USA – The 10 Most Urgent Lessons Reproductive Justice Activists Have Learned for You This Year

Actually, this fight is about so much more than abortion.

BY HANNAH CHUBB, CHRISTEN A. JOHNSON AND ERIKA W. SMITH
JUN 21, 2023

We’re not going to lie and say that abortion access in America is in great shape. But we can tell you not to despair. Thanks to the hard work of activists and community organizers who have been agitating tirelessly throughout the past year, we’ve seen reproductive justice victories both big and small across our country.

Six states—Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Ohio, South Carolina, and Wyoming—have blocked would-be abortion bans. Michigan, Minnesota, and several other states have enacted stronger abortion protections at the state level. Even in the 14 states where the procedure is now completely prohibited, abortion advocates haven’t given up—and they’re seeing more people join the effort than ever before.

Continued: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a44107481/abortion-activists-lessons/

USA – The question Republicans don’t want to answer about abortion bans

The answers will tell us far more about how anti-abortion politicians think — and how they might govern.

June 16, 2023
By Andrea Grimes, MSNBC
(also 6 minute video)

With support for abortion rights at an all-time high one year after the fall of Roe v. Wade, Republicans are now the dogs that caught the (clown) car — and instead of letting go of the bumper, they piled right in. But until the political media starts asking the right questions about anti-abortion policy, the bursting Beetle carrying the 2024 GOP presidential field will continue to drive in cheerful circles around the charred remains of Donald Trump’s still-sizzling circus tent, honking and hooting about 12- or 15- or six-week gestational limits and “leaving the issue to the states.”

The question is not when Republicans would prefer to ban abortion, but how. How do they plan to enforce their preferred abortion ban, whatever it may be? And what are the consequences for violating that ban, and for whom?

Continued: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/question-republicans-dont-want-answer-abortion-bans-rcna89528

16.06.2023

self-managed abortion

Conservative attacks on US abortion and trans healthcare come from the same place

Both are part of a project to roll back the victories of the feminist and gay rights movements and inscribe in law a firm definition and hierarchy of gender

Moira Donegan
Wed 24 May 2023

On Monday, Jim Pillen, the Republican governor of Nebraska, signed a law that bans abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy and restricts gender-affirming care for anyone under 19. The ban on trans medical care takes effect in October and the abortion ban goes into effect immediately. And so Nebraska has become the latest state to determine through law what might have once been determined by the more pliable tools of custom or imagination: the way that the sexed body a person is born with shapes the kind of life they can live.

Be it through forced pregnancy or prohibited transition, the state of Nebraska now claims the right to determine what its citizens will do with their sexed bodies – what those bodies will look like, how they will function and what they will mean. It is a part of the right’s ongoing project to roll back the victories of the feminist and gay rights movements, to re-establish the dominance of men in public life, to narrow possibilities for difference and expression and to inscribe in law a firm definition and hierarchy of gender: that people are either men or women and that men are better.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/24/rightwing-abortion-transgender-care-gender-hierarchy

24.05.2023

Opinion

abortion bans

anti-transgender laws

USA – Abortion bans drive off doctors and close clinics, putting other health care at risk

May 23, 2023
By Julie Rovner

The rush in conservative states to ban abortion after the overturn of Roe v. Wade is resulting in a startling consequence that abortion opponents may not have considered: fewer medical services available for all women living in those states.

Doctors are showing — through their words and actions — that they are reluctant to practice in places where making the best decision for a patient could result in huge fines or even a prison sentence. And when clinics that provide abortions close their doors, all the other services offered there also shut down, including regular exams, breast cancer screenings, and contraception.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/23/1177542605/abortion-bans-drive-off-doctors-and-put-other-health-care-at-risk

Abortion bans are unpopular. Republicans are passing them anyway.

In some cases, anti-abortion legislators have been forced to backtrack from some more restrictive proposals. In others, they’ve tried to subvert the lawmaking process to avoid blowback.

Shefali Luthra
May 12, 2023

With abortion bans becoming increasingly unpopular, Republican-led statehouses are walking a delicate line: Trying to advance bills that would restrict access to the procedure without drawing attention, circumventing normal processes to cram new policies through as legislative sessions come to a close.

