State Attorney General Letitia James threw her support on Monday behind a new bill in Albany intended to bolster New York’s status as a national reproductive safe harbor by creating a program to increase funding for abortion providers.
Enraged by the Supreme Court’s apparent plan to end the federal right to abortion, James declared in a news conference that New York is “a state that cares about others, and a state that recognizes that if one individual is not free, then all of us are not free.”
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The legislation, introduced last week, would create a so-called Reproductive Freedom and Equity Program overseen by the Health Department. It is sponsored by state Sen. Cordell Cleare (D-Harlem) and Assemblywoman Jessica González-Rojas (D-Jackson Heights).
“Abortion is a fundamental and essential aspect of women’s health care — plain and simple,” Cleare said in the news conference. “Any rollback or constraint of any health care right is fundamentally unjust.”
The bill is just one part of a flurry of new legislative activity aimed at expanding abortion access.
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Another bill would protect New York abortion providers from out-of-state law enforcement efforts, and lawmakers are working on a project to amend the state constitution to enshrine the right to abortion.
Gov. Hochul, a Democrat who supports the amendment effort, said last week she was leaving “no stone unturned to make sure that New Yorkers and people across this country are safe to continue to receive something we consider a human right.”
Twenty-six states are likely to ban abortions in a post-Roe world, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion-rights New York nonprofit.
“Every person in this nation should have the freedom to control their own body,” James, a Democrat, said at the Manhattan news conference. “And their own health care.”
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But 49 years after reproductive protections were guaranteed nationwide by the Supreme Court’s 7-to-2 ruling in Roe v. Wade, a conservative majority on the current court appears to have decided to strike down abortion rights.
A draft opinion in a Mississippi case that leaked to news media last week would unwind Roe. The draft was dated Feb. 10, and after the leak, the court emphasized in a statement that the decision was not final. But The Washington Post reported Sunday that a 5-to-4 majority remained ready to scrap Roe.
New York has one of the nation’s most robust reproductive rights laws.
Even with Roe intact, many minors have come to New York to receive abortions because some states have restricted access for girls under 18, and minors can legally access abortions in New York without the consent of their parents.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 9% of recorded abortions in New York State in 2019 involved out-of-state patients.
That number seems sure to skyrocket if the Supreme Court does not retreat from its draft verdict, and providers and activists are readying for the surge.
“We are lucky to live in New York, where the basic right is enshrined into law, and where the people in power actually care about the health and well being of the people that we serve,” said James, who has disclosed that she had an abortion early in her political career.
“For many of us, this is personal.”
