The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com

Lisa Margulies is vice president of public affairs at Planned Parenthood of Northern New England and Planned Parenthood Maine Action Fund.

Anti-abortion opponents are out of step with public opinion, yet they haven’t stopped their attacks on our health care. And they’ve expanded their playbook to include a wide range of attacks on reproductive rights beyond outright abortion bans.

The vast majority of Americans and Mainers support abortion rights, and these numbers have only  increased since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision. Yet this legislative session in Maine, like every legislative session, we’ve seen bills seeking to restrict access to abortion and related care.

These bills are part of a systematic, years-long effort by anti-abortion opponents to push a slate of policies across the country designed to attack our rights. These cookie-cutter policies are developed by politicians and anti-abortion organizations not informed by science but instead their own agendas.  

Take LD 1716. This bill seeks to force schools in Maine to show fetal development videos created by anti-abortion actors under the guise of sexual education, with strikingly similar language as legislation in Arkansas, Florida and Oklahoma.  

Another bill, LD 887, stokes a baseless anti-abortion conspiracy theory based on faulty science about purported environmental effects of medication abortion. This dangerous policy is being pursued at the behest of a national anti-abortion group in at least four other states this year.

Yet another bill seeks a constitutional amendment to strip young people of their ability to participate in decision making in all aspects of their lives, including reproductive health care, under the guise of protecting “parents’ rights.” This tactic has been pursued with success in states including Florida, Texas and West Virginia.

I could go on, but you get the picture. These bills are part of a broader strategy to quietly and covertly chip away at our reproductive rights and freedoms and achieve the ultimate goal of controlling our bodies.

Attacks are not slowing down at the national level, either. Like the state-level attacks, they are often more opaque than an outright abortion ban because these politicians know that the public supports abortion and related care. Abortion opponents know that shutting down reproductive health care providers is just as effective as outlawing care altogether.  

The latest: draft portions of the federal budget reconciliation package seek to “defund” Planned Parenthood. What they’ve proposed is blocking millions of patients who depend on public health care funds, like Medicaid, from receiving care from Planned Parenthood and other similar health care providers. This is the latest attempt to eliminate abortion in the U.S., and it shows they’re willing to hurt millions of patients and the health care system to do it.  

In Washington, D.C. and Augusta, some politicians aren’t interested in what the majority of their constituents want. They’re interested in forcing their own political agendas. Here in Maine, politicians peddling these policies ignore that Maine voters have twice elected a majority of reproductive rights champions to represent us in the statehouse since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned federal protections for abortion. Thankfully, the majority of our lawmakers continue to work to protect Maine values and represent the will of Maine voters.  

State-level leadership has never been more critical. In the face of these attacks, leaders have an opportunity to protect access to reproductive health care. LD 143 would adequately fund our state’s family planning care network, which serves tens of thousands of Mainers every year, regardless of ability to pay. This funding would not cover abortion care, yet anti-abortion lawmakers in Augusta refuse to support it. They refuse to help ensure their constituents can access birth control, cancer screenings, behavioral health care, well person care, gender-affirming care and more. But, there is hope.

That hope lies in the majority of lawmakers in Augusta — elected by a majority of Maine voters. LD 143 has advanced through the initial stages of the legislative process and is now before the Appropriations Committee. Now, these lawmakers have an opportunity to show their constituents — and all Mainers — their ongoing commitment to essential health care in our state.

A freshman high school track star is pushing back against state Rep. Laurel Libby’s campaign against transgender athletes.

In a letter published by the Portland Press Herald, Anelise Feldman, who attends Yarmouth High School, defended Soren Stark-Chessa, a transgender athlete who recently took first place in both the 1600- and 800-meter events.

Feldman placed second in the 1600, clocking a personal best of 6:16.32, she wrote. It was enough to earn her varsity status at Yarmouth High. Stark-Chessa finished 5:57.27 in the 1600 and 2:43.31 in the 800, just a second ahead of her next closest competitor.

“The fact that someone else finished in front of me didn’t diminish the happiness I felt after finishing that race. I don’t feel like first place was taken from me. Instead, I feel like a happy day was turned ugly by a bully who is using children to make political points,” Feldman wrote in the letter to the editor.

Stark-Chessa, a junior at Maine Coast Waldorf School in Freeport, testified last week before a legislative committee hearing a slate of bills concerning transgender athletes.

In an interview on Fox News last week, Libby lamented Stark-Chessa’s performance at the track meet earlier this month, accusing her of “pushing many, many of our young women out of the way in their ascent to the podium.”

But Feldman pushed back against Libby, saying that personal improvement is valued as much as the place where athletes finish. She wrote that athletics are the highlight of many students’ time in high school.

“No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are,” Feldman wrote in the Press Herald letter.

In February, Libby took to social media to lament the performance of a different transgender athlete who had won a girls indoor track title. That post thrust Maine into the crosshairs of President Donald Trump, who threatened to withhold federal funding from the state over the inclusion of transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports, saying that violates an executive order he signed that month.

The day after Trump singled out Maine at a Republican governors’ event in Washington, he crossed paths with Gov. Janet Mills at an event at the White House. In a heated exchange, Trump pressed Mills on the state’s policy toward transgender athletes and the governor told the president that she would “see you in court.”

