If someone is being denied an abortion they need, what can they do?

While being denied abortion care you know you’re entitled to will be an intensely fraught experience, Wonnacott said it’s nonetheless important for patients to “seek the care they need” — even if that means getting to another health center or hospital as an alternative to the provider denying care.

While advocating for yourself in medical situations is ideal, Wonnacott also acknowledged that “a patient’s experience with the medical system can vary greatly,” and “that may not be a comfortable space for patients and their historical experience” — for example, in the context of medical racism. Therefore, “trying to find a provider that is responsive to listening to their concerns is important in these situations,” she said — and that may mean moving on as swiftly as possible to another provider to get yourself the care you need.

What about religious objections to providing abortions?

For years, activists have sounded the alarm over Catholic hospitals denying procedures during emergencies across the country.

The Attorney General’s Office said that “healthcare providers are allowed to refuse to perform abortions for moral, ethical or religious reasons.” But California law does not allow religious objections to take precedence in an emergency situation, such as an emergency abortion, Bonta said.

In his Sept. 30 announcement of the state’s suit against Providence St. Joseph Hospital, Bonta confirmed that religious objections don’t apply when it comes to California’s Emergency Services Law, which mandates that hospitals provide care “necessary to relieve or eliminate the emergency medical condition.”

California’s lawsuit alleges that Providence St. Joseph Hospital denied the patient an emergency abortion her doctors recommended because “fetal heart tones” could be detected. But state law, Bonta said, “applies generally to all emergency care providers.”

“It is not a suggestion or a recommendation; it is the law, and you are duty-bound to follow it,” Bonta said. “You can’t make up your own standard.” Ultimately, however, the patient in the Providence St. Joseph case said she was forced to seek the life-saving treatment at another nearby medical facility.

How can someone report being denied abortion care in California?

After securing the abortion care they need, a patient can then judge whether or not they want to report the experience to any officials.

Attorney General Rob Bonta — California’s top lawyer and law enforcement official — has emphasized his commitment to monitoring cases of denied abortions, especially as his office gears up to fight the incoming Trump presidency. Bonta’s office also encouraged people to reach out to them about abortions they may have been denied by emailing abortion.access@doj.ca.gov.

If “a patient feels comfortable, our office would like to hear their story,” a California Department of Justice (DoJ) spokesperson told KQED by email.

The DoJ is specifically interested in hearing about cases where “you were denied an abortion you needed in a medical emergency, or if you were denied any other emergency or reproductive medical care,” the spokesperson said.

“Please note that you may or may not be contacted after writing to this email address, depending on the needs of the investigation,” the spokesperson said.

A Bay Area consumer-advocacy group claims California’s Department of Insurance is violating state public-records law by refusing to hand over important data on consumer complaints about life insurance.

The Pleasant Hill-based non-profit Life Insurance Consumer Advocacy Center called the department’s purported violation of the California Public Records Act “inexcusable.”

The department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Numbers and types of consumer complaints about life insurance and annuities, plus the reports and data the department used for the complaints section of its 2023 annual report, would help the non-profit promote the interests of life insurance customers, and provide key information to establish a baseline on consumer complaints.

“Why is (the department) trying to hide this information?” said the group’s executive director Brian Brosnahan.

Of particular interest to the group is assessing consumers’ responses after passage this year of California Senate Bill 263, which imposes requirements for agents selling life insurance, including that they not put their own interest ahead of a customer’s. The group alleges that the the bill, now law, lets agents “falsely tell” a consumer they do not have conflicts of interest with the consumer, even if they stand to make substantial commissions if the customer follows their guidance.

The Department of Insurance’s alleged stonewalling has gone on for months, the group said in a news release Tuesday. An initial request in August drew a response from the department that it did not have the information, according to the group, which responded by pointing out that the department’s annual report contained charts showing total complaints and the top 10 complaint topics. The department “obviously did possess the requested information,” the group claimed.

Another back-and-forth followed, with the department saying the requested data was “not maintained by the Department,” the group said.

