On the 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, New York passed a law to protect women’s access to abortion in the event Roe v. Wade was overturned, as later occurred in June 2022. In Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court had ruled that the right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment extended to women's decision to have abortions. However, that right must be fully balanced against the interests of the state in regulating abortions: protecting women’s health and the potentiality of all human life. The Court tied state regulation of abortion to the third trimester of pregnancy.
This news was not accepted very well by the Pro-Life camp. “We need to be honest with the public and say that this bill does not simply codify Roe v. Wade… what this bill does is expand abortion up to birth and the third trimester,” said State Assembly Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, noting the part of the law that allows medical professionals other than doctors to perform abortions. Before the new law, New York allowed only licensed physicians to perform the procedure. The law removed that requirement and furthermore allows physician assistants, nurse practitioners as well as midwives to perform abortions.
Gynecologist Jennifer Gunter has lived in a state with no gestational age limit and performed abortions after 24 weeks. She addressed her then 111K Twitter followers in a thread explaining her experiences with this heart-wrenching process that several parents have to go through, and it went viral.
People were quick to share their take on the subject:
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Additional source: New York Attorney General: reproductive rights and legal history.
The discussion belongs to a changed legal timeline
This thread accompanied New York’s 2019 Reproductive Health Act. The US Supreme Court subsequently overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, so the article’s conditional wording is historical. Gunter’s clinical account and a politician’s characterization of the law should remain separately attributed; neither substitutes for the actual legal text or individualized medical information.
What New York’s law changed
The New York State Senate passed the Reproductive Health Act by 38 votes to 24 and the Assembly by 92 to 47 on 22 January 2019, and Governor Andrew Cuomo signed it that evening. Under the previous law, abortion was banned after 24 weeks except to save the pregnant person’s life, only licensed physicians could perform it, and it was dealt with in the penal code. The act makes abortion legal on request up to 24 weeks, and afterwards when the patient’s life or health is at risk or the fetus is not viable. It allows qualified physician assistants, nurse practitioners and licensed midwives to provide abortions within their scope of practice, and moves abortion from the criminal code into public health law.
Nicole Malliotakis, then a member of the State Assembly, also argued that removing abortion from the criminal code would prevent prosecution when a fetus dies in an assault on a woman; the bill’s sponsors replied that such attacks could still be prosecuted as first-degree assault. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the legality of abortion returned to the states.
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