SANTA FE, NM (AP) — New Mexico’s governor signed an abortion-rights bill Thursday that opposes local ordinances aimed at limiting access to abortion procedures and drugs.
Reproductive health clinics in New Mexico offer abortion procedures to patients from states, including Texas, that have strict abortion bans. The new law also aims to ensure access to gender-affirming health care related to gender identity distress that does not match a person’s assigned sex.
New Mexico has one of the most liberal abortion access laws in the country, but two counties and three cities in eastern New Mexico recently adopted abortion restrictions that reflect deep opposition to abortion. offer method.
The bill signed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham overrides those local ordinances.
An additional bill working its way through the New Mexico Legislature would protect abortion providers and patients from out-of-state interference, prosecution or extradition attempts.
In 2021, New Mexico’s Democrat-led Legislature passed a measure to repeal a dormant 1969 law that banned most abortion procedures, ensuring access to abortion after the Supreme Court overturned it. of US Roe v. Wade last year.
The anti-abortion ordinances — passed in the past few months by officials in the cities of Hobbs, Clovis and Eunice, along with Lea and Roosevelt counties — refer to an obscure U.S. obscenity law that prohibits in the shipment of drugs or other material intended to assist in abortions. .
Separately, Democratic state Attorney General Raúl Torrez urged the state Supreme Court to intervene against local abortion ordinances that he says violate the state’s constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process.
Democratic governors in 20 states this year launched a network intended to strengthen access to abortion in the wake of the US Supreme Court ruling that removes a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. The decision transferred procedural regulatory powers to state governments.
Many states have also enacted or contemplated limitations or outright bans on transgender medical treatmentwith conservative US lawmakers saying they are concerned about young people eventually regretting irreversible body modification treatments.
Source: https://apnews.com/article/abortion-transgender-rights-new-mexico-b0f945afe9cc2d8e4f90bb956e62694a
