Since the fall of Dobbs, states with abortion bans have seen a threefold increase in maternal deaths. The vague, non-medical language of these legislative bans are incompatible with the complex realities of pregnancy and reproductive health, but they carry severe penalties for providers if violated, including prison time. This highly-punitive legal environment has left providers without guidance on how to handle nuanced emergency situations, resulting in patients across the country being denied legally-permitted care, leading to adverse health outcomes, trauma, and even death.

Legal guidance for providers in states with abortion restrictions is a matter of life and death. Support the L4GG Reproductive Rights and Health Equity Program to help ensure patients receive the critical care to which they are legally-entitled.

Using Georgia as a pilot state to understand the legal landscape of care, L4GG will combine its legal expertise with the medical expertise of our Georgia-based clinician partners to analyze state law, policy, and litigation outcomes and create a series of model hospital policies and protocols tailored to Georgia’s reproductive healthcare laws and designed to allow clinicians to provide the most comprehensive care possible under current law.

These protocols will provide legally sound clarity regarding when providers are able to intervene in both emergency or non-emergency circumstances, articulate provider obligations under federal laws, and give life-saving guidance on how to navigate exceptions. 

Hospitals mistakenly believe that their extremely conservative approaches are the most financially risk-averse. In reality, the denial of lawful care that patients are entitled to is not a liability-limiting strategy. Recent lawsuits against hospitals for failing to intervene in patient emergencies are proof of that fact, and our analysis indicates that these lawsuits are likely to become more common over time. By educating decision-makers in hospitals about their legal liabilities for failing to deliver sufficient care, L4GG will advocate to key administrators that expansive model policies would not only benefit patients and providers, but also protect the hospital from lawsuits for under-delivering necessary care. 

Once completed, L4GG intends to replicate this project in other states with restrictive reproductive healthcare legislation, ultimately ensuring more equitable access to healthcare across the country. But we cannot do that without your support. 

The Reproductive Rights and Health Equity program also ensures equitable access to healthcare through the following ongoing projects: 

Policy Resource Hub for Reproductive Health: The Hub is highly-coordinated effort of over 600 active pro bono lawyers from 50 top law firms that provide free, shared resources for verified partners, including a daily-updated legal research portal of state-specific reproductive health laws, a comprehensive biweekly Repro Health Digest contextualizing the news for hundreds of subscribers, and a continually expanded media index containing over 7,500 media pieces about the real-world enforcement of restrictive legislation from across the country, searchable by state. You can request access to the hub here. 

Legal Training and Education: Our expert, in-house staff attorneys work in partnership with advocates at reproductive rights and justice organizations to fight for equitable health law and policy. In coordination with groups including ACOG, Doctors for America (DFA), and the American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA), among others, we have provided high impact reports, training, research and educational opportunities. Most recently, we worked with DFA to educate their providers on how the new HIPAA Reproductive Health Rule can be utilized as a patient advocacy tool protecting against pregnancy criminalization, both through a live training and a report for circulation that can be found here. 

Supporting Legal Research Needs: We consistently partner with the reproductive health groups at law schools including Stanford, Berkeley and UC Irvine and pro bono groups at law firms nationwide to support in-house research needs and those of organizations that we work in coalition with. These projects have included legislative tracking, ballot initiative tracking, state landscape reports, and media collection projects. 

OTHER WAYS TO GIVE