North Carolina is advancing a measure that would effectively allow personal beliefs to trump women’s access to birth control. Under HB 730, employers in the state could decide not to include contraceptives in their workers’ insurance plans for any reason — a direct violation of the popular Obamacare provision that stipulates women should receive birth control coverage at no additional cost to them. But as lawmakers debate HB 730, women’s health advocates in the state want them to know they’re not willing to be dragged back to the 1960s without a fight.

“We love a good vintage look — but not when it’s running the state legislature,” the local Planned Parenthood affiliate explained in a press release. That’s why Planned Parenthood supporters dressed up in 1960s clothing to attend a House committee hearing about HB 730 on Wednesday.

The 1960s apparel is intended to communicate that state lawmakers are trying to turn back the clock to past decades, when women didn’t have the freedom to control their own reproductive decisions. Planned Parenthood raised awareness about HB 703 with a Mad Men-themed event in advance of the committee hearing, and then sent dozens of vintage-garbed supporters to Wednesday’s debate (all photos courtesy of Planned Parenthood Action Fund of Central North Carolina):

“We like watching Mad Men — but we don’t want to live in it,” Paige Johnson, the president of public affairs for the Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina, pointed out. “Women’s preventive care — including birth control — is basic health care. Politicians and bosses have no business denying women access to this basic health care. This shouldn’t be a revolutionary idea, but unfortunately it is to some.”

North Carolina lawmakers aren’t the only ones to consider a foray into 1960s-esque policies. Even though a similar law in Missouri allowing employers to deny birth control coverage was recently struck down by a federal judge, that hasn’t stopped other states from attempting the same method to restrict women’s access to affordable birth control.

And unfortunately for the women in North Carolina, this is hardly the only measure currently being considered in the legislature that could pose a threat to women’s health. State lawmakers are also considering including biased misinformation about abortion in sex ed classes, imposing unnecessary restrictions on abortion clinics that could force them to close, and forcing teens to get a notarized note from their parents before getting tested or treated for STDs.

On Monday, illegal abortion provider Kermit Gosnell was convicted of first-degree murder for the barbaric crimes he committed in his unsanitary Philadelphia-area clinic. Throughout his high-profile murder trial, anti-choice activists claimed that Gosnell’s case proved that abortion is always an inherently dangerous procedure — attempting to conflate incredibly late-term abortion services with first-trimester medication abortions. Even though their claims often fly in the face of scientific fact, abortion opponents have been largely successful at obscuring the medical realities of different types of abortion procedures.

That’s partly why restrictions on the abortion pill, which is medically known as mifepristone, are advancing across the country. Despite the fact that mifepristone is perfectly safe for women to take outside of the doctor’s office — an option that many women prefer, since it allows them the added privacy of taking the medication in their own home — anti-choice Republicans claim that more restrictions are necessary to protect women’s health. But these kind of restrictive state laws actually drive up the cost of the abortion pill, and don’t do anything to improve reproductive health care.

Here are five states where anti-abortion lawmakers are advancing medically unnecessary restrictions on the abortion pill, ultimately inserting themselves between a woman and her doctor:

1. MISSOURI: On Monday, Missouri lawmakers gave final legislative approval to HB 400, a measure that requires doctors to be physically present to administer the first dose of mifepristone and schedule an in-person follow-up appointment two weeks later. Critics of the legislation say it will interfere with women’s relationships with their doctors, as well as impose a serious burden on the women who must travel from different parts of the state to terminate a pregnancy. According to Paula Gianino, the CEO of Planned Parenthood for the St. Louis region and southwest Missouri, about 1 in 5 patients seeking an abortion at her clinic travel at least 100 miles.

2. NORTH CAROLINA: Anti-choice Republicans in North Carolina are currently pushing a package of anti-abortion bills intended to limit reproductive rights from several different angles. The most far-reaching measure is SB 308, which would require the clinics that administer medication abortions to adhere to the same standards as surgical facilities, including making costly updates to the building and requiring physicians to obtain admitting privileges from local hospitals. That’s a common method of attacking abortion clinics, and it often forces them to either stop providing the abortion pill or shut down altogether.

3. INDIANA: Earlier this month, Indiana lawmakers successfully pushed through SEA 371, a measure that is solely intended to prevent a Planned Parenthood clinic in the state from providing the abortion pill to its patients. Just like North Carolina’s proposed bill, the new law in Indiana requires clinic that administer medication abortions to make costly and unnecessary updates to their facilities under the guide of “protecting women’s safety.” When Gov. Mike Pence (R) signed the bill into law at the beginning of May, he repeated the popular anti-choice myth that the abortion pill is “dangerous” — despite all scientific evidence to the contrary.

4. MISSISSIPPI: At the end of April, Gov. Phil Bryant (R) approved SB 2795, which will require women to take the abortion pill in the presence of a physician as well as come in for a follow-up physical examination two weeks later. The measure takes effect on July 1 of this year — and it could represent a significant burden for women in the state. There’s only one abortion clinic left in all of Mississippi, and it’s fighting to remain open as anti-choice Republicans keep trying to shut it down.

