Texas – Abortion rights groups sue, saying ‘extremists’ are using the courts to target them

Courts asked to block any lawsuits resulting from information gathered in depositions of leaders of groups that fund abortions

By BeLynn Hollers
Mar 18, 2022

Two abortion rights groups — Texas Equal Access Fund and Lilith Fund — have together sued two organizations outside of Texas and two private individuals who they say are targeting them as they try to aid pregnant women after the passage of SB 8, the state law that bans abortions after around six weeks. The Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based nonprofit law firm, and America First Legal Foundation, a D.C.-based advocacy group, are the two organizations listed in the lawsuit. It also names Ashley Maxwell of Hood County and Sadie Weldon of Jack County as defendants. The two women filed petitions in January and February, seeking to depose leaders of the Texas Equal Access Fund and the Lilith Fund.

Continued: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/courts/2022/03/18/abortion-rights-groups-sue-saying-extremists-are-using-the-courts-to-target-them/

There has never been an antiabortion law like the one just passed in Texas

The state is seen as a ‘testing ground’ for new kinds of antiabortion bills

Caroline Kitchener, The Lily
May 25, 2021

AUSTIN — As John Seago looked up at the Texas Capitol, he smiled. For 12 years, he has walked across the manicured lawns, schmoozing with legislators in the limestone halls. He has always urged lawmakers to “be bold." In a state as antiabortion as Texas, he’d tell them, “there is no excuse not to be aggressive.”

Finally, they listened.

Continued: https://www.thelily.com/there-has-never-been-an-antiabortion-law-like-the-one-just-passed-in-texas/

How the Hyde Amendment Hearing Can Affect the Future of Abortion Rights

Reproductive rights and justice organizations weigh in on the historic House hearing.

BY CHELSEY SANCHEZ
DEC 9 2020

Over the course of more than four decades, Congress has annually renewed the Hyde Amendment, a highly controversial measure that reproductive rights activists say keeps abortion inaccessible to marginalized communities. That could all change, however, as the House Appropriations Committee held a historic, virtual hearing yesterday on the disproportionately negative impacts of the amendment.

Simply put, the Hyde Amendment broadly bars federal funding for abortion costs, meaning Medicaid recipients—who overwhelmingly come from communities of color or low-income communities—lack abortion coverage.

Continued: https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a34906333/hyde-amendment-facts/

This is the future of abortion in a post-Roe America

The fall of Roe v. Wade won’t end abortion. Here’s what it will do.

By Anna North
Oct 12, 2020

If Roe v. Wade falls, what happens to abortion in America?

That’s the question on a lot of Americans’ minds after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with the Supreme Court on the brink of a 6-3 conservative majority. If the Senate confirms President Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, the Court will likely have the votes to overturn the landmark 1973 decision that established Americans’ right to terminate a pregnancy.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/21504883/supreme-court-abortion-roe-v-wade-barrett

Texas – Inside the Plan to End Legal Abortion

Inside the Plan to End Legal Abortion

Esther Wang
May 22, 2020

Whiteface is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it blip in Texas’s oil patch 50 minutes west of Lubbock that only a few hundred people call home, so tiny that describing it as a small town would be a stretch. But on a rainy evening in mid-March, several dozen of its residents along with people from neighboring towns crammed into a worn-down community center on the town’s main strip for a meeting of Whiteface’s elected officials, an unusually large audience for their regular council meeting.

“I know y’all aren’t here to listen to our business,” joked one of the council members. And it was true. That night, the council would be voting on an anti-abortion ordinance that, if passed, would make Whiteface the latest so-called “sanctuary city for the unborn” in the state. With its approval, Whiteface would join a dozen other Texas towns that in recent months had declared abortion to be murder and announced that abortions (and in some towns, even emergency contraception like Plan B) were “unlawful” within the town’s limits; some of the ordinances, too, designated a list of the state’s leading abortion providers and advocacy groups as “criminal entities.” The crowd in the sparsely decorated community center, crammed into rows of red and yellow plastic chairs, had amassed to show their support for the ordinance, and to urge the Whiteface council to officially designate the town a self-proclaimed “sanctuary city for the unborn.”

Continued: https://theslot.jezebel.com/inside-the-plan-to-end-legal-abortion-1843155358

USA – ‘You have to stand up to illegitimate authority’: what veteran abortion activists can teach us in the Trump era

‘You have to stand up to illegitimate authority’: what veteran abortion activists can teach us in the Trump era
The pioneers who struggled for legalisation in the 60s are seeing the same battles being fought all over again

Laura Barton
Sat 18 Jan 2020

The telephone sat in the dormitory hallway, and when it rang it might have been for any of the residents – young women in their teens and early 20s, all students at the University of Chicago. Calls came from family and friends and boyfriends, from colleagues and classmates and clubs. But sometimes the voice at the end of the line would ask for “Jane”.

This was 1965, and in Chicago the social justice movement was gathering pace – a new era that encompassed civil rights, student rights, women’s rights and resistance to the war in Vietnam. Among those involved was Heather Booth, a 19-year-old social sciences student from New York.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/18/you-have-to-stand-up-to-illegitimate-authority-what-veteran-abortion-activists-can-teach-us-in-the-trump-era