Reproductive justice pioneer Loretta Ross on strategies for the post-Roe South

By Elisha Brown
January 26, 2023

This past Sunday, Jan. 22, marked what would've been the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark United States Supreme Court ruling that guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion. Instead of celebratory marches, though, protesters gathered across the country to raise awareness about new state restrictions on reproductive rights imposed in the seven months since the high court overturned Roe in its Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling out of Mississippi.

Thirteen states — eight of them in the South — now ban most abortions with few exceptions, and more restrictive laws are expected to be up for debate in Republican-controlled legislatures this year. It remains unclear if anti-abortion lawmakers will also take up bills that make having and caring for children easier in the South, a region beset with high maternal mortality and child poverty rates, and where eight states have still refused to expand Medicaid coverage to more residents under the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

"There's a number of things people could be doing, if they cared about children once they are here," observes reproductive justice pioneer Loretta Ross.

Continued: https://www.facingsouth.org/loretta-ross-on-roe-and-reproductive-justice

26.01.2023

USA – This Is the Anti-Abortion Movement’s Next Big Move

Anti-abortion activists are already pushing for a world where a fetus has more rights than pregnant people.

Mar 10, 2022
Caroline Reilly, Rewire News

For decades, anti-abortion lawmakers have operated under the false pretense that their only target was abortion providers. Pregnant people, depicted mostly as victims of the predatory abortion industrial complex—or some other unhinged, alarmist framework—were safe from their wrath.

But their tone has shifted as of late. The concept of fetal “personhood,” which defines life as beginning at conception, has become mainstream, and those advocates are pushing for the laws around abortion to reflect that.

Continued: https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2022/03/10/this-is-the-anti-abortion-movements-next-big-move/

Before Roe

By Ilana Panich-Linsman and Lauren Kelley
Photographs by Ilana Panich-Linsman
New York Times, Jan 21, 2022

The end of Roe v. Wade is coming.

The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling in June in a case from Mississippi called Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and that ruling will likely overturn or gut Roe — that imperfect but critical precedent that has given Americans the right to abortion since 1973. Since Jan. 22, 1973, to be precise.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/01/21/opinion/roe-v-wade-abortion-history.html

21.01.2022

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Human Rights

Linking Voter Suppression and Abortion Restrictions: “If We Lose Voting Rights, We Lose Women’s Rights”

A combination of legal restrictions on voting and abortion, physical violence and intimidation tactics have emerged again during a time of renewed challenges to white male supremacy.

5/7/2021
by CARRIE N. BAKER

In the first four months of 2021, Republican lawmakers introduced over 360 bills to restrict voting rights and 536 bills to restrict abortion rights. The defeat of Donald Trump, and Biden’s attempts to dismantle Trump’s white supremacist agenda, have inspired a fevered campaign by state-level Republican lawmakers of voter suppression and abortion restrictions. While at first glance these efforts might appear to be unrelated, they are deeply connected, says Smith College professor Loretta Ross.

“The right-wing has an intersectional agenda. Their whole plan is to maintain a white majority by whatever means possible. So that requires them to try to socially engineer white women into having more babies and to restrict voting rights and immigrant rights,” Ross told Ms.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2021/05/07/voter-suppression-abortion-restrictions-womens-rights/

The Long History of the Anti-Abortion Movement’s Links to White Supremacists

Racism and xenophobia have been woven into the anti-abortion movement for decades, despite the careful curation of its public image.

By Alex DiBranco
(posted online January 8, 2021)
FEBRUARY 3, 2020

The anti-abortion movement in the United States has long been complicit with white supremacy. In recent decades, the movement mainstream has been careful to protect its public image by distancing itself from overt white nationalists in its ranks. Last year, anti-abortion leader Kristen Hatten was ousted from her position as vice president of the anti-choice group New Wave Feminists after identifying as an “ethnonationalist” and sharing white supremacist alt-right content. In 2018, when neo-Nazis from the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP) sought to join the local March for Life rally organized by Tennessee Right to Life, the anti-abortion organization rejected TWP’s involvement. (The organization’s statement, however, engaged in the same false equivalency between left and right that Trump used in the wake of fatal white supremacist violence at Charlottesville. “Our organization’s march has a single agenda to support the rights of mothers and the unborn, and we don’t agree with the violent agenda of white supremacists or Antifa,” the group wrote on its Facebook page.)

