From the ACLU, this is at Liberty.

I'm Emerson Sykes, a staff attorney here at the ACLU and your host.

The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear a challenge to a Louisiana law requiring abortion providers

to have admitting privileges at a local hospital.

If upheld, that law would leave a single abortion clinic in the state.

That's already the case in six other states in the U.S., where onerous restrictions have shuttered all but one clinic.

Kentucky only has this one clinic left, down from 17 in 1978.

Its new Republican governor wants to take that number to zero, and the protesters agree.

Yet even as some state legislatures work to get rid of abortion access altogether,

others are bucking that trend. Today, we'll hear

from two ACLU attorneys, one from Kentucky and one from Maine, working in two very different

landscapes for reproductive rights. We'll begin with Heather Gidnerick, a staff attorney at the ACLU

of Kentucky who's on the front lines of the fight to protect the right to abortion. Heather, welcome to the

podcast. Hi, nice to be here. Thank you. So the slew of restrictions that we've seen in Kentucky

are not exactly a news story, but they've intensified over the last couple of years. Can you tell us

what's happened since about January of 2017? Sure, yeah. Since January of 2017, we've seen one

law after another coming through our General Assembly. And these have restricted abortion access

in a number of ways, beginning with mandating abortion providers to narrate ultrasounds and

provide certain information that the state requires in the course of

that ultrasound for every patient. We saw a ban after about 20 weeks of gestation. We saw a ban on

the most common second trimester abortion procedure, D&E. We are currently litigating the most recent bans that have passed, which were a ban after

approximately six weeks of pregnancy and a ban based on patient's reason for the abortion, if the

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