15-week abortion bans are the center of Republican debate. Experts say that cutoff is arbitrary.

Anti-abortion politicians have recently linked 15-weeks to fetal pain. That benchmark has been moving for years — and it's still not accurate.

Shefali Luthra
December 6, 2023

The Republican debate over abortion has centered around one number: 15. Backers of a 15-week federal ban tout it as a compromise measure, even in the face of recent electoral defeat.

Anti-abortion advocates hope congressional candidates will embrace this measure, and they’re pushing GOP presidential candidates to promise they would sign such a bill.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2023/12/15-week-abortion-bans-arbitrary-number-republican-debate/

Abortion opposition related to beliefs about fetal pain perception

Media release from the University of Otago
Thursday 13 May 2021

A person’s stance on abortion is linked to their, often inaccurate, belief about when a fetus can feel pain, a University of Otago study has found.

Lead author Emma Harcourt, PhD candidate in Otago’s Centre for Science Communication, says misinformation about abortion and pregnancy is common and potentially harmful.

Continued: https://www.nzdoctor.co.nz/article/abortion-opposition-related-beliefs-about-fetal-pain-perception

13.05.2021

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Ireland – Anti-abortion TDs set up all-party group with aim to amend legislation

Group calls for pain relief to be given to foetuses with fatal abnormalities

Wed, Dec 2, 2020
Pat Leahy

Anti-abortion TDs have set up a new all-party group and will seek to amend the legislation on abortion when it comes up for review next year.

Independent TD Carol Nolan said the amendments were likely to require that pain relief be administered to foetuses in the case of late-term abortions carried out on the grounds of fatal foetal abnormalities.

Continued: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/anti-abortion-tds-set-up-all-party-group-with-aim-to-amend-legislation-1.4425586

02.12.2020

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Oireachtas Life and Dignity Group

How the Supreme Court could overturn Roe — while claiming to respect precedent

Conservatives could build on abortion restrictions that point to “scientific uncertainty.”

By Mary Ziegler
July 1, 2020

The Supreme Court’s recent abortion ruling shows that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. means it when he says that “the legal doctrine of stare decisis requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases alike.” Casting the deciding vote Monday in June Medical Services v. Russo, he ruled against an abortion restriction that Louisiana claimed protected women against unscrupulous doctors. The state even asked the court to prevent abortion providers from suing on behalf of their patients, claiming a conflict of interest. If these arguments were new, the chief justice almost certainly would have accepted them both. The problem was that the Supreme Court had heard them before: In 2016, the justices invalidated an identical Texas law. Roberts couldn’t distinguish the two statutes enough to make a different ruling — not while respecting precedent.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-supreme-court-could-overturn-roe/2020/07/01/51fe4a2c-bb1e-11ea-80b9-40ece9a701dc_story.html

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

USA – Legislative Lowlights: Lawmakers in Ten States Have Introduced ‘Heartbeat’ Bans This Yea

Legislative Lowlights: Lawmakers in Ten States Have Introduced ‘Heartbeat’ Bans This Year

Feb 11, 2019
Brie Shea

Rewire.News tracks anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ legislation as it works its way through state legislatures. Here’s an overview of the bills we’re watching.

Arkansas and Tennessee lawmakers are planning for the fall of Roe v. Wade, Republicans in multiple states are still obsessed with bathrooms, and legislators in at least ten states have introduced measures this year to ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat has been detected.

continued: https://rewire.news/article/2019/02/11/legislative-lowlights-ten-states-introduced-heartbeat-bans/

USA – When Your President Calls You a Murderer

When Your President Calls You a Murderer
I have had a third-trimester abortion. And I am not alone.

Feb 6, 2019
T.S. Mendola

It’s a hell of a thing to hear your president call you a murderer.

That’s not quite the whole picture, though, of what President Donald Trump did to later abortion patients during the State of the Union speech Tuesday night. After he invoked the Madonna, a “beautiful image of a mother holding her infant child,” women abruptly vanished for the rest of the time he took to throw enough red meat to the anti-choice base to keep money from the evangelical coffers flowing. Instead, we disappeared into the “womb” from which “beautiful” babies are “ripped moments before birth;” we are nothing more than the “womb” in which “children … can feel pain.”

Continued: https://rewire.news/article/2019/02/06/when-your-president-calls-you-a-murderer/

Why Trump spent so much time criticizing abortion during the State of the Union

Why Trump spent so much time criticizing abortion during the State of the Union
He may see it as a winning issue for 2020.

By Anna North
Feb 5, 2019

“Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life,” said President Donald Trump during his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night. “And let us reaffirm a fundamental truth: All children — born and unborn — are made in the holy image of God.”

In uncharacteristically extensive comments on the subject, Trump criticized efforts to loosen abortion restrictions in New York and Virginia. He also called for federal anti-abortion legislation.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/5/18212521/state-of-the-union-trump-abortion-northam

USA – The Abortion Wars Have Become a Fight Over Science

The Abortion Wars Have Become a Fight Over Science
Forty-six years after Roe, the two camps increasingly disagree on basic facts about abortion — and who has the authority to determine them.

By Mary Ziegler
Jan. 22, 2019

It was perhaps, at first glance, an unusual feature of the 2019 March for Life that it downplayed what many have come to think of as the central claim of the anti-abortion movement: that the unborn have a constitutional right to life.

Instead, march organizers focused on proclaiming that science was on their side. They circulated material on “when human life begins,” whether abortions are ever medically necessary and when fetal life becomes viable. They praised legal restrictions based on what science supposedly says about fetal pain.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/opinion/abortion-roe-science.html

USA – Six Facts About Abortion to Counter March for Life’s Junk Science

Six Facts About Abortion to Counter March for Life’s Junk Science

Jan 16, 2019
Laura Huss

This year's March for Life claims that “being pro-life is not in opposition to science," though many of its positions fly in the face of evidence.

The 46th annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., has adopted “Unique from Day One” as its theme, an apparent declaration of the extreme anti-choice position that life begins at conception. The event not only asserts this view as a moral position but also claims that “being pro-life is not in opposition to science.”

This co-opting of science is in line with a strategy and infrastructure that the anti-choice movement has been building for some time.

Continued: https://rewire.news/article/2019/01/16/six-facts-about-abortion-to-counter-march-for-lifes-junk-science/