In anticipation of more hostility toward abortion under President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, California lawmakers announced two new pieces of legislation Monday aimed at protecting medication abortion and punishing local governments that interfere with access to reproductive health care.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced the bills at a press conference, saying Californians are in an “urgent and dangerous situation” with Trump returning to office and Republicans soon controlling both chambers in Congress.
One of the legislative proposals, the Medication Abortion Access bill, seeks to ensure that medication abortion ― a two-pill regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol ― is protected and available everywhere in California, including in its so-called health care deserts where medical providers are harder to come by.
“Rights don’t really do us any good if we can’t access them,” said Assemblymember-elect Maggy Krell, who co-authored the bill with Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry. The goal of the bill is to ensure that medication abortion ― the most common way of terminating a pregnancy ― is “not just a constitutional right that lives in a constitutional document on paper,” she said.
The legislation “will ensure that patients and providers have access to what they need, to mifepristone, to misoprostol, and protect the transportation, the mailing, the supplying of everything that would be needed for a medication abortion,” Krell continued at Monday’s press conference.
The full text of the bill and its strategies have not yet been released.
The legislation comes as reproductive rights advocates warn that Trump could invoke the the Comstock Act ― a 150-year-old law that criminalizes sending “obscene” materials in the mail, including anything “intended for producing abortion” ― to ban medication abortion, which has become a crucial access point since the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
After months of pressure for him to clarify his stance, Trump said on the campaign trail that he wouldn’t enforce the Comstock Act. But critics are skeptical of such a promise given that many of his allies, including Vice President-elect JD Vance, have advocated for using it to crack down on medication abortion.
The other California legislation announced Monday would broaden Bonta’s powers to enforce the Reproductive Privacy Act, an existing statute banning the state from interfering in a patient’s decision to access abortion. If passed, Bonta would be able to slap those who violate it with financial penalties.
“This is not a hypothetical,” Bonta said Monday, saying city officials in Beverly Hills illegally colluded earlier this year to stop an abortion clinic from opening there.
“We were able to prevent Beverly Hills from taking this type of action again, but we weren’t able to seek financial penalties that would in turn further disincentivize government actors from violating the law,” Bonta said.
The bills’ announcement comes the same day California Gov. Gavin Newsom convened a special session on Trump-proofing some of the state’s laws. He plans to ask the legislature to approve additional funding to Bonta’s office in preparation with legal fights with the Trump administration.
“We’re not going to be caught flat-footed,” Newsom said at a press conference earlier this month. “We want to be prepared as early as Jan. 20.”
Speaking Monday, Bonta said it’s California’s duty to inspire every state to its east.
“At times in this nation, when people’s rights and freedoms are under attack, when they’re at risk ― as is so often the case ― people look west across this country,” he said. “They look west to California to see what the largest state in the nation, the fifth-largest economy in the world, the most diverse state in the nation, is doing. And here’s what they’ll see.”
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He noted that his office sued the previous Trump administration more than 120 times and won a supermajority of those cases.