Sick propaganda

When Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine discovered that Planned Parenthood was, in fact, not responsible for selling fetal tissue in the state — the smear at the heart of a right-wing campaign seeking to discredit the national women’s health organization — he was the last to admit it.

Downplaying the finding that cleared Planned Parenthood of wrongdoing, DeWine instead quickly blamed local clinics for something entirely unrelated, hoping to distract Ohioans with an emotional appeal about the horror of abortion.

“In the course of our investigation, we learned that aborted fetuses are ultimately disposed of in landfill sites — apparently intermingled with other common residential and commercial trash,” DeWine wrote in a December letter to state Department of Health Director Richard Hodges.
Burial and cremation laws are only intended to shame women for their decision.

“We found that these fetuses were steam cooked,” he said at a following press conference, referring to a common process used to kill bacteria before disposing biological remains.
His demand for a disposing fetal remains in a more “humane manner” — which has yet to be defined — ultimately inspired a pair of recently introduced Ohio bills demanding that women, after having an abortion, must inform the clinic if they want the aborted remains to be cremated or buried. The abortion clinic is financially responsible for completing the task.

But Dewine’s tactical pivot isn’t his brainchild. It’s been carefully crafted by the country’s most powerful anti-abortion organization, Americans United for Life (AUL), which writes draft bills for GOP lawmakers. And it’s quickly become the latest trend in anti-abortion legislation.
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"Fetal burial" bills like Ohio's have begun to make a significant appearance in the legislative sessions of conservative-led states -- states that have already passed nearly every restriction possible to restrict a woman's access to an abortion. Kellie Copeland, director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, said this is a technique to keep the anti-abortion debate front and center, regardless of the need for this particular policy.
"The purpose is really just to keep the anti-abortion narrative going at state capitols, and talk about how abortion providers are not doing the right things in some people's eyes," Copeland said. "And let's be clear. Burial and cremation laws are only intended to shame women for their decision."

Gary Daniels, chief lobbyist for ACLU Ohio, agrees. "It's just a way to keep abortion issues afloat and in the public eye," he said.

Many states are using eerily similar language to drive fetal burials bill through their legislatures. The identical legislation is no coincidence: The text is copied and pasted directly from AUL's website. AUL functions as a legislation mill for anti-abortion lawmakers, enabling them to "easily introduce bills without needing to research and write the bills themselves," according to the organization's website.

You would be able to easily request a list of who's getting an abortion in the state
Idaho, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina all have bills in their current session with language pulled directly from AUL's model legislation, which is evocatively titled the "Unborn Infants Dignity Act."

States like Ohio and Indiana -- which approved a controversial anti-abortion law last month that includes a fetal burial provision -- are slightly less overt in their duplication of AUL's draft bill, but are clearly inspired by its model.

AUL's bill is meant to applied to "every instance of fetal death, irrespective of the duration of pregnancy." In some cases, this would mean a woman who took an abortion pill a couple months into a pregnancy would be asked if she wanted a quarter-sized blood clot to be formally buried. She would then get a death certificate.