Council proposes shield legislation
Bills aim to protect ‘right to choose’
Pittsburgh City Councilman Bobby Wilson formally introduced three pieces of legislation to protect reproductive freedoms in Pittsburgh during Tuesday’s council meeting.
Last Friday, just hours after the Supreme Court decided on a case that would overturn Roe v. Wade, Mr. Wilson announced that he would put forth the bills for council’s consideration in an effort to “get back our right to choose.”
“City Council has a strong precedent of passing legislation that seeks to protect and promote general health, safety and welfare of citizens,” Mr. Wilson said during a news conference Tuesday afternoon.
The city’s charter also states that residents should expect “aggressive action” from officials toward “the achievement of health and safety,” which Mr. Wilson said was part of the reason he put forth the bills.
“Councilman Wilson’s legislation has the potential to make a huge difference,” said Councilwoman Erika Strassburger, who along with Councilman Corey O’Connor, co-sponsored the new bills.
One of the proposed bills is the first-ever shield law proposed by a city, which would protect abortion providers in Pittsburgh from any out-of-state investigations or prosecutions.
Unless required by state or federal law, this bill would make it so that city officials, including law enforcement, don’t have to comply with any investigation into abortion providers who are legally operating in Pennsylvania.
“Unfortunately, the worst is probably yet to come,” Greer Donley, an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law said during the news conference. “Already you have states that have started signaling that they’re interested and willing to go after providers who are providing completely legal care in their home state.”
This would specifically apply to providers who give care to patients coming from states where the procedure has been banned.
Neighboring states, like Ohio and West Virginia both have some level of abortion ban in place, and providers in Western Pennsylvania have been prepping for an influx of patients
following the Supreme Court’s decision.
“All it takes is a rogue prosecutor in one of these states who are going to try to go after, potentially, our providers,” Ms. Donley said. “It’s really up to us to do everything we can to try to protect these people who are offering vital care to people all over the region …”
Abortions are still legal in Pennsylvania, although efforts to amend the state constitution to change that have been introduced.
Ms. Donley has previously worked with legislators in New York and Connecticut to construct statewide shield laws, but Pittsburgh is the first city to propose one.
This protection would make it so physicians wouldn’t have to consider where their patients live when giving them care, according to Dr. Grace Ferguson, an obstetrician and gynecologist with Allegheny Health Network.
“It’s hard already to provide abortion care in Pennsylvania, even though its legal,” Dr. Ferguson said. “If you make it harder for providers to provide this safe care, we’re just going to lose access entirely. So anything you can do to make it easier for us to just be doctors and take care of patients and their families … is so incredibly appreciated.”
The second piece of legislation proposed by Mr. Wilson would go into effect if Pennsylvania bans abortions in the future, and it would make it so that police officers would “depriortize enforcement” of abortion-related crimes.
It would put those crimes at the bottom of the officers’ enforcement list, Mr. Wilson explained, similar to how the decriminalization of marijuana in the city has been enforced.
By deprioritizing enforcement, the legislation acts as a work-around to the state’s pre-emption laws, Ms. Donley said.
“Typically law enforcement does have some discretion on how they allocate their time and budgets and so this is just a bill that would say this will go to the bottom of the line, not that this is not a law that is on the books in our city,” she said.
However, if passed by the city, there could still be a legal challenge on pre-emption grounds, she added.
The final proposed legislation seeks to regulate “deceptive advertising” by limited-service pregnancy centers, sometimes referred to as crisis pregnancy centers.
These centers often pose as health care clinics, but give out misleading or false information about pregnancy health care and often do not provide care or delay care for pregnant people, according to Signe Espinoza the executive director for Planned Parenthood Pennsylvania Advocates.
Crisis pregnancy centers also outnumber verified health care clinics 9 to 1 in Pennsylvania, Ms. Espinoza said.
“I think that it is just so incredible to see some efforts to hold them accountable as they continue to really target our most resilient communities,” she said, noting that these types of clinics tend to target Black and brown neighborhoods.
Ms. Donley explained that the city can regulate this type of advertising without infringing on the First Amendment because the Supreme Court previously gave states the ability to regulate “deceptive health advertising.”
Discussion of the bills with the full council could begin as early as next week.