Dear Commons Community,
Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation Tuesday requiring that public colleges and universities in New York provide students access to abortion pills.
The bill signing capped a multiyear effort in the NYS Legislature aimed at securing medication abortion access on the campuses of the State University of New York and the City University of New York.
The law will allow out-of-state students at New York’s public schools to receive abortion access regardless of the reproductive rights terrain in their home states, Hochul said.
Under the law’s text, SUNY and CUNY schools are allowed to provide pills through their own campus clinics or by offering referrals to local or telehealth providers. The measure takes effect Aug. 1. As reported by The New York Daily News.
“We are sick and tired of judges and lawmakers telling us what to do with our bodies,” Hochul, a Democrat, said at a news conference in Albany. “Our state has, from the beginning, fought this great fight. Abortion was legal in New York three years before the rest of the nation.”
Hochul signed the measure on the first anniversary of the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case in which the court erased the half-century-old federal right to abortion.
And the governor also authorized the measure as a federal legal battle rages over pill access. About half of the abortions in the U.S. are carried out with medication.
Last month, a federal judge in Texas issued an order intended to halt the federal approval of mifepristone, a widely used abortion pill that has been on the market in the U.S. for nearly a quarter century.
The Supreme Court later halted any steps to curtail access to the drug, at least for now. Mifepristone is typically used with a second drug, misoprostol, to end a pregnancy within the first 10 weeks.
Misoprostol can be used on its own to end pregnancies, but it is not as effective when used without mifepristone.
Hochul described the Texas order as “an attack on abortion, and ultimately an attack on democracy,” and disapprovingly highlighted a new law in Florida banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
“We’re going to do everything in our power to stop the backslide, while expanding reproductive rights here in our state,” said Hochul, the first woman to serve as New York’s governor. “We must meet this moment with tenacity.”
Before the New York abortion pill bill passed the state Senate and Assembly last month, efforts to secure access on SUNY and CUNY campuses had been stalled since 2019.
Sen. Cordelle Cleare, a Harlem Democrat, shepherded the bill through the state Senate. Assemblyman Harvey Epstein, an East Village Democrat, sponsored the measure in the Assembly.
Hochul predicted that “for hundreds of thousands of young New Yorkers, this legislation will make the difference between an unwanted pregnancy and a future where they can decide what they want to do.”
“This is what matters to college-aged students,” Hochul said. “With this bill, New York will be positioned to accommodate the health care needs of all of our students, and the students we welcome in from other states.”
The abortion pill bill passed separately from the complex negotiations on the state budget that dragged on last month. The governor and lawmakers reached a budget deal last week.
Hochul also signed legislation Tuesday allowing pharmacists to dispense contraception over the counter.
Congratulations to Hochul and the Legislature for promoting the rights of women for access to abortion medication.
Tony
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