The Quickie: Another Virginia GOP Candidate Caught Lying About Abortion
For Immediate Release: Oct. 31, 2023
Welcome to “The Quickie” — Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s daily tipsheet on the top health care & reproductive rights stories of the day. You can read “The Quickie'' online here.
In today’s Quickie: Another Virginia GOP state candidate caught admitting she wants to expand abortion bans beyond the 15-week mark and Kansas protects access by blocking disinformation law.
ANOTHER VIRGINIA GOP CANDIDATE CAUGHT LYING ABOUT ABORTION : Today, another Virginia Republican state legislature candidate was caught on tape saying the (not so) quiet part out loud: She wants to ban abortion well beyond the 15-week mark Virginia Republicans are supposedly rallying behind. As the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports, when State Delegate Tara Durant was asked about banning abortion before 15 weeks, she said “we are fighting to get as much as we can.”
ANY abortion ban — at 15 weeks, 12 weeks, or 6 weeks — stops patients from getting the care they need. But Virginia Republicans are intentionally lying to voters to get elected and shove their extreme, unpopular agenda through. The stakes for abortion rights in Virginia and the south are high. The Huffington Post notes that with this election, “the last southern refuge for abortion rights might soon fall.”
IN WIN FOR PATIENTS, KANSAS COURT BLOCKS ABORTION DISINFORMATION LAW: Yesterday, a Kansas state court judge blocked several laws hindering Kansans’ access to abortion, including laws that forced medical providers to give their patients dangerous disinformation and delayed patients from getting care. The lawsuit, filed by Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Center for Reproductive Rights on behalf of several Kansas abortion providers — Planned Parenthood Great Plains, Hodes & Nauser, M.D.s, P.A.; Traci Lynn Nauser, M.D.; and Tristan Fowler, D.O. — marks a significant victory for abortion access in the state.
Among the blocked laws is a 2022 law that required providers to tell patients at least five times that it may be possible to “reverse” a medication abortion — a false, potentially dangerous claim unsupported by scientific evidence. The judge also blocked portions of the state’s biased counseling law, which included medically unfounded statements about abortion’s effects on future pregnancies and a patient’s risk of breast cancer.
Additionally, the judge blocked arbitrary requirements, such as the distribution of printed counseling materials in a specific format 24-hours before an abortion, that delay access to care. In a declaration for the case, Planned Parenthood Great Plains chief medical officer Dr. Iman Alsaden stated that this particular requirement has repeatedly forced her staff to turn away patients, including people who had waited weeks and traveled for their appointments.
Planned Parenthood Great Plains president and CEO Emily Wales said of the court’s decision, “Today’s ruling is a crucial step in achieving what Kansans emphatically supported in August 2022: abortion access without political interference. While this victory allows our patients to seek the timely care they deserve, we recognize many barriers to equitable access remain in this part of the country. Despite the challenges of the post-Dobbs landscape, we’ll do as we’ve always done, provide our patients with expert care informed by best medical practices. And tomorrow, when patients arrive from wherever they may call home, our first question will be about care and not font size.”
Read Planned Parenthood’s full statement here.