Abortion in America: How access and attitudes have changed through the centuries

by: Eliza Siegel, Stacker
Jul 28, 2023

The Postal Service can legally deliver abortion medications in the U.S.—including to states with abortion restrictions or bans—according to a Justice Department decision posted online late Jan. 3. The Postal Service requested that the Justice Department provide guidance on this issue a week after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority voted to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in June 2022. That ruling, which sparked intense debate across the U.S., led to abortion restrictions and bans in many states.

In its decision, the Justice Department ruled that sending, delivering, and receiving abortion drugs by mail is not in violation of the 1873 Comstock Act —which aimed to prevent morally “corrupt” items from being delivered by mail—because there is no way to determine that the intent of the recipient is to commit an unlawful act. There are also no federal restrictions on the drugs in question.

Continued: https://www.ksnt.com/news/abortion-in-america-how-access-and-attitudes-have-changed-through-the-centuries/

Doctors weren’t considered in Dobbs, but now they’re on abortion’s legal front lines

July 3, 2022
Selena Simmons-Duffin

Historically, doctors have played a big role in abortion's legality. Back in the 1860s, physicians with the newly-formed American Medical Association worked to outlaw abortion in the U.S.

A century later, they were doing the opposite.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/07/03/1109483662/doctors-werent-considered-in-dobbs-but-now-theyre-on-abortions-legal-front-lines

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/

USA – Abortion Doesn’t Fuck Up Our Mental Health. Losing the Right to It Will.

"Forced parenthood only leads to continued cycles of trauma, as well as intergenerational trauma."

BY ROSEMARY DONAHUE
May 31, 2022

On Monday, May 2, a draft of a Supreme Court majority opinion vote written by Justice Samuel Alito to strike down Roe v. Wade was leaked. It hit the internet like a lightning bolt; though the law that preserves federal legal abortion hasn't officially been overturned yet, many have spent the last three weeks poring over the document's language, and its potential implications have brought the nation to yet another emotional boiling point.

In the draft, which aims to kick the issue of abortion back down to the state level, Alito writes, "Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences." But what, exactly, are these supposed consequences, and who has been suffering them? Anti-choice supporters often point to the supposed emotional harm caused by abortion, citing regret, depression, or even suicide as possible outcomes in its aftermath. While it's true abortion can be both an emotional topic and decision, this short-sighted argument isn't a valid cause to remove the choice from those who seek out this life-saving care.

Continued: https://www.allure.com/story/abortion-suicide-mental-health-link

America Almost Took a Different Path Toward Abortion Rights

Roe v. Wade was never expected to be the case that made history.

By Emily Bazelon
May 20, 2022

For three days in January 1970, they filled the 13th floor of the federal courthouse in Manhattan, women of all ages crowded into a conference room, sitting on the floor, spilling into the hallway. Some brought friends or husbands. One nursed a baby. Another was a painter who also taught elementary school. A third had gone to Catholic school. They’d come to give testimony in the case of Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz, the first in the country to challenge a state’s strict abortion law on behalf of women.

The witnesses in the courthouse were among 314 people, primarily women, brought together by a small team of lawyers, led by Florynce Kennedy and Nancy Stearns, to set up a legal argument no one had made before: that a woman’s right to an abortion was rooted in the Constitution’s promises of liberty and equal protection. New York permitted abortion only to save a woman’s life. Kennedy and Stearns wanted the court to understand how risking an illegal procedure or carrying a forced pregnancy could constrict women’s lives in ways that men did not experience.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/magazine/roe-v-wade-abortion-rights.html

20.05.2022

Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz

Coat Hanger Farewell

Diane Schulder Abrams

Equal Protection Clause

Griswold v. Connecticut

Justice Harry Blackmun

Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey

United States v. Virginia

women's abortion stories

USA – A landmark study tracks the lasting effect of having an abortion — or being denied one

May 15, 2022
Megan Burbank, Emily Kwong – NPR

Though it's impossible to know exactly what will happen to abortion access if Roe v. Wade is overturned, demographer Diana Greene Foster does know what happens when someone is denied an abortion. She documented it in her groundbreaking yearslong research project, The Turnaway Study and her findings provide insight into the ways getting an abortion – or being denied one – affects a person's mental health and economic wellbeing.

For over 10 years, Dr. Foster and her team of researchers tracked the experiences of women who'd received abortions or who had been denied them because of clinic policies on gestational age limits.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/05/15/1098347992/a-landmark-study-tracks-the-lasting-effect-of-having-an-abortion-or-being-denied

15.05.2022

USA – Anti-Abortion Groups Once Portrayed Women as Victims. That’s Changing.

