A year after Tennessee’s abortion ban, 14,000 people have faced limited choices, devastating consequences

Organizations nationwide pull together to offer options for unwanted pregnancies

by Sono Motoyama
August 24, 2023

In the year since Tennessee’s abortion ban went into effect on Aug. 25, 2022, about 14,000 pregnant people in the state have been forced to find other solutions for their unwanted pregnancies.

Some have driven hours to out-of-state clinics for abortions. Others have ordered and taken FDA-approved pills, with possible risk of prosecution. Still others, unable to obtain an abortion in Tennessee, have carried their pregnancies to term. Some have even turned to unsafe and ineffective methods, such as taking herbs, large amounts of alcohol or medications unintended for pregnancy termination.

Continued: https://mlk50.com/2023/08/24/a-year-after-tennessees-abortion-ban-14000-people-have-faced-limited-choices-devastating-consequences/

One Woman’s Story Of Self-Managing Her Abortion In An Anti-Choice State

Managing your own abortion is not a crime in Ohio, but a politically motivated prosecutor might believe Julia should be punished for what she did.

By Alanna Vagianos
Aug 7, 2023

SOMEWHERE IN OHIO — It’s a pretty short drive to the polling site from the cabin where Julia has been self-managing her abortion. Julia took the last of her abortion pills the day before, which she believes have ended her unwanted pregnancy. She still has some minor cramping and is tired from the whole ordeal, but she feels reasonably OK — well enough to go vote on a ballot referendum that could help decide the fate of abortion rights in Ohio.

Issue 1, a ballot initiative to raise the threshold to alter the state constitution from a simple majority — the standard in Ohio for over a century — to 60%, is a preemptive attempt to block a pro-choice constitutional amendment that Ohioans will vote on in November.

Continued: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-womans-story-of-self-managing-her-abortion-in-an-anti-choice-state_n_64c03e6be4b053a7009335eb

USA – ‘Could She or I Go to Jail for This?’ Abortion Bans Result in Substandard Care That Threatens Patients’ Lives

JUNE 8, 2023
by Megan Burbank

In April, northern Idaho’s Valor Health Hospital announced it would be closing its labor and delivery unit. It was the second Idaho hospital in as many months to stop delivering babies: Bonner Health had made headlines when it did the same thing in April, citing the state’s political situation as a contributing factor. Idaho is home to some of the country’s most draconian abortion laws, and the state’s long-running hostility toward abortion means patients from Idaho often relied on Eastern Washington abortion providers since long before Roe’s reversal.

But shutting down labor and delivery units is new. And a new report, “Care Post-Roe: Documenting cases of poor-quality care since the Dobbs decision,” from the reproductive policy research organization Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), shows why: As abortion laws keep physicians from providing standard pregnancy care as well as abortion, it’s leading to worse outcomes for pregnant people and their babies — and pushing clinicians to reconsider whether it’s even worth practicing in states where they effectively can no longer do their jobs.

Continued: https://southseattleemerald.com/2023/06/08/opinion-could-she-or-i-go-to-jail-for-this-abortion-bans-result-in-substandard-care-that-threatens-patients-lives/

08.06.2023

Opinion

Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health

Valor Health Hospital

Abortion laws triggered dozens of health complications, new report says

The research is an effort to capture an expansive picture of how health care has been affected by abortion bans

By Caroline Kitchener
May 16, 2023

A new report has identified dozens of examples in which medical providers say pregnant patients received care in the past year that deviated from care they would have received before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade — a sign, researchers said, of a pattern of serious health complications triggered by abortion bans.

While no nationwide data has yet emerged to show the extent of these complications, the report, being released Tuesday by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco and shared with The Washington Post, offers a first-of-its-kind summary of anonymized examples from medical providers across the country.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/16/ucsf-abortion-study/

Colorado becomes the first state to ban controversial abortion pill reversals

As pills emerge as the latest front in the war over abortion, the practice of administering progesterone after mifepristone may soon be labeled as ‘medical misconduct’ in the state.

Claire Cleveland, KFF Health News
May 3, 2023

In Glenwood Springs, Colorado, registered nurse Katie Laven answers calls from people who’ve started the two-pill medication abortion regimen and want to stop the process.

