USA – Researchers call for more abortion studies to be retracted

The criticism of four older studies alleging abortion causes mental illness follows high-profile retractions of studies claiming the abortion pill is dangerous.

BY: SOFIA RESNICK
FEBRUARY 27, 2024

Health and science experts published a commentary in the British Medical Journal on Tuesday calling for the retraction of four older abortion-related studies that, despite documented flaws, have influenced major anti-abortion decisions over the past 20 years, including the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned federal abortion rights.

The commentary comes the same month academic publisher Sage Journals retracted studies calling into question the long-established safety record of the abortion drug mifepristone, which were produced by anti-abortion activists shortly before they sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over the same drug.

Continued: https://kentuckylantern.com/2024/02/27/researchers-call-for-more-abortion-studies-to-be-retracted/


USA – Measuring the long-term cost of restricting abortion access

By Annalisa Merelli
Oct. 17, 2023

When Diana Greene Foster and her team at the University of California, San Francisco, started their study on the lives of women who were denied abortions in 2008, they sought to investigate a rather commonly held view: That having an abortion hurt women’s mental and physical health, including by leading to PTSD and drug and alcohol use disorder.

A series of laws had been passed based on this belief, introducing compulsory counseling and waiting periods for people seeking abortions, thereby adding barriers to accessing the procedure, especially for patients with lower incomes who couldn’t afford repeated time off work, travel, and associated costs such as child care.

Continued: https://www.statnews.com/2023/10/17/harms-from-restricting-abortion-access-research/


Abortion access could continue to change in year 2 after the overturn of Roe v. Wade

July 3, 2023
Selena Simmons-Duffin

From the moment the Supreme Court decision overturning the right to an abortion was leaked last spring, researchers and pundits began to predict the consequences.

A year later, data is beginning to bring the real-life effects into focus. Over a dozen states have near total abortion bans, with several more state bans in the works. At least 26 clinics have closed. In Texas, nearly 10,000 more babies were born in the state since its 2021 "heartbeat bill" took effect.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/07/03/1185849391/abortion-access-could-continue-to-change-in-year-2-after-the-overturn-of-roe-v-w


USA – Setting the Record Straight on Abortion and Maternal Health

The Turnaway Study’ was published in 2020 to much acclaim. Now the integrity of a paper criticizing it is being investigated.

Colleen Flaherty
November 14, 2022

Frontiers in Psychology, a peer-reviewed open-access journal published by Frontiers Media, is investigating a recent paper criticizing a landmark study on abortion and maternal well-being.

Frontiers published an expression of concern—separate from the review article itself—last month, after readers pointed out that the article had been edited and peer reviewed only by scientists with antiabortion views. The editor and three out of four reviewers are affiliated with one antiabortion group in particular.

Continued: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/11/14/journal-investigating-antiabortion-paper


Latinas are the targets of abortion misinformation. Providers and advocates are pushing back

Most of the abortion misinformation comes from online platforms, anti-abortion protests outside clinics and crisis pregnancy centers run by anti-abortion rights activists.

Aug. 5, 2022
By Nicole Acevedo

Latinas who work in clinics and with organizations that are making abortions accessible after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade say they're increasingly having to counter abortion-related misinformation that can harm women and the larger communities the groups serve.

Misinformation spreaders have found ways to latch on to the national abortion conversation in English and in Spanish “to continue disseminating this misinformation at a more rapid pace,” said Susy Chávez of California Latinas for Reproductive Justice.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinas-abortion-misinformation-online-spanish-hispanic-rcna40590


USA – 39 Celebrities Who Have Had Abortions—And Spoken Out About Them

They're among the one in four women who will get abortions in their lifetimes.

By Jenny Singer
June 13, 2022

Abortion is a human right. Abortion is basic health care. Celebrities who have had abortions and spoken out about them are in good company among the one in four women who will get abortions in their lifetime.

Abortion should be no more stigmatized than any other medical decision. But as the Supreme Court looks poised to roll back Roe v. Wade after 50 years of legal abortions, the ongoing crisis of abortion access is becoming even more of an emergency. “Celebrities today regularly reveal the details of their drug addictions, sexual obsessions, marital infidelities—but no celebrity in recent memory has admitted to ending a pregnancy,” Susan Dominus wrote in Glamour in 2005.

https://www.glamour.com/gallery/celebrities-who-have-had-abortions-and-spoken-out-about-them


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/


Six Predictions About the End of Roe, Based on Research

I’ve studied what happens to people who are denied an abortion for an unwanted pregnancy. Here’s what I learned.

By DIANA GREENE FOSTER
06/08/2022

When I was in high school, I learned a secret my grandmother had kept for decades: She’d had an abortion. The story came out after she passed away and my grandfather announced that, at her request, in lieu of flowers donations should be made to Planned Parenthood. For me, as a naïve teenager, it was a surprise that someone so maternal and loving would have had an abortion. I had been taught – through TV shows, movies and books – that abortion was something that irresponsible people do to avoid childbearing. I am sure this is how many people still see abortion.

The story my grandfather told was that my grandmother became pregnant early in their marriage, during the Great Depression when she and my grandfather didn’t have the jobs, money and security to provide for a child. So she traveled from New York to Puerto Rico to get an illegal abortion. Later she went on to have three children: my dad, my aunt and my uncle.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/08/the-end-of-roe-wont-cause-birth-rates-or-adoptions-to-spike-00037864


USA – The Doctor Prescribing Abortions from Overseas

If Roe falls, then Rebecca Gomperts could become one of the most important medical figures in America.

By CHELSEA CONABOY
06/03/2022

Within a few weeks, if Roe v. Wade is overturned as expected, a Dutch doctor named Rebecca Gomperts may quickly become the most controversial abortion provider in America — even though she isn’t in America.

Gomperts and her organization, Aid Access, is already the only provider openly providing telehealth abortion in the 19 states that currently restrict access to such services; if you go the website of Plan C, a group providing information about abortion pills by mail, Aid Access is the sole provider listed for many of them.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/03/rebecca-gomperts-interview-abortion-00036742


What This Later-Abortion Story Tells Us About a Post-Roe Future

The number of people seeking later abortions is undoubtedly about to increase, and our medical system is unprepared to care for them.

By Garnet Henderson, The Nation
May 28, 2022

In October of 2021, Kristyn Smith checked herself out of the hospital in Charleston, W.Va., where she had been denied an abortion. Bleeding and in pain, Smith drove for six hours with her fiancé to Washington, D.C., to have the procedure performed there. On the day of her first appointment at the Dupont Clinic, she was 27 weeks pregnant. “They were the sweetest, most compassionate people that I had ever met,” she said of the clinic staff, who made her feel safe and supported. The seven weeks leading up to her arrival there, however, had been a “nightmare.”

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/later-abortion-post-roe/