Why restricting access to abortion damages women’s health

The PLOS Medicine Editors
Published: July 26, 2022
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1004075

In late June, the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling was overturned by the United States Supreme Court, a decision, decried by human rights experts at the United Nations [1], that leaves many women and girls without the right to obtain abortion care that was established nearly 50 years ago. The consequences of limited or nonextant access to safe abortion services in the US remain to be seen; however, information gleaned from abortion-related policies worldwide provides insight into the likely health effects of this abrupt reversal in abortion policy. The US Supreme Court’s decision should serve to amplify the global call for strategies to mitigate the inevitable repercussions for women’s health.

Continued: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1004075

Why the Right to an Abortion Matters for Every Person

In a deeply personal essay, the actor Sophia Bush and her husband, Grant Hughes, share the impact abortion has had on their life.

By Sophia Bush and Grant Hughes
July 13, 2022

The emotions I feel—rage, fear, pain, frustration, sadness, empathy—are all-consuming as I, along with millions of you, grapple with the enormity of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which for the last 50 years has protected our fundamental right to abortion care, and to self-determination. It’s infuriating to watch lawmakers tune out the cries of medical professionals and to see women treated—in the halls of a government that purports to be founded on “liberty and justice for all”—as less-than, as though their needs and their lives don’t matter. And it is deeply painful to see people consigned—legislated—to suffering. Our right to reproductive choice is fundamental to our democracy, so much so that one of the societal changes that signifies a backsliding democracy, one of the surefire things that happens anywhere when equality is being chipped away, is the rollback of the rights of women, and particularly those relating to bodily autonomy. Without reproductive choice, we have no autonomy. And so years ago I joined the fight for womxn to control their own bodies.

https://www.glamour.com/story/why-the-right-to-an-abortion-matters-for-every-person

13.07.2022

National Advocates for Pregnant Women

prosecuting women for miscarriage

USA – The Most Important Study in the Abortion Debate

Researchers rigorously tested the persistent notion that abortion wounds the women who seek it.

By Annie Lowrey
JUNE 11, 2022

The demographer Diana Greene Foster was in Orlando last month, preparing for the end of Roe v. Wade, when Politico published a leaked draft of a majority Supreme Court opinion striking down the landmark ruling. The opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, would revoke the constitutional right to abortion and thus give states the ability to ban the medical procedure.

Foster, the director of the Bixby Population Sciences Research Unit at UC San Francisco, was at a meeting of abortion providers, seeking their help recruiting people for a new study. And she was racing against time. She wanted to look, she told me, “at the last person served in, say, Nebraska, compared to the first person turned away in Nebraska.” Nearly two dozen red and purple states are expected to enact stringent limits or even bans on abortion as soon as the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, as it is poised to do. Foster intends to study women with unwanted pregnancies just before and just after the right to an abortion vanishes.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/abortion-turnaway-study-roe-supreme-court/661246/

My Mother’s Abortion Saved My Life

And gave her own a much happier ending.

BY JENN LYONS
JUNE 06, 2022

A few years ago, I had a frank conversation regarding abortion with one of my childhood friends. We’d lost contact with each other, but I always remembered Jessica (not her real name) as a sweet girl with dimples and a fantastic smile. Her mother had been a bit of a hippie, so I’d always assumed Jessica would follow that route: charity work at food banks and protests against Big Agra, different varietals of kombucha fermenting in her basement.

Instead, she’d gone the good Christian wife and mother route. Not what I would’ve done, personally, but Jessica seemed happy, and I respected her choices. But a few years back, Jessica made a statement on social media that made me think she was planning to vote for Trump. That she was a one-issue voter, that issue being abortion. That if Trump outlawed abortion, she didn’t care what else he did.

Continued: https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/06/abortion-domestic-violence-personal-story.html

06.06.2022

The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America

The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America

By QUOCTRUNG BUI and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
AUG. 4, 2018

Becoming a mother used to be seen as a unifying milestone for women in the United States. But a new analysis of four decades of births shows that the age that women become mothers varies significantly by geography and education. The result is that children are born into very different family lives, heading for diverging economic futures.

First-time mothers are older in big cities and on the coasts, and younger in rural areas and in the Great Plains and the South. In New York and San Francisco, their average age is 31 and 32. In Todd County, S.D., and Zapata County, Tex., it’s half a generation earlier, at 20 and 21, according to the analysis, which was of all birth certificates in the United States since 1985 and nearly all for the five years prior. It was conducted for The New York Times by Caitlin Myers, an economist who studies reproductive policy at Middlebury College, using data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-gap.html

Plenty of people are pro-abortion

Plenty of people are pro-abortion
It is a necessary health care procedure that saves lives.

Kathi Valeii
Aug—01—2018

Since Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement announcement in June, the discussion about reproductive rights has intensified. Amid the social media discussions about the Supreme Court, and the importance of choice, and Roe v. Wade, emerged a common narrative in support of abortion that went: “No one is pro-abortion, but...” The conclusion to such a statement usually rounds out with something like, “...but we should all mind our own business and let people make their own choices about their health.” And while the latter part of this argument is a message we can all get behind, the first part is a problem.

While the pro-choice movement has long been conditioned to talk in metered ways about abortion, saying “no one is pro-abortion” is patently inaccurate. Let’s be straight — many, many people are pro-abortion, simply because we don’t view abortion as anything more than necessary health care.

Continued: https://theoutline.com/post/5636/yes-people-are-pro-abortion?zd=2&zi=4ry3i5go