Medium.com Article by Elan Young, June 19, 2020 || Elan Young ||| One year ago, on June 19, 2019, after a quarter-century of the Rhode Island legislature failing to pass the Reproductive Privacy Act (RPA), a women’s reproductive rights movement made history with an innovative, multiyear lobbying campaign to finally get the bill passed. Forty-six years after Roe v. Wade was signed into law, the RPA was enshrined at the state level, ensuring women access to safe, legal abortions.
In addition to securing abortion protections, the RPA also erased unobserved vestigial laws off the books that some feared the Trump administration would enforce if it ever managed to overturn Roe v. Wade in its obsession for complete cultural power over women. One law required prior notice of an abortion from a spouse, another mandated imprisonment for anyone who attempted to induce a “miscarriage” in a pregnant woman, and another said that human life begins at the instant of conception.