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/anti-abortion-white-supremacy/

08.01.2021

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USA – The Abortion Doctor and His Accuser

The Abortion Doctor and His Accuser
What does it mean to take women’s claims of sexual assault seriously?

By Katha Pollitt
March 2, 2029

Until March 25, 2019, Dr. Willie Parker was a highly respected and much-loved abortion provider in Alabama, the celebrated author of a best-selling book, Life’s Work, in which he defended abortion from a Christian perspective, and a frequent, charismatic speaker and honoree at pro-choice conferences and events. An imposing middle-aged black man who grew up poor in Alabama, he was the movement’s rock star. That all changed overnight, when Candice Russell, a 35-year-old Latina volunteer in Dallas, posted an article on Medium, “To All the Women Whose Names I Don’t Know, About the Pain We Share, the Secrets We Keep, and the Silence That Shouldn’t Have Been Asked For.”

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/willie-parker-abortion-me-too/

USA – The #MeToo Case That Divided the Abortion-Rights Movement

The #MeToo Case That Divided the Abortion-Rights Movement
When an activist accused one of the most respected physicians in the movement of sexually assaulting her, everyone quickly took sides.

Story by Maggie Bullock
March 2020 Issue, Atlantic Magazine
(Posted Feb 21, 2020)

On a 92-degree morning in September, three clinic escorts gathered in the meager shade of a tree outside the Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives. They arrive here at 8:30 a.m. on the dot, regular as clock-punchers, on the three days a week the Huntsville clinic is open to perform abortions. The women and girls arrive dressed for comfort in sweatpants and shower slides, carrying pillows from home or holding the hand of a partner or friend. The escorts, meanwhile, wear brightly colored vests and wield giant umbrellas to block the incoming patients from the sight, if not the sound, of the other group that comes here like clockwork: the protesters.

Sometimes there are as many as a dozen. This day there were four: one woman, three men, all white. Four doesn’t sound like that many until you’re downwind of them maniacally hollering: Mommy, don’t kill me! You’re lynching your black baby! They rip their arms and legs off! They suffer! They torture them!

Continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-abortion-doctor-and-his-accuser/605578/

21.02.2020

Abortion Access Front

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Amanda Reyes

Candice Russell

Cherisse Scott

Christine Blasey Ford

Laurie Bertram Roberts

Leana Wen

Life’s Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

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Naral Pro-Choice America

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National Network of Abortion Funds

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USA – The Long History of the Anti-Abortion Movement’s Links to White Supremacists

The Long History of the Anti-Abortion Movement’s Links to White Supremacists
Racism and xenophobia have been woven into the anti-abortion movement for decades, despite the careful curation of its public image.

By Alex DiBranco
Feb 3, 2020

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/anti-abortion-white-supremacy/

03.02.2020

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Will 2020 be the year abortion is banned in the US?

Will 2020 be the year abortion is banned in the US?
A conservative supreme court will take up its first abortion case as activists brace for a fight that could change everything

Jessica Glenza
Tue 21 Jan 2020

In a centuries-long debate about gender and sexuality, 2020 could mark a turning point for abortion rights in the US.

In the coming year, the anti-abortion president, Donald Trump, faces re-election, and a conservative supreme court will take up its first abortion case, with potentially far-reaching consequences for a woman’s right to choose in America.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/20/us-abortion-rights-ban-2020

USA – Fighting for Abortion Access in the South

Fighting for Abortion Access in the South
A fund in Georgia is responding to restrictive legislation with a familial kind of care.

By Alexis Okeowo
Oct 14th issue, the New Yorker

In June, 1994, at a pro-choice conference in Chicago, twelve black women gathered together to talk. One, Loretta Ross, was the executive director of the first rape crisis center in this country. Another, Toni Bond, was the executive director of the Chicago Abortion Fund. A third, Cynthia Newbille, was the leader of the National Black Women’s Health Project, which was among the first national organizations to be devoted to the wellness of black women and girls. After the first day of the event, which was hosted by the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance and the Ms. Foundation, the group met in a hotel room. “We did what black women do when we’re in spaces where there are just a handful of us,” Bond, who is now a religious scholar, recalled. “We pulled the sistas together and talked about what was missing.”

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/14/fighting-for-abortion-access-in-the-south

14.10.2019