Shielding Maine from Threats of Violence
At the Maine Women’s Lobby, our vision for a gender-just world includes a belief that all Mainers should have access to quality health care that supports their mental and physical wellbeing and bodily autonomy, including comprehensive reproductive and gender-affirming care.
We feel proud and grateful that Maine is a state that offers a range of reproductive and gender-affirming medical care, and that Maine lawmakers have continually affirmed the right to access this critical care. This state-level commitment is especially important given the recent rollbacks of Federal abortion protections and subsequent politically-motivated state-level bans on abortion and gender-affirming care for transgender youth that have passed in over a dozen states. These bans too often leave patients without access to the healthcare they need and tie the hands of health care professionals trained to provide this type of care.
And now, some states have not only banned or criminalized standard-of-care medical care, but are beginning to threaten retaliatory investigations and lawsuits against states that lawfully provide these types of care.
In response to these medical bans and attempted interference from out-of-state lawsuits, more than 15 states, including Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, have passed “shield laws” to protect health care providers and patients accessing this essential care. These shield laws make it clear that healthcare professionals and patients deserve to be safe and supported providing and accessing legal care.
Right now, with LD227, Maine has the opportunity to follow suit and protect providers of reproductive and gender-affirming health care who are critical to ensuring that all Mainers have access to the care they need.
LD227 aims to safeguard Maine’s health care infrastructure and affirms Maine’s commitment to protecting clinicians providing critical care that is already legal in our state. This bill will help ensure Maine can recruit and retain health care professionals, which is vitally important given Maine’s clinician shortage, especially in rural areas.
Despite the common sense steps in LD227’s language, the bill’s dealings with abortion access and gender-affirming care, both trigger points for extremist and authoritarian sectors, have resulted in a legislative process filled with misinformation and in some cases, outright lies. Activists attending the bill hearing on March 5th repeated inaccuracies and conspiracy theories. And, on March 8th, bomb threats were delivered to the State House, the Committee Chairs' homes, and the Maine Democratic Party.
These patterns reflect the growing connections between misogyny, extremism, and anti-democratic threats and actions. The harmful and violent misinformation that filled up the hearing was appalling and threats on the lives of lawmakers and bill supporters undermines our democracy and civil society.
It's easy to look away - to dismiss this as the actions of a few. But we need to look squarely at it and recognize that this chipping away of our sense of safety and trust in the process is part of the work to chip away at our rights and ultimately our system of governance.
It’s all connected: these threats – both the retaliatory lawsuits by states with care bans against states lawfully providing care and against Maine lawmakers looking to protect access in Maine with LD227– are designed to scare us.
We can’t allow threats and violent rhetoric to stop the important work of our legislature. And we can’t allow Maine health care providers to be targeted by politically-motivated actors for performing legal care. Passing LD227 sends a strong message that Maine supports access to critical health care including comprehensive reproductive and gender-affirming care. It also sends a message that extremists can’t get their way through threats of violence: our democratic process won’t be scared away.
