“The ability of a person to receive accurate information and referrals about their pregnancy options supports their ability to exercise their rights to have a child or not have a child,” LeBleu said. “If you don’t have the information and you can’t find a trusted person to share that information with you, this probably won’t lead you to a place where you can actualize your autonomy over your body and what you want to do about your pregnancy.”

Society has still not accepted transgender people as powerful and deserving of humanity, Moxley said. And until that changes, Trans Day of Remembrance will continue to be necessary to restore humanity to the lives of those who have been taken. In that vein, expanding the scope of TDOR makes sense to her.

Because the state’s laws threaten criminal penalties for abortion and helping someone to access abortion, doctors and sexual and domestic violence program advocates alike are under an acute pressure that has left even non-clinical program workers in social support network programs afraid to help survivors, especially if their work could be construed as having connected pregnant survivors of violence to abortion services, Miller said.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, 21 states have eliminated or restricted access because of abortion bans. And as States Newsroom has reported, even with health exceptions and especially without them, women have been denied medical care during pregnancy-related emergencies.

She said policymakers need to define “medical necessity” for abortions more broadly, by considering what a pregnancy and birth will mean for a woman’s mental health.

Many of the states with strict abortion bans have large communities of color, and Black women are three times as likely and Indigenous women twice as likely as white women to die of pregnancy-related causes.

State abortion bans also impede miscarriage care, medical groups have said. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, 14 states have banned abortion, some with explicit allowances for treatment that saves the life of the person giving birth or that eases miscarriage. But not all state laws make that distinction, said Alina Salganicoff, the director for women’s health policy at KFF, and many are written in confusing, nonmedical language that doctors struggle to interpret in real-life situations.

About a quarter of large U.S. employers heavily restrict coverage of legal abortions or don’t cover them at all under health plans for their workers, according to the latest employer health benefits survey by KFF.

The suit filed Tuesday ties in with the challenge to Senate Bill 458, which defines sex as a binary in state law, because it involves records attorneys for the firm requested in preparation for the suit challenging the new law.

“No evidence before the court indicates that minors face any harm from drag-related events or other speech and expression critical of gender norms,” Morris said. “H.B. 359’s terms prove vague and overbroad, chilling protected speech and creating a risk of disproportionate enforcement against trans, Two-Spirit, and gender nonconforming people.”

A federal judge Friday extended his block on a Montana law that seeks to ban drag story hours in public schools and libraries, saying state attorneys haven’t proven that the events are harmful to children and that the law is written too vaguely.

“No evidence before the Court indicates that minors face any harm from drag-related events or other speech and expression critical of gender norms,” Morris wrote in granting the injunction.

The law, Senate Bill 458, was passed by this year’s GOP-controlled Legislature, despite vigorous opposition from Democrats and LGBTQ+ rights groups, and signed by Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican whose nonbinary adult child was among the bill’s public opponents.

However, the suit alleges it wasn’t just a legislative oversight that caused this new definition, they point to testimony given during the passage of Senate Bill 458, coupled with examples from state Republican lawmakers that demonstrate a hostility and disregard for residents who don’t identify or cannot be placed in the two biological categories mandate by the Legislature.

A group of transgender and intersex individuals are suing the state over a new law. Senate Bill 458 revised Montana Code to provide a common definition for the word “sex” when referring to a human.

The lawsuit filed in Montana state court similarly alleges the new state law redefining “sex” creates the potential for discrimination. The suit says the law requires the plaintiffs to misrepresent themselves or reveal private medical information when applying for a driver’s license or marriage license.

Across the country, some 2 million Native Americans live in the 20 states with laws on the books banning abortion at 18 weeks of pregnancy or earlier, according to a News21 analysis.

“I don’t want to speculate on the exact motivations of this incident but anti-abortion rhetoric and misinformation and talking about reproductive and sexual health care in a way that is stigmatizing or false is really dangerous,” Sullivan said.

She said the Attorney General making false claims the organization is tied to human trafficking is an example of said rhetoric.

“It’s a political statement to serve an elected official’s own interests, rather than anything that’s based in fact,” Sullivan said. “Your average person might take those words at their face value and go with that…I’m not saying that that’s what happened here. But scenarios like that have existed.”

Nationwide some states have experienced increases in abortion as others have banned it.

Montana has seen a 22% rise in abortions during the first six months of 2023 over a comparable period in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

A person fired two shotgun rounds into the front entry of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Helena Thursday evening, according to local police and a spokesperson from Planned Parenthood of Montana.

“What we’re seeing here is lawmakers trying to single out abortion,” said Aileen Gleizer, a spokesperson for the two independent clinics (Blue Mountain Clinic in Missoula and All Families Healthcare in Whitefish). “They haven’t been able to outlaw it, and so they’re trying to come up with kind of fictionalized bureaucratic barriers to make it untenable for clinics to operate.”