Opinion: Madame Restell, and the history of abortion in America

By JONATHAN P. BAIRD
July 10, 2023

Last year, as we watched the U.S. Supreme Court destroy reproductive freedom for women, more attention was paid to the outcome of the Dobbs abortion case than the Court’s reasoning and justification. Justice Samuel Alito, Dobbs author, relied heavily on history in supporting his opinion.

What happened in earlier American history is contested terrain. I would submit that Justice Alito got his history very wrong. He argued that abortion was not deeply rooted in U.S. history and traditions. Alito wrote, “…an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”

Continued: https://www.concordmonitor.com/My-Turn-Abortion-history-Madame-Restell-and-the-revival-of-Comstockery-51539521

10.07.2023

American Historical Association

American Medical Association

New York State Society for the Suppression of Vice

quickening

Samuel Alito

USA – It’s Time to Call Abortion Bans What They Are—Torture and Cruelty

The US must learn from other countries where denials of abortion are considered intentional, state-inflicted torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

By Payal Shah and Akila Radhakrishnan
June 9, 2023

On August 24, 2022, Mayron Hollis sought an abortion after receiving news that her pregnancy was endangering her life and its continuation would likely result in uterine rupture and organ damage. Unfortunately, August 24 was also the day that Tennessee’s near-total ban on abortion went into effect. Denied care in her own state and unable to travel to one where she could get the care she needed, Hollis was forced to endure a dangerous pregnancy and birth, where she ultimately suffered severe hemorrhaging and lost her uterus, destroying her ability to give birth to any more children.

There are many terms to describe Mayron Hollis’s experience of being denied an abortion in Tennessee—harrowing, agonizing, unconscionable—but we should also call it what it is: torture and cruelty.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/abortion-bans-torture-cruelty/

Doctors rally to defend abortion provider Caitlin Bernard after she was censured

June 3, 2023
Sarah McCammon

Hundreds of Indiana doctors are coming to the defense of Caitlin Bernard, the obstetrician/gynecologist who was recently punished by a state licensing board for talking publicly about providing an abortion for a 10-year-old rape victim.

In public statements, doctors across a range of specialties are speaking out against the board's decision, and warning that it could have dangerous implications for public health.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/03/1179941247/abortion-caitlin-bernard-indiana-doctor-medical-board

03.06.2023

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Good Trouble Coalition

USA – Appeals court judges embrace anti-abortion speculation

BY: SOFIA RESNICK AND KELCIE MOSELEY-MORRIS
MAY 18, 2023

America’s major medical institutions and drug policy scholars have roundly denounced as “pseudoscience” many of the claims brought by anti-abortion groups in a high-profile federal lawsuit asking the Food and Drug Administration to revoke its 23-year-old approval of mifepristone, one half of a two-drug regimen that has become the most common form of pregnancy termination post-Roe v. Wade.

But the appeals court’s three-judge panel that heard oral arguments Wednesday appeared to be persuaded not by the medical consensus in this case, but by some of the evidence brought forward by plaintiffs that consists largely of anecdotes, speculation, and cherry-picked studies brought by a handful of anti-abortion medical groups and doctors.

Continued: https://newjerseymonitor.com/2023/05/18/appeals-court-judges-embrace-anti-abortion-speculation/

Federal judges grill Biden administration on abortion pill

During a two-hour oral argument, the judges appeared sympathetic to an anti-abortion medical group seeking to revoke the FDA’s approval of mifepristone.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and JOSH GERSTEIN
05/17/2023

NEW ORLEANS — Three federal judges seemed poised to rule against the Biden administration in its efforts to preserve access to the abortion drug mifepristone.

During an occasionally combative, two-hour hearing Wednesday before a panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, the judges — all Republican appointees — grilled attorneys from the Justice Departments and Danco Laboratories, the pill’s manufacturer, who are battling to keep the drug available in the U.S.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/17/federal-judges-appear-skeptical-of-biden-administration-in-abortion-pills-case-00097477

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 – Lawyers suggest a way around abortion pill restrictions but doctors may be afraid to try it

Doctors can prescribe abortion pills off-label if courts impose restrictions. Will they?

