Planned Parenthood and Right to Life leaders debate the state's near-total abortion ban

David Plazas, Nashville Tennessean
·3 min read
11

Good morning, readers:

On Aug. 25, the state's "trigger" law went into effect, banning abortion in nearly all cases in Tennessee.

Lawmakers passed the measure in 2019, and the U.S. Supreme Court's reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision in June allowed Tennessee to make the law go into effect soon after.

Pro-choice advocates decried the law, while pro-life supporters welcomed a new legal environment in Tennessee.

According to the state Department of Health, there was an average of 11,000 "induced terminations of pregnancy" per year from 2008 to 2019. The highest number during that period was 14,245 in 2008, while the lowest was 8,727 in 2019.

"Now, Roe is gone, our services are banned and our patients are desperate," wrote Ashley Coffield, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi, in a guest column that published the day the trigger law took effect.

She said she warned many leaders who thought Roe's undoing would never come and are now outraged.

"This didn’t happen overnight," Coffield wrote. "It happened because anti-abortion extremists have been focused on banning all abortion for decades, while y’all were afraid they wouldn’t really do it."

A few days later, Stacy Dunn, president for Tennessee Right to Life, wrote a response: "Abortion providers have sued the state time and again to try and overturn the will of the voters."

Dunn challenged abortion providers' claims as alarmist and said the Human Life Protection Act (trigger law) will save thousands of lives.

"Looking back years from now, those who are alive because of this law and who have been considered less than human for so long, will be grateful that they were allowed to be born in Tennessee," she wrote.

The USA TODAY Network Tennessee also published letters from readers on opposite sides of the abortion debate.

Scroll to read Coffield and Dunn's essays. Leave a comment and/or send a letter of 250 words or fewer to letters@tennessean.com to share your view.

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William Lyons will be our guest for our next weekly Twitter Spaces segment by The Tennessean (@Tennessean). Join us Friday at 3 p.m. CT/4 p.m. ET. Lyons will discuss his column and his ample knowledge of political science and history. He is a former adviser to several Knoxville mayors and is director of policy partnerships for the Howard Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy and at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.

Thank you!

David Plazas is the director of opinion and engagement for the USA TODAY Network - Tennessee. Email him at dplazas@tennessean.com, call him at (615) 259-8063 or tweet to him at @davidplazas. Subscribe to a USA TODAY Network - Tennessee publication.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Planned Parenthood, Right to Life heads debate near-total abortion ban