsured pregnant women, higher rates of infant and child deaths, higher rates of teen drug and alcohol abuse, and lower rates of cancer screening.

According to a 2017 report from the Center for Reproductive Rights and Ibis Reproductive Health, states that tried to pass additional constraints on a woman's ability to access legal abortions had fewer policies supporting women's health, maternal health and children's health. These states also tended to resist expanding Medicaid, family leave, medical leave, and sex education in public schools. According to Megan Donovan, a senior policy manager at the Guttmacher Institute, states that have legislation seeking to protect a woman's right to access abortion services have the lowest rates of infant mortality in the United States.

Poor women in the United States had problems paying for menstrual pads and tampons in 2018 and 2019. Almost two-thirds of American women could not pay for them. These were not available through the federal Women, Infants, and Children Program (WIC). Lack of menstrual supplies has an economic impact on poor women. A study in St. Louis found that 36% had to miss days of work because they lacked adequate menstrual hygiene supplies during their period. This was on top of the fact that many had other menstrual issues including bleeding, cramps and other menstrual-induced health issues. As of November 2018, New Hampshire did not have a state sales tax and so menstrual items were not taxed.

History

Legislative history

By the end of the 1800s, all states in the Union except Louisiana had therapeutic exceptions in their legislative bans on abortions. In the 19th century, bans by state legislatures on abortion were about protecting the life of the mother given the number of deaths caused by abortions; state governments saw themselves as looking out for the lives of their citizens. In 1997, Gov. Jeanne Shaheen signed legislation that repealed most of the abortion restrictions in place.

In June 2003, the New Hampshire Parental Notification Prior to Abortion Act, "an act requiring parental notification before abortions may be performed on unemancipated minors," was narrowly passed by the New Hampshire General Court. The New Hampshire law was repealed in 2007, making rehearing at the district court level moot. The New Hampshire parental notification law was passed again in 2011 after the Republican-controlled House and Senate overrode Democratic governor John Lynch's veto. In 2011 and 2012, dozens of abortion-related bills were submitted that did not pass. These included attempts to define a fetus as a person when pregnant women were murdered. A bill passed the House by a vote of 190–109 in 2012 that failed to become law that would have prevented women from getting abortions after week 20. Another 2012 bill that failed to pass tried to prevent religious societies from being required to offer insurance that required they pay for contraception. New Hampshire passed a parental consent law in 2012. The law had no impact on the number of abortions performed on minors, only increasing the frequency of parental participation in the process. It also did not create a situation where New Hampshire minors sought abortions out of state. The new law required minors to wait 48 hours after requesting an abortion but no longer required parental consent.

Legislators continued to try to chip away at abortion rights in the New Hampshire Legislative, with more than 30 bills coming before the body between 2015 and 2019. Only a fetal homicide bill was signed by Governor Chris Sununu, passing in 2017.

As of 2017, California, Oregon, Montana, Vermont, and New Hampshire allow qualified non-physician health professionals, such as physicians' assistants, nurse practitioners, and certified nurse midwives, to do first-trimester aspiration abortions and to prescribe drugs for medical abortions. In 2018, New Hampshire was one of eleven where the legislature introduced a bill that would have banned abortion in almost all cases. It did not pass. Parental notification laws were still on the books in May 2018.

Judicial history

The US Supreme Court's decision in 1973's Roe v. Wade ruling meant the state could no longer regulate abortion in the first trimester.

The US Supreme Court heard Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England in 2006. On November 17, 2003, Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, the Concord Feminist Health Center, the Feminist Health Center of Portsmouth, and Wayne Goldner, M.D. filed a complaint under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, seeking a declaratory judgment that the Parental Notification Act was unconstitutional and a preliminary injunction to prevent its enforcement once it became effective. On December 29, 2003, Judge Joseph A. Diclerico Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire issued an order finding the Parental Notification Act unconstitutional and permanently enjoining its enforcement.

New Hampshire Attorney General Peter Heed appealed the district court's order to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Heed argued that the court should apply the "no set of circumstances" standard set forth in United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739 (1987). A three judge panel composed of Chief Judge Michael Boudin, Circuit Judge Juan R. Torruella and District Judge Saris unanimously affirmed the judgment by Judge DiClerico for the same reasons he stated.

Attorney General Kelly Ayotte, who replaced Heed in 2004, appealed the case to the Supreme Court of the United States over the objections of former Governor Craig Benson's successor, Governor John Lynch. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to review the case, which was the first case challenging an abortion law that the Court had accepted in five years. Lynch subsequently submitted an amicus curiae brief in opposition to the Parental Notification Act. The Court vacated the judgment of the First Circuit in a unanimous decision authored by Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

Clinic history

Number of abortion clinics in New Hampshire by year

Equality Health Center was established in downtown Concord in 1973, shortly after abortion became legal because of Roe v. Wade ruling. Between 1982 and 1992, the number of abortion clinics in the state decreased by two, going from eighteen in 1982 to sixteen in 1992. In the period between 1992 and 1996, the state saw no change in the total number of abortion clinics. While only three states saw gains in this period, this state was one of four to see no changes, with 16 abortion clinics in the state in 1996. In 2014 in New Hampshire, there were twelve facilities which provided abortion services, of which four were abortion clinics. In 2014, 60% of the counties in the state did not have an abortion clinic. That year, 30% of women in the state aged 15 – 44 lived in a county without an abortion clinic. In March 2016, there were five Planned Parenthood clinics in the state. In 2017, there were five Planned Parenthood clinics in a state with a population of 290,369 women aged 15 – 49, of which two offered abortion services.

Statistics

In the period between 1972 and 1974, there were zero recorded illegal abortion deaths in the state. In 1990, 145,000 women in the state faced the risk of an unintended pregnancy. Alaska, California, and New Hampshire did not voluntarily provide the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) with abortion related data in 2000. All three states also failed to provide abortion-related statistics to the CDC the following year. In 2014, 66% of adults said in a poll by the Pew Research Center that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. In 2017, the state had an infant mortality rate of 4.2 deaths per 1,000 live births.

Abortion financing

As of May 2018, women could get public funding for abortions in three specific cases: her life was in danger, the pregnancy was a result of rape or the pregnancy was a result of incest. In 2010, the state had three publicly funded abortions, of which were three federally funded and zero were state funded. As of May 2019, state Medicaid rules prohibited the use of state Medicaid funding for abortion services for poor women.

Abortion rights views and activities

Protests

Women from the state participated in marches supporting abortion rights as part of a #StoptheBans movement in May 2019.

Anti-abortion views and activities

NH has several organizations that believe that abortion is the taking of a human life, and advocate for the civil rights. Some of these include:

• NH Right to Life
• NH Cornerstone

Violence

On July 3, 1989, a fire was started at the Feminist Health Center clinic in Concord, New Hampshire, on the day the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Missouri law banning funding of public facilities as related to abortion. The clinic was set afire again on May 28, 2000, resulting in several thousand dollars' worth of damage. The case remains unsolved. This was the second arson at the clinic. On October 22, 2015, a Planned Parenthood clinic in Claremont, New Hampshire, was vandalized by a juvenile intruder. Damaged in the attack were computers, furniture, plumbing fixtures, office equipment, medical equipment, phone lines, windows, and walls. The flooding that resulted from the vandalism also damaged an adjacent business.

Footnotes