The Ohio Senate will not vote on two hotly contested pieces of anti-choice legislation — one that would have imposed the strictest abortion in the nation, and one that sought to strip funding from the state’s Planned Parenthood clinics — during their lame duck session this year, the current Speaker of the Senate announced on Tuesday.

State Speaker Tom Niehaus (R-OH) confirmed to the Columbus Dispatch that the Senate’s agenda for the rest of the year will not include those two bills, after he suggested earlier this month that state lawmakers might attempt to push them through:

The New Richmond Republican said publicly what has been hinted privately for more than a week – that despite support from House Republicans, and some in his own caucus, the Senate’s agenda in the lame-duck legislative session will not include these controversial bills.

“We have been the most pro-life legislature in my memory,” Niehaus told reporters today. “I want to continue my focus on jobs and the economy.”

Niehaus cited some concerns that two bills may be too overreaching, even for the most stringent abortion opponents in his legislature. The proposed “heartbeat” bill that sought to outlaw all abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected — which can occur as early as six weeks, before many women even know they’re pregnant — is so extreme that it has divided the anti-choice community, and Niehaus said he wants to wait until the Ohio’s anti-choice groups are able to reach a consensus on it.

Niehaus even acknowledged that the move to deny $1.4 million in funding for Planned Parenthood clinics may be going too far. In a rare concession from a Republican official, Neihaus told the Columbus Dispatch that he believes the organization provides women with a number of health services that aren’t available elsewhere. “From my perspective, we have to look at the entirety of work done by Planned Parenthood,” he said.

The announcement is welcome news for women’s health advocates, who were gearing up for a fight even after this month’s election results confirmed that voters across the country are rejecting radical anti-choice agendas. But they aren’t convinced that GOP lawmakers are finished with the War on Women quite yet. As NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio director Kellie Copeland told the Associated Press, “We don’t believe for a second that this threat is over — perhaps delayed, but not over.”

Voters across the country rejected radical anti-choice legislation in this month’s election, and far-right candidates whose campaigns centered on denying women abortion access overwhelmingly lost their races. But that doesn’t mean anti-choice activists are giving up the War on Women quite yet. Republican lawmakers in Arkansas are already looking ahead to the new year, when they plan to push for a slew of anti-choice legislation now that the state has elected more conservatives to office.

As the Associated Press reports, abortion opponents in Arkansas are seizing a new opportunity to revisit their anti-choice agenda now that the election is over — even though their efforts failed during this past legislative session:

Fresh off an election where Republicans won control of the state House and Senate for the first time in 138 years, GOP lawmakers and anti-abortion groups are now focusing on a handful of bills they believe have a better chance. [...]

“I will say that basically any opportunity now is more than any opportunity than we had in the previous session,” said Rep. Andy Mayberry, R-Hensley.

Mayberry said he plans to reintroduce legislation next year that would ban abortion at 20 weeks of pregnancy, based on the disputed claim that a fetus can feel pain after that point. Mayberry’s bill was one of 10 anti-abortion measures that failed to clear the House Public Health Committee during last year’s session, and it’s one of three measures that Arkansas Right to Life says it plans to push for in the legislative session that begins Jan. 14.

A similar 20-week ban on abortions enacted in Arizona is currently being considered in court after the ACLU sued to block it, citing the law’s “truly, horrifically narrow” medical exception that could prevent women from getting abortions even in cases when it is medically necessary for them to end a pregnancy. In addition to Mayberry’s fetal pain bill, anti-choice activists hope Arkansas’ newly elected Republican lawmakers can push through measures to prevent the state’s health insurance exchange from offering coverage for abortion services and ban doctors from administering the abortion pill through video supervision in rural health clinics.

And Arkansas isn’t the only state where anti-choice lawmakers are eager to get back to work on crafting legislation to deny women their reproductive rights. Ohio lawmakers are taking advantage of the current lame duck session to push through measures to restrict abortion access and defund Planned Parenthood, and right-wing activists in Wisconsin are encouraging lawmakers to consider bills to force mandatory ultrasounds upon women seeking abortions.

Even though part of Arizona’s restrictive abortion ban is currently being blocked from taking effect while it is considered in court, state officials are moving forward with implementing other parts of the law — including launching a misleading website designed to encourage women to reconsider their decision to have an abortion.

The GOP lawmaker who sponsored the legislation, Rep. Kimberly Yee (R-Phoenix), is upfront about her intentions for the site required under her new law. According to the Arizona Daily Sun, she has “acknowledged she believes that the site will convince some women considering an abortion not to go through with it.”