“This statement is obviously false since (the department) necessarily maintains the underlying data and reports from which the charts in the Annual Report were generated,” the group claimed.

In October, the department “finally admitted that it possessed the requested data,” the group said, but now is refusing to provide it, saying it is confidential, the group said.

Originally Published: November 12, 2024 at 3:40 PM PST

In the final days of the presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump never missed a chance to tie his opponent to California. It was a critique that required no elaboration—though true to form, Trump didn’t shy away from providing an overheated one. At his Madison Square Garden rally in October, he proclaimed that Vice President Kamala Harris was a “radical-left lunatic” who “destroyed California.”

Breathless rhetoric notwithstanding, it is a problem for national Democratic ambitions that California—the state most associated with the party’s rule—is now synonymous with the top issue of the election: the rising cost of living. 

For the first time in recent memory, housing costs emerged as a major presidential election issue. (Experts agree that it’s the last major driver of inflation.) And while Harris promised to oversee the construction of 3 million homes over her term, that wasn’t enough to shake the California stigma.

As of 2024, California has the most expensive housing of any continental U.S. state, with a median home price that is more than eight times the state median household income. (A healthy ratio is considered between three to five times the state median income. The ratio in Texas is four.) As a result, working- and middle-class Californians have virtually no path to homeownership.

Locked out of homeownership, half of California renters spend at least a third of their income—for many, up to 50 percent—on rent. And they’re the lucky ones: Nearly 200,000 Californians and counting are homeless.

On some level, rank-and-file Democrats understand that the state is a problem. Ask a progressive in swing states like North Carolina or Wisconsin what she thinks about California, and she will likely try to change the topic of conversation. (Could you imagine a conservative having the same reluctance about Texas?)

Where millions of Americans—myself included—once knew California as a place where friends and family went off and claimed their slice of the dream, the Golden State is today better known as the source of embittered migrants making cash offers on homes. 

Over the past 25 years, hundreds of thousands of people have voted with their feet and left the state. Sluggish population growth over the 2010s led California to lose a congressional seat after the 2020 reapportionment. (On net, red states picked up three seats in that election.) Amid declining immigration, the state has started losing population for the first time in history.

In 2022 alone, an estimated 102,000 Californians moved to Texas. They weren’t fleeing the perfect weather or the high-paying jobs—by and large, they were pushed out by the cost of living.

Occasionally, California’s progressive NIMBYs celebrate this unhappy exodus as a way of flipping other Mountain West states blue. Yet this year, Nevada voted for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in 20 years. Even before the election, the polls acknowledged that Arizona was a lost cause for the Democrats.

It turns out that forcing people to abandon their home state in search of an affordable home doesn’t exactly engender party loyalty. Indeed, it may be having the opposite effect: Surveys out of states like Texas suggest that new arrivals from California might actually be more conservative than the locals. 

 Of course, Kamala Harris isn’t the reason California has a housing crisis. Democrats aren’t even solely to blame—the zoning that has made it illegal to build housing in California has been backed by NIMBYs of the right and left, and it was Republican Gov. Ronald Reagan who signed the state’s infamous environmental review act into law. 

But the state has been under Democratic supermajority control since 2011. Outside of the unusual case of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican who backed Harris for president, they have effectively run the state since 1999. The undecided voter might be forgiven for wondering why this issue has only gotten worse under a quarter century of Democratic governance.

Immediately after the election, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom—who has made no secret of his presidential ambitions—called for a special session to address how California will respond to anticipated attacks on reproductive rights, immigrants, and the state’s climate policies by the Trump administration. The proclamation makes no mention whatsoever of the cost-of-living issues that likely handed the election to Trump. 

There is a small but growing cadre of pro-housing Democratic state legislators who have taken up the cause of cutting through the red tape and getting California building again. And they’ve had some successes: Since 2017, the state has legalized granny flats, abolished parking mandates, and streamlined permitting. But all too often, reform efforts have been stymied by members of their own party.

It’s too late for Kamala Harris. But the next Democratic nominee for president had better hope those reformers are successful.