How Pa. abortion providers are prepping for Nov. 8

In Pennsylvania, the thicket of restrictions on abortion providers shapes the number of facilities in the state and limits the services they can provide, effectively circumscribing access to the procedure.

Kate Huangpu reports that providers are closely watching the outcome of the November governor's race (Democrat Josh Shapiro wants to maintain access while Republican Doug Mastriano wants to effectively ban abortion). In the meantime, providers are working to expand access to telemedicine and to medication abortion because opening new surgical facilities is prohibitively expensive. 

Also this week, Huangpu and Stephen Caruso analyzed and mapped Mastriano and Shapiro's donations and found a vast disparity in out-of-state funding.

Shapiro, the state’s attorney general, has raised just under $51 million — roughly $25 million from out-of-state donors and PACs. Mastriano has raised just under $5 million in the same time period, the vast majority of which — just over $3 million — came from donors in Pennsylvania.

And finally, York County has agreed to improve public access to criminal court records to settle a First Amendment lawsuit brought by Spotlight PA and four other Pennsylvania newsrooms, Ed Mahon reports. 

The newsrooms argued that York County Clerk of Courts Daniel J. Byrnes improperly shut down free, easy access to criminal court records and instituted practices and policies that slowed the release of documents.

"It’s a little more lopsided than I would have predicted."

—Pete Quist, a research analyst with OpenSecrets, on Doug Mastriano’s small level of out-of-state support compared to Josh Shapiro

» GOVERNOR'S GUIDE LIVE: On Wednesday, Oct. 19 at 6 p.m. via Zoom, Spotlight PA is hosting a free panel on who the candidates for governor are and how their administrations would impact you. Register for the event here and submit your questions to events@spotlightpa.org. 

While working on a guide to how the top candidates for governor view criminal justice issues, I decided to look deeper at how Democratic nominee and state Attorney General Josh Shapiro voted as a member of the Board of Pardons.

The five-person board meets several times per year to review and vote on applications from people who want their prison sentence shortened or their criminal record scrubbed.

Pardons are approved by a majority vote. Life sentence commutations, which allow a person to get out of prison, require unanimous approval. Both require final signoff from the governor after the board sends a recommendation.

The bureaucratic process has life-altering implications, but it typically chugs along with little public scrutiny.

That’s changed this year because two members of the Board of Pardons, Shapiro and fellow Democrat Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, are running for higher office. In Fetterman’s race for the U.S. Senate, his Republican opponent Mehmet Oz has run ads targeting his pardons board votes and depicting his work to expand pardons as lenient on crime. But Shapiro’s votes haven’t been scrutinized as harshly (except by Fetterman).

Because Spotlight PA is focused on the governor’s race, I wanted to know how Shapiro has voted during his more than five years on the board and whether those votes have changed as his gubernatorial campaign has progressed.

The Board of Pardons provided records of every vote that has taken place during Governor Tom Wolf’s administration. I’m still working on a fuller analysis, but I’ve been able to review how Shapiro voted when the full board was present and no one abstained. 

Here’s what I’ve found for those cases:

When Shapiro joined the board in 2017, there were fewer applications to review. The board that year voted on one life sentence commutation and 112 pardons.

Shapiro supported the life commutation along with the rest of the board and voted yes for roughly 34% of pardons. 

But as the number of pardon applications before the board increased, so did Shapiro’s support.

In 2018, Shapiro voted to approve 66% of the 158 pardon applications. The percentage of pardons he supported increased every year, reaching about 80% in 2021. So far this year, he’s approved 84% of applications when the full board voted.

Life sentence commutations are less frequent, so the data don’t show a clear trend.

In 2018, only two applications to commute a life sentence received full board votes. Both were unanimously denied. Over the next three years, Shapiro supported nearly 55% of the 50 applications. 

But this year, that number has jumped to 73%.

Shapiro has said his political aspirations have never affected his board votes. As Election Day approaches, I’ll keep digging into the data. Stay tuned! —Danielle Ohl, Spotlight PA

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