The new section of Arizona’s Department of Health Services site is framed as presenting the information that women have “the right to know” before opting to have an abortion. Links offer resources that repeatedly warn about the potential dangers of electing to have an abortion, including separate sections about “making an informed decision,” the “medical risks of abortion,” the “mortality risks of abortion,” and the medical side effects and emotional damage that may occur “after an abortion.” Of the dozen links on the site, only one, “pregnancy and childbirth,” attempts to present the other side — but although that section does include information about the complications that can occur from carrying a pregnancy to term, it still maintains that “pregnancy and birth is usually a safe, natural process”:

Arizona’s HB 2036 already has another provision that requires any woman seeking an abortion to undergo a mandatory ultrasound, but Rep. Yee hopes that the new website will help women see even more detailed images than that ultrasound can provide. The site includes images documenting the stages of a fetus at each two-week interval, and Rep. Yee explained that “the medical drawings, which are in full color and much more detailed than any ultrasound, may give some prospective parents additional reasons to reconsider their initial decision to terminate the pregnancy.”

Pushing unbalanced information about the risks of abortion procedures is a tactic designed to pressure women to change their minds about a safe medical procedure they have already chosen for themselves. Arizona lawmakers are using HB 2036 to restrict women’s access to abortion services after just 20 weeks of pregnancy, but they aren’t stopping at simply legislating women’s health services. As Rep. Yee admits, state lawmakers are pursuing emotional manipulation as well.

An estimated 10,000 activists flooded the streets of Dublin on Saturday to protest Ireland’s stringent abortion policies. The predominantly Catholic country has a total ban on all abortion services, with a narrow exception in cases where a pregnancy may threaten a woman’s life. But the recent death of Savita Halappanavar — the 31-year-old Indian woman who died of blood poisoning after an Irish hospital refused to terminate her pregnancy — highlights the fact that women in Ireland struggle to access reproductive health services even when their lives may be at stake. Halappanavar’s tragic story is quickly becoming an international controversy, prompting the Irish government to promise to reexamine its abortion policy.

Thousands of protesters took to the streets today with signs and banners bearing Halappanavar’s image, vowing that the tragic events of her death will “never again” happen in their country (all images via Broadsheet):

President Obama’s landmark health care reform includes multiple provisions with significant positive implications for women, including putting an end to discriminatory gender-based insurance costs and ensuring affordable access to contraceptive services and maternity care. But Obamacare could also have another unexpected effect on women’s lives: helping ensure they don’t have to rely on a spouse for their health coverage, or worry about losing that coverage after a change in their marital status.

According to a new study from the University of Michigan, about 115,000 American women lose their private insurance coverage following a divorce each year, and 65,000 of those women remain uninsured because they don’t have any way to access health care without a spouse. Women are much more likely than men to be covered as a dependent — nearly a quarter of women under 65 years old were dependents last year, versus just 14 percent of men in the same age group — because they continue to be less likely to be insured through their jobs, partly because they tend to be in fields that don’t offer comprehensive benefits. Men are still more likely to have jobs that offer better insurance packages, and the Michigan study suggests that’s one reason why women often choose to access health insurance through their husbands’ plans.

Once those women get divorced, however, they lose the ability to access coverage as a dependent, and they often can’t afford the high costs of private insurance on their own. And rather than just a temporary gap in coverage immediately following a divorce, researchers observed that the rates of insurance coverage for divorced women remained depressed for more than two years after their splits occurred. “Insurance loss may compound the economic losses women experience after divorce and contribute to as well as compound previously documented health declines following divorce,” researchers warned.

This study builds on previous research that has already drawn a link between marital status and uninsurance rates. Unmarried women are estimated to be between 1.5 and 2 times more likely to be uninsured than the women who have a legal spouse — and even when unmarried women are insured, they are more likely to rely on public insurance programs like Medicaid. In fact, women make up 68 percent of the recipients in the Medicaid program.

But thanks to Obamacare, women may not have to keep relying on insurance plans that are only available through their husbands — something that will help women who choose to remain unmarried, women who seek a divorce, and LGBT women who live in states where they cannot legally marry. By requiring that all employers provide their workers with insurance, preventing insurance providers from charging women more than men for the same medical care, and expanding the eligibility levels for the Medicaid program, the health reform law actually represents a step toward ensuring that women’s ability to have insurance isn’t impacted by women’s ability to get married.

While Republican lawmakers across the country work to redefine abortion access, Ohio’s state senator Nina Turner has decided to redefine their party’s acronym. She showed up at a Planned Parenthood press conference at the state house today wearing a shirt that said, simply, “GOP: Get Out of my Panties.”

