‘It’s Breaking My Heart’: Abortion Providers on Life After Roe

For many abortion providers, working in a clinic isn’t just a job—it’s a calling. But clinics are businesses, too, and in the 15 states that have banned almost all abortions, business has been turbulent.

Carter Sherman, VICE
June 28, 2023

Kathaleen Pittman was too angry to retire.

Pittman had worked at Hope Medical Group, one of the last abortion clinics in Louisiana, for thirty years. She’d started there as a part-time counselor in 1992; by 2022, she was running the place. She’d gone to the Supreme Court to defend her clinic and won, successfully striking down a Louisiana abortion restriction in 2020.

Two years after that victory, she watched as the Supreme Court dismantled her life’s work by overturning Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. She went back to court to try and fend off Louisiana’s cascade of abortion bans, but a month after the overturning, the clinic had to close. Louisiana had outlawed nearly all abortions.

Continued: https://www.rsn.org/001/its-breaking-my-heart-abortion-providers-on-life-after-roe.html


Texas – Inside the Plan to End Legal Abortion

Inside the Plan to End Legal Abortion

Esther Wang
May 22, 2020

Whiteface is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it blip in Texas’s oil patch 50 minutes west of Lubbock that only a few hundred people call home, so tiny that describing it as a small town would be a stretch. But on a rainy evening in mid-March, several dozen of its residents along with people from neighboring towns crammed into a worn-down community center on the town’s main strip for a meeting of Whiteface’s elected officials, an unusually large audience for their regular council meeting.

“I know y’all aren’t here to listen to our business,” joked one of the council members. And it was true. That night, the council would be voting on an anti-abortion ordinance that, if passed, would make Whiteface the latest so-called “sanctuary city for the unborn” in the state. With its approval, Whiteface would join a dozen other Texas towns that in recent months had declared abortion to be murder and announced that abortions (and in some towns, even emergency contraception like Plan B) were “unlawful” within the town’s limits; some of the ordinances, too, designated a list of the state’s leading abortion providers and advocacy groups as “criminal entities.” The crowd in the sparsely decorated community center, crammed into rows of red and yellow plastic chairs, had amassed to show their support for the ordinance, and to urge the Whiteface council to officially designate the town a self-proclaimed “sanctuary city for the unborn.”

Continued: https://theslot.jezebel.com/inside-the-plan-to-end-legal-abortion-1843155358


Texas and Ohio Include Abortion as Medical Procedures That Must Be Delayed

Texas and Ohio Include Abortion as Medical Procedures That Must Be Delayed
The moves by the states set off a new front in the political fight over abortion during the coronavirus pandemic.

by Sabrina Tavernise
Published March 23, 2020

Texas and Ohio have included abortions among the nonessential surgeries and medical procedures that they are requiring to be delayed, setting off a new front in the fight over abortion rights in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States.

Both states said they were trying to preserve extremely precious protective equipment for health care workers and to make space for a potential flood of coronavirus patients.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/us/coronavirus-texas-ohio-abortion.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share


USA – The Next Big Abortion Case Comes Down to John Roberts

The Next Big Abortion Case Comes Down to John Roberts

By Irin Carmon, The Intelligencer
Feb. 28, 2020

Almost four years ago, I sat on a cable-news set waiting for the Supreme Court to hand down a ruling on a Texas abortion law that, reputable medical organizations agreed, amounted to a bogus justification for shutting down abortion clinics. The live feed was trained on candidate Hillary Clinton’s Cincinnati rally, featuring Elizabeth Warren, who had just endorsed her.

Alike in blonde bobs and jewel tones, if not much else, the two raised their clasped hands to the sky in a show of party unity and the hint of an all-female ticket, or at least a future in which reproductive autonomy, along with everything else, didn’t depend on the whims of a tiny number of white men. The particular man we were waiting on that day was Justice Anthony Kennedy. Minutes later, the networks cut away to announce that his vote in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt would keep the clinics open, ruling that the Texas law placed an unconstitutional burden on women.

Continued: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/john-roberts-choice.html


USA – One of Supreme Court’s most important abortion cases has just begun

One of Supreme Court’s most important abortion cases has just begun

By CBS News -
November 26, 2019

The lawsuit that will decide the future of abortion access in Louisiana – and the rest of the country – is officially underway.

A 63-page opening brief was filed late Monday night by the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) in a Supreme Court case that could leave Louisiana without access to legal abortion and provide a roadmap for other anti-abortion access states to follow.

Continued: https://www.wcbi.com/one-of-supreme-courts-most-important-abortion-cases-has-just-begun/


USA – The Supreme Court Could Restrict Abortion Sooner Than Previously Thought

The Supreme Court Could Restrict Abortion Sooner Than Previously Thought
Abortion advocates are keeping a close eye on a Louisiana case that could come before the Supreme Court within the next two months

By Tessa Stuart
April 18, 2019

Kathleen Pittman has been the clinic administrator at Hope Medical Group in Shreveport, Louisiana, since 2010. Back when she first took the job, there were seven abortion clinics operating in the state. Today, there are three. Earlier this year, after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a law that would have required every doctor who provides abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital, that number temporarily fell to two. It could have dwindled to just one if the Supreme Court had not stepped in, temporarily blocking the law from going into effect.

On Wednesday, the Center for Reproductive Rights asked the Supreme Court to overturn the Fifth Circuit’s decision, keeping the three clinics left in Louisiana open. And, in an unusual step, they’re asking for the court to overturn the law without a hearing because of its striking similarities to a law the court already struck down three years ago, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt.

Continued: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/supreme-court-abortion-louisiana-821017/