Last year, Republican lawmakers across the country pushed restriction after restriction in anticipation of the looming Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which in June of last year allowed states to begin banning abortion. But now that those laws can actually take effect, legislators are newly attuned to potential political consequences.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2023/05/abortion-bans-unpopular-republicans-passing-them-anyway/

12.05.2023

anti-choice restrictions

More bans and creative clinics: the future of abortion access in a post-Roe US

The federal right to abortion ended in 2022 – where does that leave people seeking to terminate a pregnancy going forward?

Poppy Noor
Tue 27 Dec 2022

It was a landmark year for abortion rights, for all the wrong reasons. In the summer, the US supreme court, with its new hard-right supermajority, dismantled the constitutional right to abortion secured almost 50 years ago through Roe v Wade. After that came a slew of laws passed in state legislatures, court battles and – indeed – some surprise victories for abortion rights advocates. All this has changed the way Americans can access pregnancy care and the way they think about women’s rights. Here are the key points from 2022.

New bans abound
For some it may have felt like abortion rights changed in the US overnight on 24 June 2022. But even before Roe fell, 22 states already had laws on the books that would make abortion bans likely if not inevitable once the supreme court ruled, after years of anti-abortion activism.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/27/abortion-access-bans-roe-dobbs-advocates-providers-future

27.12.2022

Republicans won’t stop until abortion is banned across America. And it could be

It is time for liberal Americans, and all American women, to face this reality: there will soon be no safe states

Moira Donegan
Thu 15 Sep 2022

Republicans want to ban abortion nationwide, and they have the nerve to claim that this is a compromise. This week, Senator Lindsay Graham, of South Carolina, introduced a bill to ban all abortions everywhere in the United States at 15 weeks. Abortion is already banned before 15 weeks in 15 states.

It is banned outright in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. Indiana’s ban on abortion went into effect just this Wednesday. It is banned at six weeks – in practice a total ban – in Georgia and Ohio. West Virginia passed an abortion ban, too. It won’t be the last.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/15/republicans-wont-stop-until-abortion-is-banned-across-america-and-it-could-be

15.09.2022

national abortion ban

Two months after the Dobbs ruling, new abortion bans are taking hold

August 23, 2022
Sarah McCammon

WASHINGTON, D.C. — This week marks two months since the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision reversed decades of precedent guaranteeing abortion rights, and the effects of the decision are continuing to unfold as abortion bans take effect around the country.

Well before the opinion was issued on June 24, more than a dozen states had so-called "trigger bans" in place – laws written to prohibit abortion as soon as Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that had legalized the procedure for nearly 50 years, was overturned.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/23/1118846811/two-months-after-the-dobbs-ruling-new-abortion-bans-are-taking-hold

USA – The Coming Rise of Abortion as a Crime

In places where abortion is now illegal, a range of pregnancy losses could be subject to state scrutiny.
By Melissa Jeltsen
JULY 1, 2022

Before last week, women attempting to have their pregnancies terminated in states hostile to abortion rights already faced a litany of obstacles: lengthy drives, waiting periods, mandated counseling, throngs of volatile protesters. Now they face a new reality. Although much is still unknown about how abortion bans will be enforced, we have arrived at a time when abortions—and even other pregnancy losses—might be investigated as potential crimes. In many states across post-Roe America, expect to see women treated like criminals.

On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending abortion as a constitutional right. Nearly half of U.S. states either are in the process of implementing trigger bans—which were set up to outlaw abortions quickly after Roe was overturned—or seem likely to soon severely curtail abortion access. Reproductive-rights experts told me that in the near future, they expect to see more criminal investigations and arrests of women who induce their own abortions, as well as those who lose pregnancies through miscarriage and stillbirth.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/07/roe-illegal-abortions-pregnancy-termination-state-crime/661420/

USA – How abortion bans widen the gender pay gap and diminish women’s economic power

Paul Constant, Business Insider
Feb 26, 2022

When the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in December for and against a Mississippi law that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, Justice Amy Coney Barrett seemed confused why lawyers arguing for legal abortion, as she put it, "focus on the ways in which forced parenting, forced motherhood, would hinder women's access to the workplace and to equal opportunities."

Justice Barrett asked the lawyers, "Why don't the safe-haven laws [in which any mother can give up her new baby to the state for adoption, no questions asked] take care of that problem?"

Continued: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-legalizing-abortion-bans-could-impoverish-women-for-generations-2022-2