Arkansas is not a state that is hurting for greater abortion restrictions – not even in the eyes of abortion foes. So when Arkansas became the first state this year to enact new anti-abortion laws, it provoked the ire of reproductive rights groups across the country.



And that was only the beginning. Arkansas soon emerged as the nation’s leader in new abortion restrictions for 2015 – a title the state still holds as the year comes to a close.

This is the year in reproductive rights writ small: Arkansas was just one of dozens of states where conservative lawmakers piled several strict new anti-abortion laws on top of the hundreds of measures already enacted in the four years prior.

And looking ahead, lawmakers have set the wheels in motion for a new batch of 2016 restrictions in response to a series of now debunked videos that purport to expose wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood.

Across the US, legislators approved 57 new anti-abortion measures in 2015, according to a recent count by the Guttmacher Institute, a thinktank supportive of abortion rights. That is down from previous highs in 2011, which saw 92 new restrictions, and 2013, which saw 70. But it is more than double the number of new laws enacted in 2014.

The number of new measures in 2015 surprises those who wondered if lawmakers weren’t running out of ready avenues to restrict abortion.

“After 2013, many thought this had run its course,” said Elizabeth Nash, a researcher at Guttmacher. That year, the thinktank reported that lawmakers had hit a new milestone: they had passed more new anti-abortion restrictions in the last three years than in the entire preceding decade. “But 2015 tells us, no, we’re very much still in the midst of this wave of restrictions.”

All told, lawmakers across the country introduced some 400 abortion restrictions, a tally by the Center for Reproductive Rights found.

In a break from previous years, the laws most heavily favored by abortion foes in 2015 pose direct barriers to women seeking abortions. Earlier laws were aimed at causing abortion clinics to close. This year, two states, Arkansas and Tennessee, passed laws that force women wanting an abortion to make two in-person trips to the abortion clinic instead of one. The first trip, which must take place two full days before the second, is for anti-abortion counseling. Florida passed a similar, 24-hour waiting period that is the subject of a court fight. And North Carolina and Oklahoma established a 72-hour waiting period between a woman’s first call to an abortion clinic and her appointment.

Other popular laws restrict certain methods of abortion with little to no supportive evidence from mainstream medical groups. One of these is a model law appearing to criminalize a procedure commonly used when a woman is more than 12 weeks pregnant. Another narrows the window of time in which women can use medication to end their abortions – a more private, less expensive option that has made abortion widely available to many rural women. A bill passed in Arkansas even suggests to women that they can reverse an abortion performed with medication, an assertion which is not backed up by any credible evidence.

And battle lines are already being drawn for next year. In July, as most legislative sessions were drawing to a close, a little-known anti-abortion group unleashed a series of videos edited to show Planned Parenthood officials illegally selling fetal tissue obtained from abortions. The accusations in the video have been disproved. But the videos erupted into five separate congressional investigations of Planned Parenthood and unsuccessful efforts by Republicans in Congress to strip the group of some half a billion dollars in federal family planning funds. (The funds are not used for abortion.)

At the state level, legislators scrambled at the end of their lawmaking sessions to introduce bills restricting fetal tissue for medical research or outlining costly ways for abortion providers to dispose of fetal tissue. Sometimes acting in concert with Republican governors, they took action to relieve Planned Parenthood of hundreds of thousands in state and federal family planning funds and Medicaid contracts.

Those efforts – in states such as Arkansas, Louisiana, Ohio, Texas and Utah – have spawned court fights that will spill over into 2016. In Utah, Governor Gary Herbert is vowing to cut funds for STI testing to Planned Parenthood over the objections of officials in his health department.

And abortion foes are preparing to use the videos as inspiration for further restrictions. Americans United for Life, a legal advocacy group that is the source of most anti-abortion legislation, has already circulated a package of model legislation for 2016 in response to the videos. Charmaine Yoest, the president of AUL, described the bills as designed “to advance legal protections for the humanity of the unborn, as well as to address ongoing abortion industry abuses”. Many of the bills contain measures the group has promoted before, but a spokeswoman identified one bill as new: a proposal to broadly restrict the handling of fetal tissue, including for medical research.

“The states didn’t fully absorb the shock of those videos in 2015,” Nash said. “The fallout is far from over.”