USA – Abortion exceptions “have no meaning at all” — and estimates of pregnancies by rape prove it

A new report estimates 65,000 pregnancies by rape in abortion-ban states, underscoring the fallacy of these laws

By NICOLE KARLIS
JANUARY 26, 2024

For years, Dr. Samuel Dickman was an abortion provider in Texas. Currently, he works as the chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood in Montana. But in both states, he’s had patients who have spontaneously revealed that they were pregnant as a result of rape.

Dickman and his colleagues thought if some people are revealing this to their abortion providers, without being prompted, there have to be more who aren’t because they understandably don’t feel comfortable doing so. Moreover, what was happening to pregnant survivors of rape in states with abortion bans?

Continued: https://www.salon.com/2024/01/26/abortion-exceptions-have-no-meaning-at-all-and-estimates-of-pregnancies-by-rape-prove-it/

26.01.2024

Commentary

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

How Many Abortions Did the Post-Roe Bans Prevent?

The first estimate of births since Dobbs found that almost a quarter of women who would have gotten abortions carried their pregnancies to term.

By Margot Sanger-Katz and Claire Cain Miller
Nov. 22, 2023

The first data on births since Roe v. Wade was overturned shows how much abortion bans have had their intended effect: Births increased in every state with a ban, an analysis of the data shows.

By comparing birth statistics in states before and after the bans passed, researchers estimated that the laws caused around 32,000 annual births, based on the first six months of 2023, a relatively small increase that was in line with overall expectations.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/upshot/abortion-births-bans-states.html

22.11.2023

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A new abortion study is a stunning indictment of Dobbs’ consequences

Criminalization is ineffective because it fails to address the reasons one would consider abortion in the first place.

Oct. 26, 2023
By Mary Ziegler

A study released this week confirmed a surprising fact: The national abortion rate has risen slightly in the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The study, released by WeCount, a project of the Society of Family Planning, relied on data from more than 80% of the nation’s providers, along with historical trends and state data. The report matches earlier findings released last month by the Guttmacher Institute, which likewise found abortions had remained steady or even increased since Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health.

With abortion rates not decreasing, opponents will pursue increasingly complex and constitutionally dubious ways to shut down access in and travel to progressive states. The outcome of this ratcheting up of penalties will be just as predictable. While criminalization makes pregnancy far more dangerous, it is ineffective because it fails to address the reasons one would consider abortion in the first place.

Continued: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/abortion-rates-study-dobbs-roe-republicans-rcna122324

USA – Medical exceptions to abortion bans often exclude mental health conditions

Pregnant people were more likely to die from mental health conditions than any other cause, a CDC analysis found.

Nada Hassanein, Stateline
October 24, 2023

More than a dozen states now have near-total abortion bans following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, with limited medical exceptions meant to protect the patient’s health or life.

But among those states, only Alabama explicitly includes “serious mental illness” as an allowable exception. Meanwhile, 10 states with near-total abortion bans (Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming) explicitly exclude mental health conditions as legal exceptions, according to an analysis from KFF, a health policy research organization.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2023/10/medical-exceptions-abortion-bans-mental-health-conditions/

USA – Effects of Dobbs on maternal health care overwhelmingly negative, survey shows

By Kim Bellware and Emily Guskin
June 21, 2023

Sweeping restrictions and even outright abortion bans adopted by states in the year since the landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling have had an overwhelmingly negative effect on maternal health care, according to a survey of OBGYNs released Wednesday that provides one of the clearest views yet of how the U.S. Supreme Court decision has affected women’s health care in the United States.

The poll by the health research nonprofit KFF reveals that the Dobbs ruling — which ended federal protection on the right to abortion — affected maternal mortality and how pregnancy-related medical emergencies are managed, precipitated a rise in requests for sterilization and has done much more than restrict abortion access. Many OBGYNs said it has also made their jobs more difficult and legally perilous than before, while leading to worse outcomes for patients.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/21/obgyn-abortion-poll/

21.06.2023

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USA – How anti-abortion laws impact the Black community

With some of the highest maternal death rates in the nation, Black pregnant people face extreme impacts on their health, particularly those in states with restrictive abortion bans.

