States look to Californias blueprint for a post-Roe world

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. Nurses at the low-slung maze-like student health complex at the University of California, Santa Barbara work year-round to make sure the shelves of their in-house pharmacy remain stocked with antivirals, painkillers and antibiotics for the tens of thousands of students they serve.

This month, they were required to have two more drugs on hand: mifepristone and misoprostol the regimen that induces an abortion.

The first-in-the-nation mandate for student health centers to carry abortion pills is just one of more than a dozen new California policies that aim to make the state the nations leading haven for abortion rights. Now, Democrats are holding up California as a model as New York, Washington, Illinois and other blue states prepare to enact similar policies in 2023.

People look to California for leadership, and in these dark moments, we want to be a bright light, Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is already defending some of the new abortion-rights laws from legal challenges, said in an interview. We made a menu of options thats now publicly available for anyone. These laws are ready to be duplicated and replicated.