On March 28, a Facebook page, Periods for Pence, began a calling campaign to Indiana governor Mike Pence. In some ways, Periods for Pence, or P4P, as they like to call themselves on their page, is like any other organized lobbying campaign; members call in with specific messaging in the hopes of influencing state legislation. 

However, what makes P4P interesting is the content of their calls. The callers — the vast majority of whom are women — call Pence’s office to keep him up-to-date on their periods and then post a transcript of their calls on the Facebook page. Some of the transcripts are absolutely hilarious; there are colorful descriptions of what their blood clots look like and play-by-play updates about just how terrible menstrual cramps can be. One on March 31 is especially amusing as it describes the phone operator’s response as “strangely horrified and chipper at the same time.” However, the reason for this movement is hardly a laughing matter.

Two days before P4P was created, Pence signed H.B. 1337, one of the harshest anti-abortion laws in the country — but one that was largely ignored until after the fact, as it did not try to defund Planned Parenthood outright. What it did instead is so bad that, according to a March 15 Slate article, radically pro-life Republicans like state senators Sean Eberhart and Sharon Negele actually voted against it because it was too extreme. This “everything and the kitchen sink” legislation has every popular anti-choice policy in it — and then some. 

Indiana already has some of the strictest “admitting privilege” laws in the country, laws which do nothing to actually protect women’s health and can often be physically harmful to pregnant women. The new legislation now requires admitting privileges to be renewed every single year in writing and would require the hospitals they partner with to publicly announce that partnership. 

The legislation also tries to combat a problem that does not exist, as it bans fetal tissue research; never mind the fact that even before the controversial Center for Medical Progress videos were leaked, not a single abortion clinic in Indiana participated in any sort of fetal tissue research, according to a July 30 Indystar article.

So why are women calling about their periods? H.B. 1337 includes unprecedented requirements about disposing of fetal remains. Most medical providers tend to consider fetal remains before 20 weeks of gestation as medical waste and treat them as such, according to a March 26 Vox article. 

Under the new legislation, “a miscarried or aborted fetus must be interred or cremated by a facility having possession of the remains,” regardless of how far along in the pregnancy someone might be. Under this absurd law, a pregnant person who miscarries at home eight weeks into the pregnancy, when a miscarriage can easily be confused with a heavy flow, would be required to keep all the blood and tissue and have it examined at a hospital before it is cremated or buried. That is the reason P4P took off. 

According to the American Pregnancy Association, about half of all miscarriages happen shortly after the fertilized egg implants and often can occur when a woman is already expecting her period. 

Under Indiana law, these P4P supporters are just being good citizens; they are checking in with their governor to make sure they do not break the law and improperly dispose of what could either be a zygote or just uterine lining and blood.

This requirement, as well as two other parts of H.B. 1337, have a darker side. H.B. 1337 includes language that bans abortion based on a fetus’s race, gender or certain types of disabilities and genetic disorders. On the surface, this seems benign enough; of course, people should not terminate a pregnancy because their child is not the gender they want or because the child is not “perfect.” However, these bans are next to impossible to enforce and often target marginalized groups. 

For example, the Guttmacher Institute, in a March 1 brief, found that these types of bans often are based on racist stereotypes about how Asians are more likely to abort female fetuses and can stigmatize Asian-American women who are trying to seek medical care. 

Horrible as this racially coded ban is, the language about disabilities is even worse. While H.B. 1337 does not ban abortions in the cases of lethal fetal anomaly, the law says the anomaly has to be severe enough that if the child were born, it would die within three months after birth. 

However, it is impossible for doctors to predict if many severe fetal anomalies, like microcephaly, would cause death within that three-month window. So, if a woman is pregnant with a child who is so severely disabled that it would not be able to live past its first birthday, she would still have to carry it to term if its defect is not severe enough that it would die within three months. And, to add insult to injury, H.B. 1337 also requires women whose fetuses have severe birth defects and who choose to end their pregnancy to learn about perinatal hospice services, a form of counseling for women who do choose to carry babies with lethal anomalies to term. This requirement implicitly tells women who choose to end a pregnancy because of severe birth defects that their choice is less valid and they are “worse” than women who carry non-viable pregnancies to term.

The P4P page is largely funny, but scroll through all of the comments long enough and you will find a heart-wrenching story about a wanted pregnancy that miscarried or the difficult decision to end a pregnancy when it was clear that the child would not be able to survive outside of the womb. 

These are the women whom H.B. 1337 harms the most, women who lose or have to end a wanted pregnancy and then are forced to jump through hoops and pay for expensive services like burial or cremation and certain counselling that they do not want or need. H.B. 1337 is just another example of legislators, especially male legislators, trying to regulate women’s bodies with disastrous consequences.