The Supreme Court Ruling the Right Is Using to Eradicate Transgender People

The high court’s infamous abortion decision is now being wielded against gender-affirming care—in the first of many attacks on our rights to come.

Zane McNeill, New Republic
February 14, 2024

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with its now infamous ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the adverse disruptions to both the legal landscape of abortion and the quality of life of both abortion-seekers and pregnant patients across the country were nearly immediate. But the dystopia of the Dobbs holding isn’t limited to reproductive freedoms—it has also endangered other constitutional privacy matters that determine the right to purchase and use contraception, the right of same-sex intimacy and marriage, and the right to marry across racial lines. However, what’s become clear is that the far right intends to test the judicial system for future breaches by first targeting transgender people’s access to gender-affirming care.

Continued: https://newrepublic.com/article/178681/dobbs-ruling-war-trans-community

We Must Fight for Abortion and LGBTQ Rights—and Our Own Bodies

The right to bodily autonomy is sacrosanct, whether you’re someone who needs an abortion, gender-affirming care, or simply want to live your truth openly.

Martha Plimpton
Sep. 21, 2023

It’s been more than a year since Roe v. Wade was struck down, and abortion rights are clearly in a dire crisis. Fifteen states have total abortion bans in effect and two others have six-week bans. Most of the Southeast and Midwest are now abortion deserts and pregnant people are forced to travel hundreds, even thousands, of miles to access abortion care.

I’ve watched the escalating attacks on abortion rights with a mix of horror and outrage. I’ve had more than one abortion in my life, and for a variety of reasons—because I was too young to have kids, or not in a stable relationship, or as a result of illness and complications early on. Each time I made that decision, I was sure it was the right one for me and I was fortunate to have access to the care that I needed. I’m not ashamed of my abortions—I’m grateful.

Continued: https://www.thedailybeast.com/martha-plimpton-we-must-fight-for-abortion-and-lgbtq-rightsand-our-own-bodies

How South Carolina’s abortion law sounds to transgender men

South Carolina Public Radio | By Scott Morgan
August 29, 2023

For gender-expansive people in general, and for transgender men in particular, South Carolina’s ban on most abortions after six weeks raises scary questions. Chief among those is one Matthew Ward asks: Who is in charge of our bodies?

“Who gets to decide what we can and cannot do?” asks Ward, a transgender man in his mid-20s. “This sort of legislation is trying to take bodily autonomy away from people, and being trans sort of relies on bodily autonomy. It's part of the same problem.”

Continued: https://www.southcarolinapublicradio.org/sc-news/2023-08-29/how-south-carolinas-abortion-law-sounds-to-transgender-men

How GOP efforts to restrict trans rights take a page from the antiabortion playbook

BY ARIT JOHN
JUNE 7, 2023

WASHINGTON — Bans on treatment. New laws threatening doctors with malpractice suits and criminal charges. Praise from lawmakers who say their legislation is meant to protect minors, even as the new policies infringe on the rights of adults.

As state legislatures wind down and the 2024 election cycle kicks off, the similarities between the fights for abortion access and transgender rights have come into stark focus. Republican lawmakers have introduced a record number of bills at the state level and in Congress that would restrict the rights of transgender people and the healthcare they receive.

Continued: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-06-07/wave-of-anti-trans-laws-reminds-advocates-of-another-struggle-abortion-rights

USA – My Body No Choice: taking the fight for abortion rights to the stage

A new stage production tells the stories of women and their bodily autonomy, or lack thereof, as part of the fight to reverse the supreme court decision to restrict abortion

David Smith
Thu 27 Oct 2022

Theirs was a secret space. In the early 1970s, Molly Smith and her sister Bridget attended weekly women’s consciousness-raising sessions in a friend’s living room near Washington’s Catholic University. They read books such as Our Bodies, Ourselves, a groundbreaking text about women’s health and sexuality. Sitting on cushions, the circle of women listened to one another, laughed and cried and shared their deepest secrets.

