It’s official: Oregonians will be voting on the state’s first anti-abortion measure in over a decade in November.
This afternoon, the Oregon Secretary of State office confirmed that 85 percent of the signatures collected by campaigners were valid—enough to qualify the initiative for a statewide ballot. The measure would ban public dollars from covering the cost of an abortion procedure. This means that the hundreds of thousands of women currently enrolled in the Oregon Health Plan (the state Medicaid program) or employed by the state government would have to pay for an abortion out of pocket. It would negate the groundbreaking bill Gov. Kate Brown signed into law last August which banned insurance companies for charging patients a copay for getting an abortion.
We wrote about the implications of this state anti-abortion bill in this week’s issue of the Mercury.
