USA – Liberal Cities Are Not Immune to Mounting Attacks on Abortion Rights

BY Emily Janakiram & Katie Finnigan, Truthout
April 16, 2022

An anti-abortion group that masquerades as progressive in an attempt to gain a following in liberal cities suddenly surged into mainstream news headlines this spring after the Washington Metro Police Department recovered five fetuses from the apartment of anti-abortion activist Lauren Handy.

Handy is a member of the group “Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising” (PAAU), which announced its formation in September 2021. The group claims to be “pro-BIPOC” and “pro-LGBTQ,” but in practice, the group’s actions align with a violent, right-wing anti-abortion tradition.

Continued: https://truthout.org/articles/liberal-cities-are-not-immune-to-mounting-attacks-on-abortion-rights/

How the Real Jane Roe Shaped the Abortion Wars

The all-too-human plaintiff of Roe v. Wade captured the messy contradictions hidden by a polarizing debate.

By Margaret Talbot
September 13, 2021

Roe v. Wade may be the rare Supreme Court decision that most Americans can name, but it’s also one of the few that many volubly disparage—and not just anti-abortion activists who want to get rid of it altogether. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a staunch advocate of access to abortion but an open critic of the reasoning behind Roe. She thought the rationale should have centered on preventing sex discrimination rather than on preserving a right to privacy. “The image you get from reading the Roe v. Wade opinion is it’s mostly a doctor’s-rights case—a doctor’s right to prescribe what he thinks his patient needs,” Ginsburg told the legal writer and scholar Jeffrey Rosen, in 2019. “My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a doctor’s-right notion, but a woman’s right to control her own destiny, to be able to make choices without a Big Brother state telling her what she can and cannot do.”

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/how-the-real-jane-roe-shaped-the-abortion-wars

We Need a Left Strategy for Confronting the Anti-Abortion Movement

The anti-abortion movement has grown increasingly militant in recent years — and increasingly successful. The liberal pushback isn’t cutting it. We need a leftist strategy to defend abortion rights.

BY ANNE RUMBERGER
July 14, 2021

Abortion access has been uneven and inadequate for decades. But with the recent announcement that the Supreme Court will hear a major abortion case next term concerning a Mississippi state law that would ban almost all abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, the threat has reached new levels.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization strikes at the heart of the precedent set in Roe v. Wade in 1973 that abortion is permitted until fetus viability, generally at around twenty-four weeks. As it hears the case, the Supreme Court will consider one clearly delineated question: whether or not “all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” Mary Ziegler, author of Abortion and the Law in America, said recently that the court taking up the case could result in overturning Roe, but it could also get rid of viability as the point at which states can ban abortion.

Continued: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/07/anti-abortion-movement-choice-reproductive-justice

14.07.2021

Commentary

Featured

Alliance Defending Freedom

Anne Rumberger

anti-choice intimidation

anti-choice protests

anti-choice restrictions

anti-choice terrorism

anti-choice violence

At the Well

Bevelyn Beatty

Child Evangelism Fellowship

clinic blockades

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Edmee Chavannes

Father Fidelis Moscinski

Flip Benham

Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act

Marjorie Dannenfelser

Mary Wagner

Mary Ziegler

Monica Migliorino Miller

National Abortion Federation

Operation Rescue

Operation Save America

overturning Roe v. Wade

USA – The Capitol Insurrection Was Fed by the Anti-Abortion Movement

BY Tina Vásquez, Prism
February 2, 2021

Reproductive justice advocate Jordyn Close watched with the rest of the nation on Jan. 6 as Donald Trump supporters invaded the Capitol. Some were outfitted in tactical gear and had zip ties at the ready. Others brought nooses and pitchforks and Confederate flags. The insurrectionists broke windows, ransacked lawmakers’ offices, and spread feces on the Capitol walls. By the end of it all, five people died.

The escalation from rhetoric to violence at the Capitol has shocked many Americans. Close, who works with Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity (URGE), is an abortion storyteller with We Testify, and who serves on the board of the abortion fund Women Have Options Ohio, is less surprised. Very early into the news coverage of the insurrection, Close saw a number of familiar faces. Overwhelmingly, these were white men who — when not trying to overthrow the government — spend a great deal of their time harassing people outside of abortion clinics.

Continued: https://truthout.org/articles/the-capitol-insurrection-was-fed-by-the-anti-abortion-movement/

02.02.2021

Featured

News

A Preferred Women’s Health Clinic

Abby Johnson

Abortion Access Front

abortion stigma

anti-choice hatred

anti-choice misogyny

anti-choice terrorism

anti-choice violence

anti-choice white supremacy

Faithful Soldier Training Camp

Operation Save America

Political Research Associates

Triangle Abortion Access Coalition

Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity

URGE

We Testify

white supremacy

Women Have Options Ohio

Women's Health Center of West Virginia

United States

Anti-choice

USA – A Movement Grows Outside of East Charlotte Abortion Clinic

The 'New Feminist' defenders

Ryan Pitkin
September 24, 2020

The video begins with a 19-year-old woman relaxing in a lawn chair outside of A Preferred Women’s Health Center, an abortion clinic on Latrobe Drive in east Charlotte where tensions between anti-abortion activists and pro-choice clinic defenders have risen in recent years.

