Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune via AP
Surrounded by DFL legislators, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, center, holds up a bill he signed that adds a “fundamental right” to abortion access to state law, January 31, 2023, in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Minnesota has demonstrated the reach of a progressive Democratic trifecta amid a wave of red-state restrictions on abortion one year after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Bordering four states with abortion bans—three of them with Republican trifectas—Minnesota has effectively become the Midwest’s abortion access center. It forged ahead to liberalize reproductive rights policies and became the first state after Dobbs to codify abortion rights into law. “Since the Dobbs decision, a lot of Americans, especially men, got educated that abortion is health care,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) said last week during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “They’ve heard the horrific stories of pregnancies gone bad.”
To destigmatize the procedure and to increase access to reproductive health care, state lawmakers went beyond simply protecting the right to abortion. Some of the repealed abortion restrictions include removing a 24-hour waiting period, viability periods, requirements for abortion to be performed in a hospital, and for doctors to recite lists of “medically dubious claims about the risks.” Two restrictions remain in place: Fetal remains must be cremated or buried, and both parents of a minor seeking an abortion must be notified of their intent to pursue the procedure. (Neither parent has veto power over that decision.)
The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) has slim majorities in the Minnesota legislature. In the House, the DFL has 34 seats to the Republican Party’s 33 seats. In the Senate, the DFL has 70 seats to the Republicans’ 64. The measures, which passed along party lines in both chambers earlier this year, were embedded in a larger health financing bill.
“If you don’t have access to health care, then it’s not a right, it’s a privilege.”
For Maggie Meyer, the executive director of Pro-Choice Minnesota, the session was one of the most productive legislative sessions she’s ever witnessed. “We have to sit down this summer and create an entirely new legislative agenda because we just got everything done that we’ve been working toward over the last ten years,” Meyer told the Prospect.
One major goal was increasing access to abortion and reproductive health care and striving to reintegrate abortion into mainstream health care, by situating the procedure within reproductive health care regimes and training programs for medical professionals. “If you don’t have access to health care, then it’s not a right, it’s a privilege,” says Minnesota state Sen. Erin Maye Quade (DFL-Apple Valley), one the legislative leaders of the state’s abortion reform coalition. “Because if you can’t get care, it doesn’t matter if it’s legal or not.”
The four neighboring states’ restrictions vary. Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota have Republican trifectas. In Iowa, abortion is currently legal up to 20 weeks, following the Iowa Supreme Court’s June 16 decision to uphold a lower-court ruling blocking a “heartbeat law,” which bans abortion after about the sixth week of pregnancy. The legislature’s next steps are not yet clear, though some Democrats expect a special session this summer.
North Dakota’s heartbeat ban (with exceptions only for rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother) persuaded one abortion provider, the Red River Women’s Clinic, to move from Fargo across the state border into Moorhead, Minnesota. Although the new location is just a few miles from the old one, it was North Dakota’s only abortion clinic. It also offers other reproductive services, including birth control and emergency contraception, pregnancy and STI testing, and miscarriage management. Under the South Dakota ban, the only exception is saving the life of the “pregnant female.”
Wisconsin technically has an abortion ban, with no exceptions for rape or incest. But Gov. Tony Evers (D) has filed a lawsuit in an attempt to block the ban, which went into effect immediately after Dobbs due to the prior 1849 law. Abortion services have been paused until the Dane County Circuit Court rules. The Republican-controlled legislature has pushed bills that would restrict abortion, such as requiring police reports as proof of incest or rape. Evers has vowed to veto any of these proposals.
Other states in the region, like Missouri, attempted to go further with a trigger law enacted after Dobbs that banned abortion except to save the life of the mother. Republican legislators tried to criminalize abortion, give a fetus the status of “personhood,” prevent future legislation to expand abortion, and weigh down health care legislation with terminology restricting abortion. These attempts were unsuccessful, but a tax exemption for fetuses was passed as well as an extension of postpartum health care for Missourians on Medicaid.
Still, driving along I-70 from Missouri to Illinois, there are billboards advertising “safe and legal abortions” in health care clinics just across the Mississippi River where demand for abortions is increasing and creating wait lists for the service. In Illinois and Michigan, abortion is protected by state law and available until viability. Like Minnesota, both states have Democratic trifectas.
Ken Martin, DFL Party chairman, sees Minnesota outpacing other states with long-standing Democratic trifectas, like Illinois, New York, and California: “They haven’t done nearly as much as Minnesota has to deliver on a whole host of really important issues.” In addition to repealing restrictions on abortion in the 2023 session that ended in May, state lawmakers passed the largest child tax credit in the country, a universal school lunch program for K-12 students, protections for gender-affirming care, voting rights expansions for returning citizens, and recreational marijuana reforms.
A MinnPost and Change Research poll found that nearly 75 percent of college-educated Minnesotans oppose a ban on abortion. Maye Quade, the state senator, says that level of agreement is extremely rare: “I don’t think you can get 75 percent of Minnesotans to agree on what the weather is right now.” According to a 2019 statewide Gender Justice poll conducted by PerryUndem and Bellwether Consulting, 71 percent of respondents view abortion as an integral feature of women’s rights and another 69 percent say abortion is a vital component of reproductive health care access.
