The large number of abortion restrictions is relatively new for Arkansas. For decades, the state was run almost entirely by Democrats who largely backed abortion rights. As recently as 2011, Democrats held five of the state’s six offices in Washington, controlled all of its statewide offices, including the governor’s mansion, and had majorities in both chambers of its legislature, said Jay Barth, a politics professor at Hendrix College in Conway, Ark. It was the last state in the South to come under Republican control, he said.
But in 2012, Democrats lost control of both houses — the first time since 1874, according to Professor Barth — and by 2015, there was not a single Arkansas Democrat in elected office in Washington or at the statewide level in Little Rock.
The state has passed 29 laws restricting abortion since 2011, the third most in the country after Kansas and Indiana, said Elizabeth Nash, a senior policy analyst for the Guttmacher Institute. Across the country, state legislatures have passed 423 abortion restrictions since Republicans swept statehouses in 2010, Ms. Nash said. That is about 35 percent of all abortion legislation that has passed since 1973.
Some of these laws wound up in court, where they have increasingly received a more sympathetic hearing as some federal appeals courts have grown more conservative.
B. Jessie Hill, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland who also represents clinics, said she remembers feeling confident two decades ago when working on abortion cases at the American Civil Liberties Union.
“In that era, there was this real feeling that we were winning,” she said. “There was this sense that if you were going to court, you were going to win.”
Today, Republican presidents have appointed 10 of the 11 judges on the Eighth Circuit, compared to six in 2001, according to Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
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