“Women needed spaces where they could be open, where they could be uncompromising, where they could speak about the beginnings of their feminism, where they could speak about their stories around their bodies without shame,” Smith, now 70, recalls by phone. “A lot of women didn’t understand their bodies at all.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/oct/26/my-body-no-choice-supreme-court-abortion-rights-stage

27.10.2022

Abortion deleted from UK Government-organised international human rights statement

July 19th, 2022
Humanists UK

A UK Government-organised multinational statement committing to the fundamental rights of women and girls has been amended to remove references to ‘sexual and reproductive health and rights’ and ‘bodily autonomy’. The statement was issued by the UK as part of an intergovernmental conference it hosted in London on 5-6 July. A total of 22 countries signed the joint statement before it was amended. One – anti-abortion Malta – has first signed since. Humanists UK has expressed serious alarm at the changes. It is asking the UK Government for a full explanation, and if possible, a reversal.

Continued: https://humanists.uk/2022/07/19/abortion-deleted-from-uk-government-organised-international-human-rights-statement/

19.07.2022

International Ministerial Conference on Freedom of Religion or Belief

sexual and reproductive health and rights

UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief

Europe

United Kingdom

Human Rights

UK – MP Danny Kruger says abortion comments were ‘misunderstood’

July 3, 2022

A Tory MP criticised for remarks about abortion says he was misunderstood. Wiltshire MP Danny Kruger was speaking in a Parliamentary debate about the US' abortion ban when he said he disagreed that pregnant women had an 'absolute right to bodily autonomy'.

In a new statement he said: "I do not wish to dictate what a woman should do with her own body, as has been claimed."

Continued: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-62030114

03.07.2022

Forced Pregnancy Is Involuntary Servitude, Violates the 13th Amendment

5/23/2022
by CARRIE N. BAKER

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.“
The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

The draft Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked this month gives America a glimpse into a dystopian future where the Constitution would offer no protection for women’s rights—including abortion rights—because they are not “deeply rooted in the country’s history and traditions.”

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2022/05/23/abortion-bans-13th-amendment/

23.05.2022

involuntary servitude

reproductive coercion

United States

Health

Human Rights

USA – When a Right Becomes a Privilege

The main difference between the women who will make it to an abortion provider in a post-Roe world and those who won’t? Money.

By Melissa Jeltsen, The Atlantic
May 15, 2022

When New York legalized abortion in 1970—three years before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade—a shrewd entrepreneur named Martin Mitchell saw an opportunity. The 31-year-old Detroit-area man chartered a tiny private plane and began advertising frequent flights from Michigan, where elective abortion was illegal, to Niagara Falls, New York, where it was not. For $400, a woman got transportation, an abortion by a licensed doctor at a clinic near the airport, and lunch, before being flown home the same day.

Continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/05/roe-v-wade-abortion-access-poor-women/629858/

The Elephant in the Womb: Unintended Pregnancies

22 APRIL 2022
Population Matters

This year’s State of the World Population (SWOP) report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) focuses on the worrying issue of unintended pregnancies. Still approximately half of all pregnancies today are unplanned and the number of affected women is increasing. Tackling this crisis is key to achieving a better future and should be an utmost priority.

RUNNING TO SLIDE BACKWARDS?
Since 2019, the annual unintended pregnancy rate fell from 79 to 64 unintended pregnancies for every 1,000 women of child-bearing age (15 to 49 years) – in other words, roughly 6% of the world’s women experience an unintended pregnancy each year, down from 8% in 2019. However, the report points out that due to population growth, the absolute number of affected women has increased by as much as 13% during this time period. This inconvenient truth also applies to the number of girls and women affected by other injustices, such as child marriage and unmet contraceptive needs, alongside many other development indicators, as shown in Population Matters’ 2019 report on population and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Continued: https://populationmatters.org/news/2022/04/elephant-womb-unintended-pregnancies

22.04.2022