“They are just in turmoil,” said Laven, who works at the Abortion Pill Rescue Network and answers some of the roughly 150 calls it says come in each month. “They feel like, ‘Well, maybe an abortion would make it better.’ And then they take the abortion pill and they’re like, ‘I don’t feel better. In fact, I feel much worse that I did that.’”

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2023/05/colorado-bans-abortion-pill-reversals/

USA – Abortion Is Not a “Choice” Without Racial Justice

After Roe v. Wade, Angela Davis wrote about how the reproductive rights movement was failing women of color. As Roe is dismantled, her diagnosis is more crucial than ever.

Sara Matthiesen
January 25, 2022

In 2016 researchers at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a public health project focused on reproductive well-being, made headlines with their “Turnaway Study.” The groundbreaking longitudinal study was comprised of nearly 8,000 interviews with 1,000 women who had either been “turned away” from abortion because they were past a clinic’s gestational limits or had successfully received abortions. Through interviews conducted every six months over a period of five years, the study compared the life circumstances of study participants following these two reproductive outcomes. The study, the first of its kind, sought to quantify the effects of being denied a wanted abortion.

Contrary to anti-abortion claims about the supposed psychological harm of ending a pregnancy, researchers found that obtaining an abortion did not increase women’s risk of developing PTSD, depression, or anxiety. Those denied abortions, on the other hand, did not fare as well.

Continued: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/abortion-is-not-a-choice-without-racial-justice/

25.01.2023

Commentary

Featured

Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health

USA – Next frontier in the abortion wars: Your local CVS

The emerging strategy could further limit the Biden administration’s already limited policy.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and LAUREN GARDNER, Politico
01/11/2023

Fresh off winning their decades-long battle to overturn Roe v. Wade, abortion-rights opponents are pinpointing their next targets: the nation’s biggest pharmacy chains.

Anti-abortion advocates are organizing pickets outside CVS and Walgreens in early February in at least eight cities, including Washington, D.C., in response to the companies’ plans to take advantage of the Food and Drug Administration’s decision last week allowing retail pharmacies to stock and dispense abortion pills in states where they’re legal.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/01/11/pharmacies-anti-abortion-pills-00077349

USA – The new front in the right’s war on abortion

Abortion pills are at the heart of the fight over abortion access in a post-Roe world.

By Rachel M. Cohen
Jan 9, 2023

The Biden administration helped expand access to medication abortion last week, with the US Food and Drug Administration finalizing a rule to make the pills more readily available in pharmacies. But this effort to help patients get pills to end a pregnancy could be dwarfed by a major push to restrict access to the medication from anti-abortion leaders and their Republican allies.

As lawmakers head back to state legislatures this month, many for the first time since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June, Republicans face new pressure to restrict access to the combination of abortion-inducing drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, used typically within the first 10 to 12 weeks of a pregnancy. Medication abortion has become the most common method for ending pregnancies in the United States, partly due to its safety record, its lower cost, diminished access to in-person care, and greater opportunities for privacy.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2023/1/9/23540562/abortion-pills-medication-dobbs-roe-mifepristone

How the Supreme Court’s Abortion Decision Left Many Youth Behind

BY ALEX BERG
DECEMBER 20, 2022

After having an abortion two years ago, B (whose name is withheld for privacy) didn’t think much about her experience with the procedure. As a 17 year-old at the time with a couple of months to go before her high school graduation, she “put it out of sight.” That was until June 24, 2022, the day the Supreme Court issued a decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in the United States.

“It really snapped me back into reality from it,” B, now 19, tells Teen Vogue.

Continued: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/how-the-supreme-courts-abortion-decision-left-many-youth-behind

USA – ‘Love Is Blind,’ ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and more: How abortion’s portrayal on TV is changing

A researcher found more plotlines around and more mentions of abortion on TV this year — though wealthy White characters are still overrepresented.

Jennifer Gerson
December 15, 2022

For the past five years, researcher Steph Herold has studied portrayals of abortion in television and film as part of the Abortion Onscreen initiative.

The latest study by Herold, a research analyst at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) at the University of California-San Francisco’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health spans this year. It found 60 abortion plotlines or mentions from 52 distinct television shows, well outnumbering the 47 abortion plotlines in 42 shows seen in 2021.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2022/12/abortion-portrayal-television-movies-after-dobbs/

15.12.2022