5. LOUISIANA: Last month, the Louisiana Senate approved SB 90, a measure that would require a doctor who has completed a residency in obstetrics or gynecology to be physically present when administering medication abortions. If the bill becomes law, doctors who violate the new rule could be fined $1,000, imprisoned for two years, or both.

Requiring doctors to be physically present to administer the pill, even though most clinics don’t currently use that protocol, is a thinly-veiled attempt to ban abortion procedures conducted with the help of internet technology. Allowing doctors to prescribe mifepristone over a video conference helps improve low-income and rural women’s access to abortion services, since they may not be able to make a long trip to the nearest abortion clinic. Studies have shown that this type of abortion procedure is safe and effective. Nonetheless, anti-choice lawmakers continue to launch attacks at so-called “webcam abortions.”

Despite the fact that leading medical organizations agree that abortion does not actually put women at a higher risk for future premature births, North Carolina Republicans want to teach students otherwise. Under a measure that’s currently advancing in the state legislature, the state’s sex ed classes would be required to include scientifically disputed information about the risks of having an abortion.

The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Warren Daniel (R), claims that SB 132 isn’t based on any kind of political ideology. “It’s based on the scientific evidence that you will have a future risk of preterm birth if you decide voluntarily to have an abortion,” Daniel told a Senate Health Committee earlier this week during the initial debate over SB 132.

But the medical professionals who testified against the measure disagree with that assessment. At the same committee hearing, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina, Dr. David Grimes, called the proposed update to the state’s sex ed law “unnecessary and uninformed“:

“Senate Bill 132 would establish a state-sponsored ideology,” he said. “The statement is scientifically false.”

Grimes formerly directed abortion surveillance efforts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The World Health Organization, the CDC, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Pediatricians and the American Public Health Association all have uniformly concluded that abortion does not cause prematurity,” he told the committee. “How did they all get it wrong?”

There’s no good reason to amend the sex ed requirements that the state already has. According to a recent poll from the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina, 83 percent of parents in the state would like schools to continue providing sex education as currently defined under the Healthy Youth Act.

Nonetheless, the measure has already cleared a Senate committee and gotten approval from the full Senate. After this week’s heated debates, Daniel agreed to amend the legislation to add other risk factors for preterm birth — like smoking, drinking, drug use and poor prenatal care — to sexual health instruction. But SB 132 would still enshrine misinformation about abortion into state law. A final vote on the measure could come as early as Monday.

And SB 132 is hardly the only anti-choice legislation currently being considered in North Carolina. Republicans have also introduced a measure that would impose unnecessary, burdensome restrictions on abortion clinics that could ultimately force them to close their doors. At the end of March, hundreds of protesters gathered in the state capital to protest against the proposed clinic rules, telling their anti-abortion legislators that they have no right to interfere in women’s personal medical decisions. And just earlier this week, North Carolina also began advancing a bill that would force teens to get a notarized permission slip from their parents before being able to access sexual health services like birth control pills or STD tests.

(Credit: TestMeSTD)

A measure advancing in the North Carolina legislature would require teens to obtain notarized, written parental consent in order to access a range of health services, including testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, birth control prescriptions, pregnancy care, mental health counseling, and substance abuse treatment. HB 693 seeks to amend the state’s existing parental consent law — which already prevents teens from getting an abortion without permission from their parents — to extend to a broader range of medical care that lawmakers have deemed potentially inappropriate for minors.

HB 693 was approved by a GOP-controlled House committee on Tuesday. Since Republicans hold super majorities in both chambers of North Carolina’s legislature, the bill is expected to advance — and if it becomes law, North Carolina will be the first state to require such explicit parental consent for these types of health services. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 26 states allow all teens to consent to contraceptive services, and every single state currently allows minors to seek STD testing and treatment.

The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Chris Whitmire (R), claims it will simply help prevent “problems” from being repeated by involving parents in teens’ health decisions from the beginning. Other supporters of HB 693 argue that it will help “restore parental rights and lines of communication within families.”

But women’s health advocates point out that not every teen lives in a family that has healthy lines of communication, and the policy could be disastrous for minors in abusive households. “Here’s the bottom line: Everybody wants teenagers to talk to their parents, but public policy is not based on ideal families,” Paige Johnson, the vice president of external affairs for Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina, told the Huffington Post. “What if there’s something happening in the home, some kind of abuse going on? If teenagers can’t talk to their parents for whatever reason about their pregnancy or their STD or their substance abuse, they need to be able to access professional care.”

Doctors and health advocates testified against HB 693 on Tuesday, pointing out that imposing obstacles to health services could ultimately dissuade youth from seeking the medical care they need. In fact, studies have shown that when adolescents are required to seek out parental consent to access birth control and STD services, teen pregnancies tend to go up and teens’ willingness to seek out STD testing tends to go down. That’s particularly problematic considering the fact that the Centers for Disease Control has found that STDs disproportionately affect young people. In North Carolina specifically, half of all new reported cases of sexually transmitted infections occur among people between the ages of 15 and 24.

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