State law, specifically the Maine Human Rights Act, prohibits discrimination in education, employment, housing and more on the basis of race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, disability, ancestry or national origin.

There are no transgender athletes competing on any University of Maine System sports team. At the high school level, only two transgender athletes are competing during the current school year.

For the 2023-2024 school year, about 45,000 students participated in high school sports in Maine, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. (That does count students who participated in two or more sports multiple times.)

Between 2013 and 2021, the Maine Principals’ Association, which oversees scholastic sports for 151 public and private schools, heard from 56 trans students wishing to participate on a high school sports team consistent with their gender identity, only four of whom were trans girls.

Since that verbal sparring at the White House, the Trump administration has launched an unprecedented pressure campaign against Maine over the inclusion of transgender athletes. Key to that has been a slate of Title IX investigations from six federal agencies targeting the state, the Maine Department of Education, the Maine Principals’ Association, Greely High School in Cumberland and the UMaine System.

Last month, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sued the state alleging it was discriminating against and failing to protect women and girls in violation of Title IX, a landmark 1972 anti-discrimination statute. Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey responded late last week, accusing the Trump administration of a slew of constitutional violations and asking a federal judge to toss out the case.

That case could ultimately land before the conservative U.S. Supreme Court, where the Trump administration could ask it to rule that Title IX outlaws athletic policies like the ones in Maine and more than 20 other states.

The U.S. Department of Education, whose Title IX probe is behind the civil rights lawsuit, has launched a separate probe into its state counterpart over allegations that dozens of school districts are hiding students’ “gender plans” from parents in violation of the   Family Educational Privacy Rights Act.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services also has referred a Title IX case to the Justice Department.

The Maine House censured Libby in February for her social media posts. She has sued House Speaker Ryan Fecteau in federal court to get her speaking and voting privileges back. But the courts have handed her two  setbacks.

Now she’s asking the Supreme Court to take up her case.

Beyond the investigations, the Trump administration has been trying to leverage federal funds to get the state to reverse its policies toward transgender athletes.

Almost immediately the Trump administration pulled funding for Maine Sea Grant. More than 30 states, Puerto Rico and Guam participate in the national Sea Grant program. No other Sea Grant program has seen its funding cut.

That funding was restored earlier this month after the Commerce Department renegotiated the award, though it’s unclear what — if any — changes were made.

In March, the Social Security Administration ended two programs allowing Maine providers to share birth and death information electronically, a move that meant new parents would have to travel to one of eight Social Security offices to register their newborns for a Social Security number.

The agency reversed that decision within 48 hours.

The acting Social Security administrator, Leland Dudek, took that move in retribution against Mills over her war of words with Trump, despite earlier statements calling it a “mistake.” He even brushed off a senior aide’s warning that it would increase fraud. In an email, Dudek acknowledged “improper payments” would increase, but it was necessary in order to punish a “petulant child.”

And on April 1, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins informed Mills that her department was pulling funding for programs that feed schoolchildren, children in day care, at-risk youth outside school hours and adults in care settings. In a letter to the governor, Rollins warned that “this was just the beginning” for Maine because of alleged Title IX violations.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration signed a settlement with Maine agreeing to “refrain from freezing, terminating, or otherwise interfering with the state of Maine’s access to United States Department of Agriculture funds” over “alleged violations of Title IX.” In exchange, Maine dropped its lawsuit challenging the freeze.

In April, Bondi announced that her department was pulling $1.5 million in “nonessential” funding from the Maine prison system because of a transgender inmate housed in a women’s prison.

The national nonprofit that owns most of Maine’s newspapers on Tuesday announced that it sold 21 of its newspapers in Colorado to a company that media observers say is known for cuts to local newsrooms.

The National Trust for Local News described the move to sell the Denver-area publications to Tempe, Arizona-based Times Media Group as a restructuring that will “allow the organization to maximize its long-term impact and sustainability in the state.”

Will Nelligan, chief growth officer at the National Trust for Local News, described the sale as a way to “reduce our footprint in greater Denver without reducing local journalism there, all while positioning ourselves to grow in the parts of Colorado where the need for our unique model is greatest.”

Neiman Journalism Lab reporting on the sale described Times Media Group as “a company with a history of gutting local outlets.”

The National Trust has owned most of the newspapers in Maine since 2023 when it bought five dailies and 17 weeklies from Reade Brower, who still owns several newspapers in the midcoast and Hancock County.

The purchase, which included the Portland Press Herald, Lewiston Sun Journal, Kennebec Journal in Augusta, Times Record in Brunswick, Waterville-based Morning Sentinel and more than a dozen weekly papers across southern Maine, was heralded a way to safeguard local journalism at a time when small newspapers are regularly sold to private equity funds that then strip them of their assets.

In recent months, the Maine Trust saw a wave of high-level departures, and in March announced lay-offs of 36 full-time and 13 part-time positions, along with plans to reduce its print operations to save money.

The sale of the 21 Colorado papers was announced one day after the National Trust appointed its new CEO Tom Wiley. He replaced co-founder Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro who resigned in January.