The new attire is a response to Ohio Republicans’ renewed push to severely limit abortion access for women in the state through a so-called “heartbeat” bill, as well as an upcoming initiative to strip funding from the state’s Planned Parenthood affiliates.

Turner says of her fellow lawmakers, “For the Republicans at the state level to disregard this message is astonishing to me. They are arrogant, they are inebriated with power, and that is exactly what we see going on here.”

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco launched a Global Turnaway Study this year to explore the potential social and economic implications of denying women access to legal abortion. And after documenting the experiences of the women who seek to terminate a pregnancy but are turned away from abortion services, the UCSF researchers found that those women were three times more likely than the women who successfully obtained abortions to fall below the poverty line within the subsequent two years.

The Gawker affiliate io9 summarizes some of the researchers’ preliminary findings, and notes that denying women access to abortion puts a strain on struggling women as well as federal assistance programs. Although the women who participated in the Turnaway Study were in comparable economic positions when they sought abortions, the woman who were unable to terminate their unwanted pregnancies were more likely to have slipped into poverty just a year later:

A year later, [the women who were denied an abortion] were far more likely to be on public assistance — 76 percent of the turnaways were on the dole, as opposed to 44 percent of those who got abortions. 67 percent of the turnaways were below the poverty line (vs. 56 percent of the women who got abortions), and only 48 percent had a full time job (vs. 58 percent of the women who got abortions).

When a woman is denied the abortion she wants, she is statistically more likely to wind up unemployed, on public assistance, and below the poverty line. Another conclusion we could draw is that denying women abortions places more burden on the state because of these new mothers’ increased reliance on public assistance programs.

The UCSF researchers also told io9 that their study did not find any statistical correlation between abortion and drug use, or abortion and clinical depression — in other words, women who successfully obtained abortions did not experience any negative emotional consequences stemming from their decision to end a pregnancy, including an uptick in drug abuse. In fact, the researchers explained, “One week after seeking abortion, 97 percent of women who obtained an abortion felt that abortion was the right decision; 65 percent of turnaways still wished they had been able to obtain an abortion.”

In fact, women often seek abortions for the very same reasons they seek access to affordable contraception: because they cannot currently afford to have another child. Women typically want to avoid unintended pregnancies in cases when having a baby would compromise their economic autonomy and prevent them from finishing school, keeping a job, or supporting their current families.

Nonetheless, conservative anti-choice advocates are currently pushing to limit access to both abortion and contraception — while simultaneously slashing funding for the social safety net programs that poor women rely on.

Abortion rights, we’re told, are our Great Divider. America is cleaved in two. Fifty unremitting percent on either side. There is no United States of America, only pro and anti choice America.

But what if that’s not true? Or, more precisely, what if that won’t be true for much longer?

The 2012 election has been touted as a watershed moment for the Democratic Party, but it may have been one for the pro-choice cause as well. And it’s not because the would-be rape caucus was defeated or that pro-choice candidates won big, though those help. Rather, it’s that there’s good reasons to believe the coalition Obama has built is not only durable, but also staunchly pro-choice. If that’s true, it could signify the start of a major shift on what had previously been thought to have been a fundamental fault line in American politics.

Let’s start with the exit polling. The 2012 electorate was overwhelmingly pro-choice; 59 percent said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while only 36 percent said the reverse. The critical swing states followed the pattern, with some like Virginia falling to the left of the national average. Exit polls should be taken with a grain of salt, of course, but these numbers undeniably suggest American voters are more pro-choice than previously thought, especially in the states up for grabs in Presidential and Senatorial elections.

These data throw a monkey wrench in the conventional wisdom about abortion rights — namely, that it’s an issue that the GOP could use to make inroads with the new Obama coalition. Young voters, women, African-Americans, and Latinos have average-to-conservative views on choice, we’re told. But many identified as pro-choice in 2012. What gives?

Part of the answer is that the general picture is wrong: these key Democratic groups generally track the national average on abortion or tilt left. Though some polls suggest young voters are likely to support restricting abortion rights, the most systematic evidence suggests Milllenials are as, if not more, likely to support keeping abortion legal in all or most cases as the general population. Ditto with women. While African-Americans used to lean right, the most recent polling suggests a decisive pro-choice shift.

Even Latinos, who generally (though not always) tend to oppose abortion rights, have more complicated views than pundits generally let on. While first and second generation Latino-Americans tend to oppose abortion in most or all cases, third generation and higher Latinos support abortion rights by a 19 point margin. Since the Latino population boom is currently being fueled by birth rather than immigration, the third generation cohort seems likely to grow over time. Not incidentally, Latinos who voted in the 2012 election supported keeping abortion legal by a 2:1 margin (though, for it’s worth, the poll didn’t include Texas).

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