By Rebekah Sager
April 17, 2023

When the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization last June, overturning Roe v. Wade and ending federal constitutional affirmation of the right to abortion, medical experts and pro-abortion activists working in the Black maternal health community say, they knew the result could be dire.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black pregnant people are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white pregnant people. And Black infants are nearly four times as likely to die during birth as white infants, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health reports.

Continued: https://americanindependent.com/anti-abortion-laws-black-pregnancy-mifepristone-supreme-court-maternal-infant-death-health-care/

USA – The Abortion Battle Over Rising Deaths in Pregnant Women

BY KATHERINE FUNG
ON 3/24/23

A massive spike in U.S. maternal deaths has abortion-rights and anti-abortion groups debating the cause of the nation's most fatal odds for expectant mothers in more than half a century.

A new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last week said that maternal mortality—deaths that take place during pregnancy or within 42 days after delivery—shot up by 40 percent in 2021. The figure reaffirms America's position as the most dangerous wealthy country to live in when pregnant or while giving birth.

Continued: https://www.newsweek.com/abortion-battle-over-rising-deaths-pregnant-women-1789982

Inside the Post-Roe Scramble to Count Abortions

The end of Roe reshaped abortion access across the U.S. What does it take to track those changes?

By Rebecca Grant
March 22, 2023

On May 2, 2022 at 8:32 p.m., when Politico published a leaked draft of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Jennifer Pepper was standing on Main Street in Disney World. Pepper is president and CEO of the Choices Center for Reproductive Health, a reproductive health clinic in Memphis, Tennessee, that began providing abortion care in 1974. She had traveled to Orlando to give a presentation at a conference and visited Disney World that evening to watch the fireworks. The air was warm and humid, the sun had just set, and Pepper was staring at Cinderella’s Castle when her phone erupted with messages and alerts.

“I remember kneeling down and feeling like I’d been gut punched,” Pepper said. “We knew it was going to happen, but seeing those words in black and white shattered any little bit of hope that maybe we had gotten it wrong.”

Continued: https://undark.org/2023/03/22/inside-the-post-roe-scramble-to-count-abortions/

What the data says about abortion in the U.S.

JANUARY 11, 2023
BY JEFF DIAMANT AND BESHEER MOHAMED, Pew Research Center

Pew Research Center has conducted many surveys about abortion over the years, providing a lens into Americans’ views on whether the procedure should be legal, among a host of other questions. In a Center survey conducted after the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision to end the constitutional right to abortion, 62% of U.S. adults said the practice should be legal in all or most cases, while 36% said it should be illegal in all or most cases. Another survey showed that relatively few Americans take an absolutist view on the issue.

Here is a look at data on the number of legal abortions that take place in the United States each year – and other related measures – from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Guttmacher Institute, which have tracked these patterns for several decades. The latest data from both organizations is from 2020 and therefore does not reflect the period after the Supreme Court’s recent decision.

Continued: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2023/01/11/what-the-data-says-about-abortion-in-the-u-s-2/

11.01.2023

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Two leading compilers of abortion data issue unique reports giving insight into U.S. abortion incidence

Dec 10th, 2022
By Tessa Redmond, Kentucky Today

Two of the nation’s leading compilers of abortion data published unique reports providing insight into U.S. abortion incidence during 2020. In 2020, a total of 620,327 abortions were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

…. The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion research and policy organization, estimates that three states who did not provide information to the CDC (California, Maryland and New Jersey) accounted for approximately 20% of all abortions that year—rendering the 620,327 lives lost an incomplete figure.

Continued: https://www.nkytribune.com/2022/12/two-leading-compilers-of-abortion-data-issue-unique-reports-giving-insight-into-u-s-abortion-incidence/

10.12.2022