Go to Content Go to Navigation Go to Navigation Go to Site Search Homepage

Reproductive Health & Rights Groups Support Governor’s Bill to End Outdated Ban on Abortion Care

For Immediate Release: April 30, 2019 (Updated: April 30, 2019, 7:54 p.m.)


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Maine’s leading reproductive health and rights groups voiced their support for a Governor’s bill that would end Maine’s outdated law preventing qualified and trained nurse practitioners and other advanced practice clinicians (APCs) from providing abortion services.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Sponsored by Speaker Sara Gideon, LD 1261 is a governor’s bill that would repeal Maine’s outdated ban preventing nurse practitioners from providing abortion services.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.

This page is controlled and operated by Planned Parenthood Maine Action Fund.

Planned Parenthood cares about your data privacy. We and our third-party vendors use cookies and other tools to collect, store, monitor, and analyze information about your interaction with our site to improve performance, analyze your use of our sites and assist in our marketing efforts. You may opt out of the use of these cookies and other tools at any time by visiting Cookie Settings. By clicking “Allow All Cookies” you consent to our collection and use of such data, and our Terms of Use. For more information, see our Privacy Notice.

Cookie Settings

Planned Parenthood cares about your data privacy. We and our third-party vendors, use cookies, pixels, and other tracking technologies to collect, store, monitor, and process certain information about you when you access and use our services, read our emails, or otherwise engage with us. The information collected might relate to you, your preferences, or your device. We use that information to make the site work, analyze performance and traffic on our website, to provide a more personalized web experience, and assist in our marketing efforts. We also share information with our social media, advertising, and analytics partners. You can change your default settings according to your preference. You cannot opt-out of our Necessary Cookies as they are deployed to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting the cookie banner and remembering your settings, to log into your account, to redirect you when you log out, etc.). For more information, please see our Privacy Notice.

Marketing

On

We use online advertising to promote our mission and help constituents find our services. Marketing pixels help us measure the success of our campaigns.

Performance

On

We use qualitative data, including session replay, to learn about your user experience and improve our products and services.

Analytics

On

We use web analytics to help us understand user engagement with our website, trends, and overall reach of our products.