Connecting the dots on the Alabama abortion story

Connecting the dots on the Alabama abortion story
[A roundup of notable news stories on the new Alabama law]

By Jon Allsop, CJR
May 20, 2019

“It’s time to hear Alabama’s women.” That was the headline on identical front pages published yesterday by The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times, and the Mobile Press-Register, three titles within the Alabama Media Group. Last week, after lawmakers in the state pushed through a near-total ban on abortion, the three papers invited readers to weigh in on what it’s like to be a woman in Alabama; within 24 hours, more than 200 had responded. Yesterday, the papers published many of the essays they received. “Alabama was the talk of the nation last week as the most restrictive abortion ban in the country became law,” Kelly Ann Scott, who edits the three titles, wrote in an introduction to the package. “But, missing from many of those conversations were the voices of women from this state.”

Continued: https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/alabama_abortion_ban_law.php


From Alabama to Armagh, women are on the front line waging the ‘war on abortion’

From Alabama to Armagh, women are on the front line waging the ‘war on abortion’
Far from being driven just by men, many female voices are heard in the anti-choice lobby

Catherine Bennett
Sat 18 May 2019

Intensifying campaigns to criminalise all abortion in the US have been summarised, accurately, as a war on women, one that calls on women to, as the presidential contender Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has put it, “fight like hell”.

In terms of knowing the enemy, much of it, in the US, will certainly resemble the Alabama misogynists – the 25 white, male, no longer young Republicans who have just stripped half their state’s population of reproductive rights. Photographs have been generously distributed. But, as the men would probably be the first to admit, they couldn’t have ushered in a generation or more of unwanted children without assistance from at least two women combatants, Terri Collins and the state governor, Kay Ivey.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/18/from-alabama-to-armagh-women-are-on-the-front-line-in-the-war-on-abortion


What Actually Happens When a Country Bans Abortion

What Actually Happens When a Country Bans Abortion
Romania under Ceausescu created a dystopian horror of overcrowded, filthy orphanages, and thousands died from back-alley abortions.

By Amy Mackinnon
May 16, 2019

As lawmakers in Alabama this week passed a bill that would outlaw abortion in the U.S. state entirely, protesters outside the statehouse wore blood-red robes, a nod to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which childbearing is entirely controlled by the state. Hours later, the book was trending on Twitter.

But opponents of the restrictive abortion laws currently being considered in the United States don’t need to look to fiction for admonitory examples of where these types of laws can lead. For decades, communist Romania was a real-life test case of what can happen when a country outlaws abortion entirely, and the results were devastating.

Continued: https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/16/what-actually-happens-when-a-country-bans-abortion-romania-alabama/