March 19, 2022
By Mary Ziegler

With Roe v. Wade on thin ice, state legislatures are producing a wave of anti-abortion bills, some of them truly eye-popping. Missouri alone has in recent weeks tried to limit out-of-state travel for abortion, proposed treating the delivery or shipment of abortion pills as drug trafficking, and moved to make it a felony to perform an abortion in the event of an ectopic pregnancy (in which a fertilized egg implants outside the womb), a condition that can be life-threatening.

In the past, many extreme bills like these would have captured the public’s attention and then quickly disappeared, swept under the rug by lawmakers and abortion opponents who had easier-to-enact plans for dismantling abortion rights.

(This link goes to an unlocked version of the article.) Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/opinion/abortion-laws-bans-missouri.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhkS1UaCibSRdkhrxqAwvHFx6Ygh3j4aSycVi0Hxe0TGM2F-lzWYrd5Zp0zwzGfDpdnAYMYecZTnKVZLlA_DE6huIeFk5AIZCxp-du4BW5vmsyXUeh9rG7hYCzpcrcuge3h5kjYaGi7WabchGYzZ1ow-esTflGr3XECz63EA7Q1joE4haF9c8g8ETQQZyCKvO3qCQF9MLiGbRLa7Ao1X4JJSG2Z3I7cu_9bLlIkWR-RR2h_4G089NpaJNoXWa3_JBMlc8L66q4DPqR7ajO07TGHKYxX6XKpbQ&referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwAR3XEiGRZDlwpR7rVBS_SBHTuzhFumvaYtnRfq5o_9BuR-Etz1hSf56cuoo

How the Supreme Court could overrule Roe v. Wade without overruling Roe v. Wade

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is an existential threat to Roe — even if the Court doesn’t use the words “Roe v. Wade is overruled.”

By Ian Millhiser
Nov 29, 2021

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which the Supreme Court will hear on Wednesday, is the single greatest threat to abortion rights since Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973. It involves a Mississippi law that prohibits nearly all abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy, a law which violates the Supreme Court’s holding in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) that “a State may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability.”

“Viability” refers to the moment when a fetus can live outside of the womb, which typically occurs around the 24th week of pregnancy. (It’s worth noting that, while Mississippi’s law is often described as a “15-week” ban, the law provides that the 15-week clock starts ticking on “the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman.” So, in practice, the law functions more like a 13-week abortion ban.)

Continued: https://www.vox.com/2021/11/29/22796446/supreme-court-roe-wade-abortion-dobbs-jackson-womens-health-organization-overrule

How the Anti-Abortion Movement Used the Progressive Playbook to Chip Away at Roe v. Wade

Mary Ziegler and Robert L. Tsai
Sat, June 12, 2021

The Supreme Court captured its biggest headlines last month not for a decision, but for a case it agreed to review next year: Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The case turns on a 2018 Mississippi law banning abortion at 15 weeks, but its impact will likely reach well beyond one state. To uphold Mississippi’s law—which the Court’s conservative majority is expected to do—the Court will have to undo all or part of Roe v. Wade.

Such a sweeping decision might seem like an opportunistic swipe at abortion rights, a conservative court suddenly reversing 50 years of precedent with a single move. But if the Court does rule that way, the story behind it will be far more complex and important to understand. The attack on Roe has been decades in the making—and its successes owe not just to the strength of the conservative anti-abortion movement, but to the progressive playbook that achieved breakthroughs on civil rights, gay marriage and even abortion.

Continued: https://news.yahoo.com/anti-abortion-movement-used-progressive-060015339.html

The first abortion case of the Amy Coney Barrett era is now before the Supreme Court

The Court’s new majority has its first chance to take a shot at Roe v. Wade.

By Ian Millhiser
Dec 17, 2020

Last October, the Supreme Court handed down a fairly surprising order in an abortion case.

FDA v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists concerns whether patients should have an easier time obtaining a pill used in medication abortions while the Covid-19 pandemic is still raging, but the Trump administration saw in the case an opportunity to drastically roll back abortion rights. One of the administration’s arguments could force abortion patients to have unnecessary surgeries instead of receiving a far less invasive medication abortion, and it could potentially deny abortions to many people altogether.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/2020/12/17/22178362/supreme-court-abortion-amy-coney-barrett-fda-american-college-obstetricians-gynecologists