In the video, the 19-year-old clinic defender nonchalantly reads the lyrics to the song “WAP,” which stands for Wet Ass Pussy. She’s talking calmly, but just loud enough to drown out Philip “Flip” Benham, a known religious extremist who has spent nearly 20 years protesting and harassing patients at the east Charlotte clinic. While Benham is usually the loudest man on Latrobe Drive, he looks bewildered by the woman’s confident reading of Cardi B and Meg Thee Stallion’s gospel. He continues to read a Bible passage aloud just feet away from her. Continued: https://qcnerve.com/new-defenders-charlotte-abortion-clinic/

USA – How a group of clinic volunteers use TikTok to battle anti-abortion protesters

BY MORGAN SUNG
Sep 11, 2020

Sometimes you need to fight fire with fire — or fire with "WAP" lyrics.

A group of abortion clinic escorts and defenders have developed a devoted fanbase on TikTok after going viral for their unconventional methods of opposing religious protesters. The clinic, which is based in North Carolina, is often swamped with protesters who read Bible passages and chant about sin in an effort to intimidate patients seeking reproductive care. The army of primarily teenage girls defending the clinic's patients are fighting back in the most quintessential Gen Z way possible: bullying them on the internet.

Continued: https://mashable.com/article/tiktok-abortion-clinic-defenders-pro-choice/

How the Anti-Abortion Movement Is Responding to Jane Roe’s “Deathbed Confession”

How the Anti-Abortion Movement Is Responding to Jane Roe’s “Deathbed Confession”

By Ruth Graham
May 22, 2020

The pro-life movement has always loved a conversion story. People who reject their former lives working for pro-choice causes are some of the most prominent voices in the movement, and the existence of abortion regret—a woman changing her mind after it’s too late—is a key legislative and rhetorical tactic. So when the real-life “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade announced two decades after that landmark Supreme Court case that she had realized abortion ought to be illegal after all, she became an instant star within the pro-life movement.

A bombshell documentary airing Friday night on FX adds a final shocking twist to Norma McCorvey’s ideologically eventful life. In AKA Jane Roe, McCorvey offers what she calls a “deathbed confession”: Actually, she was basically pro-choice all along and only became a pro-life activist for the money.

Continued: https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/05/jane-roe-norma-mccorvey-confession-anti-abortion.html

USA – Roe v Wade plaintiff admits abortion rights reversal ‘was all an act’ in new film

Roe v Wade plaintiff admits abortion rights reversal ‘was all an act’ in new film
Norma McCorvey, known as Jane Roe, reveals she was paid by evangelical Christian groups to take anti-abortion stance

Kenya Evelyn in Washington
Tue 19 May 2020

Norma McCorvey, most notable for being the plaintiff known as Jane Roe in the 1973 landmark supreme court case Roe v Wade that led to abortion becoming legal in the United States, made a stunning admission just before her death in 2017, it has emerged.

“This is my deathbed confession,” she explained.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/19/roe-v-wade-norma-mccorvey-abortion-rights-documentary-aka-jane-roe?CMP=share_btn_link=

USA – Jane Roe’s Deathbed Confession: Anti-Abortion Conversion ‘All an Act’ Paid for by the Christian Right

Jane Roe’s Deathbed Confession: Anti-Abortion Conversion ‘All an Act’ Paid for by the Christian Right
The new FX documentary “AKA Jane Roe,” out May 22, contains a shocking revelation: Roe (of “Roe v. Wade” fame) played the part of an anti-abortion crusader in exchange for money.

Cassie da Costa, Entertainment Writer
Published May. 19, 2020

In its final 20 minutes, the documentary film AKA Jane Roe delivers quite the blow to conservatives who have weaponized the story of Jane Roe herself—real name, Norma McCorvey—to argue that people with uteruses should have to carry any and all pregnancies to term.

McCorvey, who died in 2017, became Jane Roe when, as a young homeless woman, she was unable to get a legal or safe abortion in the state of Texas. Her willingness to lend her experience to the legal case for abortion led to the passing of Roe v. Wade in 1973, which legalized abortions in all 50 states (though red states do all they can to get around this; recently, several have even used the COVID-19 pandemic to make abortions functionally impossible to procure). But conservatives had a field day in the mid-‘90s when the assertive, media-savvy pro-choice advocate and activist McCorvey became an anti-abortion born-again ex-gay Christian with the help of leaders of the evangelical Christian right, Reverend Flip Benham (of the infamous Operation Rescue) and Reverend Rob Schenck. A conservative film, Roe v. Wade, starring Jon Voight and Stacey Dash, will dramatize McCorvey’s “conversion.”

Continued: https://www.thedailybeast.com/jane-roe-confesses-anti-abortion-conversion-all-an-act-paid-for-by-the-christian-right