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
04/24/2023

The Supreme Court’s Friday decision punts the fate of the abortion pill mifepristone back to lower courts — maintaining the current level of access for now but leaving in jeopardy the most common method of terminating a pregnancy.

Some legal experts have argued that doctors can circumvent a key piece of the restrictions lower courts may impose by prescribing the pill off label. But physicians say it’s not that simple, and focusing on that technicality misses the larger peril facing doctors who help patients have an abortion.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/24/off-label-abortion-pill-prescribing-00093377

24.04.2023

News

abortion pills

American Medical Association

Center for Bioethics and Health Law

Physicians for Reproductive Health

United States

Human Rights

Law

The Latest Casualties of Idaho’s Abortion Ban: Babies

An entire obstetrics department shuttered. Give the Idaho GOP a round of applause!

Abigail Weinberg
March 25, 2023

An Idaho hospital is ending its labor and delivery services in the wake of a Texas-style, near-total abortion ban signed into state law last year.

Citing the state’s “legal and political climate,” Bonner General Health plans to stop delivering babies and providing other obstetrical services in mid-May, according to a press release. While the release doesn’t explicitly blame Idaho’s restrictive abortion laws for the decision, the implication is clear: “Highly respected, talented physicians are leaving,” it says, while the state legislature “continues to introduce and pass bills that criminalize physicians for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care.”

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/the-latest-casualties-of-idahos-abortion-ban-babies/

25.03.2023

Commentary

Abigail Weinberg

American Medical Association

Bonner General Health

closure of maternity wards

Abortion Laws Stand Between Pregnant Texans and the Care They Need

Doctors are left to guess at whether helping their patients will land them in prison.

BY SARA HUTCHINSON
MARCH 24, 2023

Doctors have a code, a set of principles meant to guide their practice: Give care. Act justly. Respect patients. Do no harm. But for Texas doctors, especially obstetrician-gynecologists, following those seemingly straightforward principles has become a legal and ethical minefield.

Physicians are finding themselves torn between providing medically appropriate care and staying in compliance with the state’s draconian anti-abortion laws. The stakes couldn’t be higher: risking major fines and up to life in prison for doctors on one side, and on the other, often putting women’s lives at risk because of delays in care or refusals to provide formerly routine procedures. As a result, medical decisions regarding pregnancy complications now involve a host of new stakeholders—hospital administrators and lawyers—who may put questions of institutional risk above patient well-being.

Continued: https://prospect.org/health/2023-03-24-abortion-laws-pregnant-texans/

Punishable by death—how the US anti-abortion movement ended up proposing the death penalty

These proposals are unlikely to succeed but remind Americans what is at stake, writes Rebecca Kluchin

BMJ 2023; 380 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p711
Published 24 March 2023
Rebecca Kluchin, professor

In January 2023, 24 Republican legislators in the US state of South Carolina sponsored the South Carolina Equal Protection Act of 2023, a bill designed to extend constitutional rights to embryos and fetuses at all stages of development, granting them equality with women already born.1 The bill makes women and pregnant people who undergo abortion subject to the state’s homicide laws and punishments, including the death penalty. It allows exceptions if they face “imminent death or great bodily injury,” as well as to save the life of the mother, but not for rape or incest.

The anti-abortion movement celebrated a huge victory last summer when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. With the ruling for Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court threw abortion policy back to the judgment of individual states, making access to abortion care contingent on where one lives. Since then, 14 states have criminalised abortion.2 South Carolina legislators attempted to ban the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy, but the state supreme court ruled that effort unconstitutional in January. The Equal Protection Act is one of several legislative efforts to ban the procedure again.

Continued: https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p711