While New Jersey has protections for gender-affirming and reproductive healthcare in place, many of those protections are not codified into state law and therefore could be overturned by the next gubernatorial administration or by a court decision.
That’s why at least one LGBTQ civil rights group and a coalition of like-minded groups in the state are supporting the “Reproductive Freedom and Health Equity Bill Package.” The package was introduced in June 2024 and contains nine bills that are focused on gender-affirming and reproductive healthcare in the Garden State.
“Reproductive healthcare and gender-affirming care are two sides of the same coin,” said Lauren Albrecht, director of advocacy and organizing for the Garden State Equality Action Fund, in a news release. “Both forms of medically necessary, lifesaving care hinge on the fundamental human right to bodily autonomy. The Reproductive Freedom and Health Equity Bill Package is our way of codifying protections for trans healthcare for years to come while simultaneously strengthening our pre-existing protections for reproductive healthcare.”
Garden State Equality, the state’s largest LGBTQ advocacy organization, launched a campaign called “Jersey for Trans Healthcare,” which urges the Legislature to pass the bills that the organization says would protect providers and patients receiving gender-affirming and reproductive care.
The campaign was launched approximately two years after Gov. Phil Murphy signed Executive Order No. 326 on April 4, 2023. The order established New Jersey as a safe haven for gender-affirming healthcare, and it directed “all state departments and agencies to protect all persons, including health care professionals and patients, against potential repercussions resulting from providing, receiving, assisting in providing or receiving, seeking, or traveling to New Jersey to obtain gender-affirming health care services.”
The order, because it’s not a law, could be overturned by the next governor or by a court decision. New Jersey elects a new governor this November.
GSE Executive Director Christian Fuscarino said in a news release that GSE is grateful for the campaign’s coalition partners and legislators who are already supporting the effort, and he specifically acknowledged state Senate majority leader M. Teresa Ruiz who, he said, is “leading the charge.”
“Their collaboration and commitment to resisting attacks against transgender and gender diverse people will prove vital to the success of this campaign,” Fuscarino said in the release.
The coalition partners are Action Together New Jersey, Blue Wave New Jersey, Cherry Hill Women’s Center, HiTOPS, National Council of Jewish Women/Essex, Planned Parenthood Action Fund of New Jersey, and Unitarian Universalist Faith Action NJ.
Planned Parenthood Action Fund of New Jersey provided a brief explanation on its website of what each bill in the package would do, along with its Senate and Assembly bill number, if the bills became law. According to that organization, the bills would:
S3452/A4601 – Provide insurance coverage for abortion without cost-sharing;me
S3490/A4655 – Remove medically unnecessary restrictions on reproductive health providers;
S3491/A4656 – Protect patients and providers of reproductive health and gender-affirming care;
S3492/A4657 – Invest in the reproductive health care infrastructure;
S3493/A4658 – Ensure patients’ sensitive reproductive health data is protected;
S3494/A4659 – Make reproductive health care more accessible on college campuses;
S3495/A4660 – Provide student loan redemption for reproductive health physicians;
S3496/A4661 – Allow New Jerseyans to support reproductive health care with donations through tax returns; and
S1513/A4662 – Ensure Medicaid coverage for emergency contraception.
Albrecht told me that currently the “big, big ask” is to see Senate Bill No. 3491 and Assembly Bill No. 4656 move in their respective houses of the Legislature.
S3491/A4656 basically takes everything that was already legally protected healthcare in New Jersey such as gender-affirming care and reproductive healthcare, including abortions, birth control, and assisted fertility, and establishes the right of New Jerseyans and people in New Jersey to access this care without interference from other states, according to Albrecht.
She cited as an example a recent case in which a grand jury in Louisiana indicted a New York physician who allegedly provided abortion medication through the mail for a Louisiana mother’s minor daughter. The mother is also facing charges.
According to a January report by New Orleans Public Radio, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill praised the indictment on the social media platform X, writing that it is illegal to send abortion pills into Louisiana and it’s also illegal to coerce another into having an abortion.
“I have said it before and I will say it again: We will hold individuals accountable for breaking the law,” Murrill wrote, according to the report.
S3491/A4656 is intended to protect gender-affirming and reproductive healthcare providers and patients seeking those services in New Jersey.
“So what this bill will do is basically say that New Jersey is not complying with that, and that anything our providers do here in the state, to patients here in the state, with patients here in the state, is protected,” Albrecht said.
GSE said in a news release that gender-affirming care is best-practice, medically necessary healthcare supported by all major medical associations and improves mental health and quality of life and is often lifesaving for those who can access it.
Aisling MacDonald, a 32-year-old trans woman who grew up in Union and currently lives there, can attest to that. MacDonald, who works as a project manager and trainer in the Department of Trans Resiliency at GSE, said she is looking at losing access to the primary lifesaving healthcare that she has, which is hormone replacement therapy, if certain bills in the package don’t make it through.
MacDonald recalls that growing up was rough and that she had a lot of struggles.
“I actually tried to transition as a youth, but I didn’t have support from the therapist that I was seeing, and there wasn’t a lot of education or access. It was really miserable,” she said.
MacDonald also said that she went through a form of conversion talk therapy, in which there were attempts to convince her that she wasn’t trans.
“That series of events really sent me on a rough road and a really dark path,” she said. “So growing up was not a Hallmark movie.”
MacDonald said she struggled with substance use disorder and mental health issues through her late childhood, her adolescence and her early adulthood primarily because of being denied the opportunity to transition and the lack of support for transitioning.
Her parents had a rough time with her being trans in the early years, and that was compounded by her mental health issues and struggles with substance use disorder, MacDonald said.
“I think that they did the best they could in the total absence of education about the subject. They did the absolute best they could with the tools they had available to them at the time,” she said.
The early 1990s and the aughts continued the lack of education and community support for people who were trans. After a few “false starts” in transitioning, MacDonald said, she has been in transition since the fall of 2019.
“We’re finally at a point where I have their support, and it’s a privilege. Not a lot of people have it, and it’s taken a long time to get where we are now, and it’s a blessing,” she said.
MacDonald noted that there has been some dramatic progress made in the area of trans rights. “I grew up in a time before science and research could really speak to encouraging transition in children when they are trans,” she said.
Now, almost every single major medical and psychological body in the country and many governing associations across the world, including the World Health Organization, stand up for and back up the evidence-based truth that transgender people have always existed and they always will regardless of who wants to take away their basic human rights, MacDonald said.
“Today, my life is a fairy tale, actually. Despite the times and a worsening physical disability, I get to go to work every day and help make people’s lives better. I get to give a voice to people that don’t often have a voice in the kinds of spaces that I go to for work. I get to uplift communities and help platform some issues in communities that never have a voice,” she said.
“I have a girlfriend who is amazing, and I have meaningful friends for the first time in a very, very long time.”
MacDonald is also coming up on 10 years in recovery for substance use disorder.
“My life is amazing, and I am beyond grateful to be sitting here doing what I do day in and day out,” she said.
MacDonald wanted to share with Out IN Jersey readers a quote from the activist and educator Mariame Kaba: “Hope is a discipline.” The No. 1 thing MacDonald wants readers to know is that as a community leader, as a woman who is on a healing journey from so many different things, that she thought hope was a feeling, and it is not.
Feelings are really hard to manifest and summon, she said. “Hope is a discipline. It’s predicated on our behavioral patterns, and it’s really hard; it’s one of the hardest things we will ever do. But we got this because we’ve got us, as long as we’re acting toward that behavioral pattern of hope.”
