New Mexico Rep. Cathrynn Brown (R) made headlines this past week when she introduced a bill to charge women who become pregnant from rape with “tampering with evidence” if they choose to have an abortion. Brown has since clarified that House Bill 206 isn’t intended to target victims of sexual assault, and has worked to revise the language of the legislation — but although she wants to ensure rape survivors won’t be prosecuted for getting an abortion, she hasn’t extended the same protections for the doctors who perform those abortions.

As the Democratic Party of New Mexico pointed out in an official statement about HB 206, the revised bill still represents a dangerous step toward criminalizing abortion. “The bill still makes it a crime to ‘facilitate’ an abortion for a woman who wants one,” Scott Forrester, the director of the group, explained. “That means doctors, nurses, or anyone else who works at a health care clinic where this is one of the services provided would still be guilty of a felony.”

Targeting abortion providers is simply an indirect method of limiting women’s reproductive access, and it has been a successful tactic for anti-choice lawmakers across the country. Abortion opponents often subject abortion clinics and providers to burdensome regulations that aren’t placed on other medical professionals — and doctors who break those rules are typically faced with harsh consequences, like losing their medical licenses.

Brown isn’t the first GOP lawmaker to go as far as to suggest that doctors who perform abortions should be subject to criminal charges. But singling out the doctors who work in this field is having serious consequences. Partly due to the obstacles placed in front of the medical professionals who perform abortions, as well as rising levels of anti-abortion harassment, the country currently has a shortage of abortion doctors — particularly in states that are especially hostile to abortion rights, like New Mexico.

Should a recently introduced bill in New Mexico become law, rape victims will be required to carry their pregnancies to term during their sexual assault trials or face charges of “tampering with evidence.”

Under HB 206, if a woman ended her pregnancy after being raped, both she and her doctor would be charged with a felony punishable by up to 3 years in state prison:

Tampering with evidence shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime.

Sexual assault trials are infamously grueling for survivors, who are often subjected to character assassination and other attempts to discredit their accounts. State Rep. Cathrynn Brown’s (R) bill would add the forced choice between prison or an unwanted pregnancy to these proceedings.

After several failed GOP candidates, including Todd Akin (R-MO) and Richard Mourdock (R-IN), made offensive comments about rape victims during the last election season, Republican consultants launched sensitivity training to teach candidates how to avoid talking about rape. But GOP policy speaks for itself. At the federal level, former vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) introduced a failed bill that would negate sexual assault that are not deemed “forcible rape.” And another New Mexico lawmaker, Gov. Susana Martinez (R), advanced a proposal to require women who become pregnant from rape to prove they were “forcibly raped” in order to qualify for childcare assistance.

In addition to burdening victims of sexual assault, Brown’s bill also reveals some hypocrisy in the anti-abortion community. While anti-choice advocates maintain that a fetus should be afforded the full rights of personhood, charging abortion as “tampering with evidence” effectively turns the fetus into an object. This isn’t the first time so-called pro-life supporters have dropped the fetal personhood crusade when it was convenient — last year, a Catholic hospital in Colorado reversed its stance on fetal personhood in a malpractice suit, arguing in court that the term “person” should only apply to individuals who have already been born.

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) today announced that she will agree to expand Medicaid to extend coverage to additional low-income residents of her state, following a provision set forth in Obamacare.

Martinez is only the second Republican governor to join Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) and agree to the Medicaid expansion. Other Republican governors have refused to expand the program, essentially acknowledging that they would rather allow low-income people in their state to go uninsured than to follow the law of their Democratic president.

The AP estimates that the expansion will help cover roughly 170,000 people in New Mexico:

Republican Gov. Susana Martinez says New Mexico will follow provisions of a federal health care law to expand the state’s Medicaid program to potentially provide medical services to 170,000 low-income adults.[...]

Martinez made the announcement Wednesday during a speech in Albuquerque.

About a fourth of New Mexico’s population currently receives health care through Medicaid, but the program mostly covers uninsured children in low-income families along with the disabled and some extremely low-income adults.

The expansion in 2014 will make adults eligible with incomes of about $26,000 for a family of three or $15,400 for an individual.

New Mexico has among the highest rates of uninsured in the country. The Medicaid expansion seeks to remedy this problem by permitting those within 133 percent of the federal poverty line to join the program, helping aide those who earn too much to qualify, but not enough to afford coverage.

The state also moved to set up its health insurance exchange earlier this month.

After Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) asserted his belief that “legitimate rape” doesn’t often lead to pregnancy, Republican lawmakers were quick to attempt to configure his radical stance on women’s health as an outlier in their party. However, increasing numbers of GOP politicians’ language about the nature of sexual assault actually echoes Akin’s — including New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R), whose state’s policies use language that effectively narrows the definition of rape.

Not only did Martinez refer to “forcible rape” in an announcement instating April as New Mexico’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month — as if some kinds of sexual assault need to be qualified as more or less “legitimate” than others — but, as RH Reality Check reports, the term also appears in the state’s proposed changes to its official applications for childcare assistance. If the proposed changes take effect, women in New Mexico will be required to prove that their sexual assault qualified as “forcible rape” if they are seeking childcare assistance for a child that resulted from rape:

If adopted, this policy will have numerous implications. It establishes in state law a narrow definition of rape that can and will be applied in other areas of law and policy. It puts a heavy burden on women who have been raped and are now struggling economically to support a child or children to prove the manner in which they were raped and to meet a test set up by the state to exclude many women in need of childcare assistance who would otherwise qualify.

It would force women who have left violent domestic partnerships, who were date-raped, who were impregnated as a result of incest, or through other “non-forcible” but nonetheless equally violent and denigrating means of sexual violation to first re-engage with their abusers to seek child support, putting control of their lives back into the hands of someone by whom they were violated in the most profound sense of the term.

Martinez’s problematic move to narrow the definition of sexual assault is not unique to her state. Last year, vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan partnered with Akin to co-sponsor a bill that introduced the concept of “forcible rape” in one of its earlier drafts. The “forcible rape” language was eventually removed from that bill after widespread public outcry, but that hasn’t stopped the concept from permeating the Republican Party.

Women’s health advocates in New Mexico are fighting back against the proposed changes to the childcare assistance applications. Strong Families, a coalition that works to advance the rights of women and immigrants, released a statement expressing their disappointment in Martinez’s “attempt to qualify differing levels of rape,” calling the move “especially egregious” in light of the fact that Martinez was a prominent speaker at last month’s Republican National Convention. A hearing on the issue is scheduled for October 1st.

Update

RH Reality Check has received confirmation from New Mexico’s Children, Youth, and Families Department that Martinez has requested the removal of the “forcible rape” language from the state’s childcare assistance applications. A statement from department explained, “The Governor feels the language is redundant and unnecessary, and she does not support its usage.”