Year In Review: Covering health and human services in 2023
Though it feels like a lifetime ago, the 2023 legislative session was filled with conflict over several high-profile issues, including restrictions on abortion and medical choices for transgender minors seeking gender-affirming treatments. There was also camaraderie over reform-minded policies aimed at other issues, including Montana’s expansive foster care system and efforts to tame the state’s unwieldy mental health and addiction treatment landscape. As is common with thorny policy issues, clear winners and losers have yet to emerge even half a year later.
The Republican-driven law to prohibit transgender youth from receiving gender-affirming medical care was challenged in court by trans teens, their families and health care providers, and eventually blocked by a temporary court order. An effort by House Republicans to censure the most vocal opponent of that bill, freshman transgender lawmaker Rep. Zooey Zephyr, D-Missoula, seems to have accomplished little other than raising Zephyr’s profile. Two other bills targeting LGBTQ+ people and expression have also been challenged in court.
A ban on the most common method for second-trimester abortions briefly went into effect but was later paused by a judge’s order, alongside a stack of other restrictions on reproductive rights. Later in the year, advocates for expanding abortion protections launched the long process of putting a constitutional amendment on the ballot before voters in 2024, encouraged by positive voter responses to similar measures in other states since the fall of Roe v. Wade.
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