Montana lawmakers in the recently ended legislative session voted for a state budget that contains $6.2 million in state and federal funds over the next two years to extend continuous postpartum eligibility from 60 days to 12 months after pregnancy.

Jawort said she was surprised such a decision would come out of Butte and that officials were perhaps taking the easier route.

“Hiding behind the law is very ‘sus,’ as the kids say,” she said. “It’s very spineless.”

She said she was initially shocked but has since tried to find a silver lining.

“We can expose how silly this law is, that it just targets trans people just like we said. And no one believed us, and here we are,” she said. “So, as an activist, I have to work on Step B, and work on eliminating this law so we can have free speech.”

The Montana Department of Justice and attorneys for the state have filed notices of appeal with the state Supreme Court after a judge in Helena blocked several newly signed bills restricting abortion access and a state health department rule on Medicaid-funded abortions.

“Unfortunately, it means that a lot of kids are going to struggle with food insecurity this summer when DPHHS could’ve done something to alleviate that,” Semmens said.

“Even before the Armstrong decision in Montana, our courts said that you can’t discriminate against people because they’re lower-income and deny them access to health care – and that includes abortion care,” Graybill said.

A Montana trial judge has blocked two new state laws that allegedly eliminate access to abortion for Medicaid patients and others who depend on state money to pay for their care.

A Helena judge has blocked four anti-abortion bills and a health department rule restricting Medicaid coverage of abortion while lawsuits challenging their constitutionality play out.

A state judge has temporarily blocked new restrictive abortion policies from going into effect while their constitutionality can be hashed out in court. That order came after a 4-hour hearing in which both sides made their cases for or against the block.

Erica Coyle, executive director of Haven, said the nonprofit’s old shelter had been a not-so-well-kept secret for years in the city of more than 54,000 people. “Our job isn’t to rescue a survivor and keep them hidden away,” Coyle said. “What we need to be doing overall, as communities and as a movement, is listening to survivors and when they say, ‘The isolation of staying in a shelter is a big barrier for me.’”

A Helena district court judge on Tuesday barred the state from enforcing five new abortion restrictions while litigation over their constitutionality continues.

A state District Court judge on Tuesday put the brakes on several new abortion restrictions in Montana, including laws to tighten requirements for medically necessary abortions covered by Medicaid, require ultrasounds and ban the most commonly used procedure to terminate pregnancies in the second trimester.

Some statehouse bills share similarities with Do No Harm’s model legislation and a 2021 Arkansas bill endorsed as a model by the Family Research Council. The model bills have similar preambles, including the assertion — rebutted by major medical organizations — that the risks of gender-affirming care outweigh its benefits.

“If you start with the assertion that there are exactly two sexes, which is the literature of the bill, that’s an inaccurate statement,” Grantham said. The law’s attempt to separate sex from gender and ignore a person’s psychology, she continued, is also problematic and unscientific. “You can legislate whatever you want. You can say that gravity only applies when you’re at sea level, but that doesn’t change the fact that there’s gravity when we walk up a hill.”

“Violence, threats and intimidation tactics should have no place in our political discourse, including in our nation’s ongoing debate over abortion access,” said Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, the ranking member on the panel. “We must condemn all political violence and threats of violence, whatever the beliefs or motivations of those who engage in it and regardless of who the target may be.”

Scanlon chided her GOP colleagues during the hearing for focusing their questions and inviting witnesses based on their belief the Biden administration isn’t doing all it could to prosecute people who attack anti-abortion pregnancy centers under a federal law known as the FACE Act.

Clinics and groups suing to stop the new laws include the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana, Planned Parenthood of Montana and the Center for Reproductive Rights. They argue that these new laws will limit a woman’s options so severely that it essentially makes it impossible to obtain an abortion. It also says that the laws discriminate against those on Medicaid.

A Montana District Court has temporarily blocked a new state ban on a specific abortion procedure commonly used after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Menahan notes in his ruling the law may be in violation of the Montana Constitution.

A press secretary for the attorney general’s office did not respond to questions Monday about how Attorney General Austin Knudsen plans to enforce the dilation and evacuation ban, House Bill 721.Representatives of Planned Parenthood of Montana, one of the state’s abortion providers impacted by the new law, framed HB 721 as contradictory to the state Constitution and medical best practices in a Tuesday statement. The group filed a motion for a temporary restraining order shortly after 2:00 p.m., asking Helena District Court Judge Mike Menahan to prevent the state and the attorney general’s office from enforcing the law.

“Absent emergency injunctive relief, Montanans will be irreparably harmed by denial of their constitutionally protected right to access pre-viability abortion care and will suffer irreversible health consequences,” the filing said.

“The state’s argument is detached from the overwhelming evidence presented to the district court that abortion care is one of the safest forms of medical care in this country and the world, and that APRNs are qualified providers,” the order reads. “ ... There is no medically recognized bona fide health risk for APRNs to perform abortion care, much less one that is clearly and convincingly demonstrated.”

In the 2023 legislative session, Republicans introduced 13 bills attempting to limit abortion access, a substantial uptick from the seven anti-abortion bills brought by legislators in 2021, four in 2019, and two in 2017, 2015 and 2013.

The Montana providers joined others in Kansas and Virginia in a lawsuit against the federal Food and Drug Administration hoping to ensure access in their states to mifepristone, one of the drugs in a two-step regime to complete medication abortions.