USA – When it comes to abortion rights, you should be scared

BY JESSICA MACKLER, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR
02/15/24

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Voters would be wise to consider Maya Angelou’s famous quote as the 2024 election kicks into high gear and Donald Trump and Republicans try to posture on the issue of abortion.

Abortion is coming front and center in this election, and the anti-abortion movement is doing all it can to downplay the horrors of abortion bans and mischaracterize what the Republican Party has done and will do to restrict abortion.

Continued: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4468151-when-it-comes-to-abortion-rights-you-should-be-scared/


USA – Lying About Abortion Is the GOP’s Election Strategy

Despite voters making their choice for safe and accessible abortion resoundingly clear at the polls, Republicans are doubling down on their life-threatening bans.

Kylie Cheung
Nov 20, 2023

The weekend after Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to enshrine a right to abortion in the state Constitution, Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel went on NBC’s Meet the Press and CNN’s State of the Union to pitch her master plan for Republican candidates on abortion moving forward: lie. Candidates in her party, McDaniel argued to CNN, should follow the lead of a newly elected Republican state senator in Virginia who falsely claimed that he doesn’t support abortion bans; he instead supports “common sense limitations.” On NBC, McDaniel offered an example of how Republican candidates should answer questions about the matter, saying, “It’s confusing right now. But in a time of consensus, can’t we agree on reasonable limitations [on abortion]?”

This was precisely the playbook on which anti-abortion candidates across Virginia ran—and lost—last week. They lost their narrow majority in the State House, giving Democrats control of both chambers of the state legislature and barring Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin from being able to sign an abortion ban into law. The governor, together with Virginia state Republicans, vowed to enact a 15-week ban. Yet Youngkin’s PAC stated that “there is no ban” and referred to the proposed 15-week ban as an ostensibly moderate, reasonable “limit.”

Continued: https://www.damemagazine.com/2023/11/20/republicans-abortion-position/


‘THE central issue’: How the fall of Roe v. Wade shook the 2022 election

More than 50 Democratic and Republican elected officials, campaign aides and consultants took POLITICO inside the first campaign after the Supreme Court's landmark ruling.

By ELENA SCHNEIDER and HOLLY OTTERBEIN
12/19/2022

On May 4, less than 48 hours after a draft opinion was published showing the Supreme Court was poised to end the federal right to abortion, a group of eight strangers gathered around a conference table in the Detroit suburbs to talk about the news.

They were all white women, mostly in their 30s to 50s and without college degrees. Their home county, Macomb, had voted for President Barack Obama twice and President Donald Trump twice. In the upcoming gubernatorial race, they were undecided, frustrated by how Democratic incumbent Gretchen Whitmer had handled the pandemic.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/19/dobbs-2022-election-abortion-00074426


USA – ’Abject failure’: Abortion rights movement fractures over post-Roe future

By James Oliphant

WASHINGTON, June 24 (Reuters) - Badly stung by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade on Friday, the abortion rights movement finds itself splintered, demoralized and faced with a startling landscape in which the procedure may be outlawed in half the country.

Angry grassroots activists are calling past efforts an “abject failure." They say national abortion rights advocacy groups were so consumed with winning federal elections they allowed conservatives to chip away at abortion rights through state-level legislation over decades.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/abject-failure-abortion-rights-movement-fractures-over-post-roe-future-2022-06-24/


With Roe endangered, Democrats divide on saying the word ‘abortion’

By Caroline Kitchener
April 2, 2022

After Texas passed its restrictive abortion law last fall, Democrats started talking more about abortion than they had in decades.

House Democrats coalesced around a bill to turn into law the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing most abortions, Roe v. Wade, voicing their support for the landmark precedent in tweets and public statements. A few days later, three congresswomen shared their abortion stories on the House floor. And when he delivered his State of the Union address in March, President Biden became the first Democratic president since Roe to use that platform to call for action on abortion rights.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/02/abortion-rhetoric-roe/


‘This is a fundamental right’: Abortion rights supporters gear up for 2022 midterms as Roe comes ‘under real threat’

A decision by the Supreme Court in 2022 could turn the battle for control of Congress upside-down, John Bowden writes

Jan 3, 2022

When hundreds of activists on both sides of the abortion debate squared off in front of the Supreme Court last month, the 2022 midterms were not at the top of either faction’s agenda.

A month later as President Joe Biden’s first year in office comes to a close, though, the significance of the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision is a key issue for major liberal groups gearing up to defend the Democratic Party’s House and Senate majorities.

Continued: https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/us/abortion-2022-midterms-activists-candidates-b1985681.html


USA – These 5 States Are the Next Battlegrounds in the Abortion Wars

These 5 States Are the Next Battlegrounds in the Abortion Wars
Abortion rights groups are pouring tens of millions into these states to flip their legislatures in 2020.

by Carter Sherman
Oct 22 2019

When Americans think about the future of abortion, they often think of the Supreme Court decision to legalize abortion nationwide in Roe v. Wade. But over the last decade, the real battle over abortion hasn’t been in Washington, D.C. — it’s played out in statehouses across the country, where legislators have passed restriction after restriction on the procedure.

Now, abortion rights activists believe they have a unique chance to wrest back those state legislatures from abortion opponents. And though Election Day 2020 is still more than a year away, they’re already preparing.

Continued: https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/43kpy3/these-5-states-are-the-next-battlegrounds-in-the-abortion-wars


USA – How Six-Week Abortion Bans Are Fueling a ‘Radical’ Year for Abortion Law

How Six-Week Abortion Bans Are Fueling a 'Radical' Year for Abortion Law
The bans mark an unprecedented year for abortion legislation—and a potential political turning point.

Rosemary Westwood
Apr 12, 2019

The projected political reckoning of abortion rights has arrived. Abortion bills, as expected, dominated state legislatures in early 2019, pushing the issue ever closer to the United States Supreme Court.

Among the 28 states considering abortion bans in the first four months of the year, a handful of the most conservative are aiming to ban abortion at just six weeks' gestation—when an embryonic "heartbeat" (doctors use the term cardiac activity, and embryos don't have hearts so much as tissues that will become the heart) can be detected. Abortion rights groups say the measures are so extreme that they effectively amount to outright abortion bans, since few women who want abortions would be able to access them before the cut-off, or perhaps even know they're pregnant.

Continued: https://psmag.com/social-justice/how-six-week-abortion-bans-are-fueling-a-radical-year-for-abortion-law