Reproductive Health & Rights Groups Support Governor’s Bill to End Outdated Ban on Abortion Care

In advance of tomorrow’s public hearing, Maine’s leading reproductive health and rights groups voiced their support for a Governor’s bill that would end Maine’s outdated law preventing qualified and trained nurse practitioners and other advanced practice clinicians (APCs) from providing abortion services.

Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, Maine Family Planning, Mabel Wadsworth Health Center, and the ACLU of Maine work every day to ensure Maine patients receive the high-quality sexual and reproductive health care they need in a safe, respectful environment. This includes abortion care.

Data, including from the CDC, shows abortion has a 99 percent safety record, meaning fewer than one percent of abortions have complications. Peer-reviewed medical literature, including a recent four-year study of more than 11,000 abortion patients published in the American Journal of Public Health, uniformly confirms that nurse practitioners can safely and effectively provide abortion care. Every day in Maine, nurse practitioners perform many medical procedures more complex and complicated than abortion, like extracting bone marrow for biopsies.

Many health organizations, including the nation’s leading women’s health care providers, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the World Health Organization, and the American Public Health Association, support allowing nurse practitioners to provide abortion services. In fact, nurse practitioners and other APCs have provided abortion care in New Hampshire and Vermont for decades.

Sponsored by Speaker Sara Gideon, LD 1261 is a governor’s bill that would repeal Maine’s outdated ban preventing nurse practitioners from providing abortion services.

The public hearing on LD 1261 will begin at 10 a.m. on Wednesday May 1 in room 220 of the Cross Office building.

Nicole Clegg, Vice President of Public Affairs, Planned Parenthood of Northern New England

However we feel about abortion, we can all agree that when a woman has made the decision to end a pregnancy she should be able to receive care from a trusted provider in her community. The nurse practitioner ban prohibits women from getting care from their provider of choice.