USA – I’m Black. I Thought White Feminism Would Keep Abortion Safe.

White women who once saw Roe as core to second-wave feminism seem not to be putting up much of a fight. Is it time for Black women to pick up the mantle?

05/27/2022
Erin Aubry Kaplan

When I was in my 20s, I had an abortion. Actually, I had more than one. It’s taken me more than a month even to write those sentences — a single, simple truth I had to break into two parts to make palatable. The impending official demise of Roe v. Wade has forced me to look at the depth of my reticence about this. People have lauded me over the years for allegedly brave things I’ve said in columns, for putting myself “out there,” but I’d never shared this. I always told myself it was because abortion wasn’t relevant to racial justice, which is the bulk of what I write about. Yet I’ve written about plenty of personal matters that are ostensibly nonracial — depression, money, crises with my dogs, my unfolding struggle with alopecia. All these things at some point have racial implications, as most things in America do. Those things certainly include abortion rights. But I left it alone.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/27/abortion-feminism-essay-white-black-00032987

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

Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives

Amanda Reyes

Candice Russell

Cherisse Scott

Christine Blasey Ford

Laurie Bertram Roberts

Leana Wen

Life’s Work: A Moral Argument for Choice

Loretta Ross

Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund

Naral Pro-Choice America

NARAL Pro-choice Texas

National Network of Abortion Funds

National Women’s Law Center

Physicians for Reproductive Health

Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice

Robin Marty

Roe v. Wade

sexual assault allegations

USA – Misogyny Is At The Core Of The Anti-Abortion Movement

Misogyny Is At The Core Of The Anti-Abortion Movement

Ebony Tucker, Shaina Goodman
April 10, 2019

From the White House to the Senate, from courthouses to state legislatures, everywhere you look across the country, men in power are simultaneously dismissing women’s experiences of sexual assault and further restricting access to abortion care.

There’s the cruel irony of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, declaring in one of his first opinions from the bench that he would support upholding an anti-abortion law in Louisiana, only months after he was confirmed despite the protests of women bravely sharing their stories of sexual assault.

Continued: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/04/229437/abortion-rights-sexual-assault-misogyny

Why women in Argentina are speaking up about their abortions

Why women in Argentina are speaking up about their abortions
Regular protests addressing violence against women in Argentina have led to a national debate about women’s rights in the country—particularly abortion.

Jul 26, 2018
Author & Photographer: Bridget Gleeson

One morning in December 2008, Daniela Luna woke up in an unfamiliar hotel room in Miami. Naked and disoriented, she was surrounded on either side by men she hardly knew—men who, like her, worked in the art world.

“I couldn’t understand what happened to me. I felt like I’d been run over by a train,” said Luna, a curator and artist, now 40. In a phone interview from Miami, she recalled how she tried to get a morning-after pill the following day, but it was only available with a prescription. On Christmas Day, after she had returned to Buenos Aires, she found out she was pregnant.

Continued: http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2018/argentina-women-protests/

The Northern Irish abortion issue could topple Theresa May once and for all – here’s why

The Northern Irish abortion issue could topple Theresa May once and for all – here’s why
It is fair to say the deal the prime minister made with the DUP wasn’t thought through

Rachael Revesz
June 4, 2018

Depending on which side of the Brexit debate you sit, it has been easy to blame obtuse EU bureaucrats or incompetent Westminster officials for the fragile state of negotiations. Behind the scenes, the DUP is the link in the chain that is increasingly likely to snap.

Soon after DUP leader Arlene Foster told Sky News that any Brexit deal that treated Northern Ireland differently to the rest of the UK would be her “only red line”, a cross-party coalition, including senior Tory MPs, announced that Foster could not have her cake and eat it. If she wanted equal application of Brexit in Northern Ireland, she would also have to accept same sex marriage and abortion.

Continued: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/northern-ireland-abortion-theresa-may-dup-arlene-foster-brexit-a8382616.html?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_todayworld

The Observer view on the global threat to access to abortion

The Observer view on the global threat to access to abortion
Women’s reproductive rights are under widespread threat, not least in America. This is no time for complacency

Observer editorial
Sun 20 May 2018

During his eight years in the White House, one of the themes President Obama frequently reflected on in speeches was the non-linear nature of social progress. “Progress doesn’t travel in a straight line,” he told Rutgers students in his commencement address in 2016. “It remains uneven and at times for every two steps forward, it feels like we take one step back.”

Those words feel particularly apt in relation to women’s rights. In the last year, the #MeToo movement has seen women globally assert their right to live and work without the threat of sexual assault and harassment. But in the world’s wealthiest democracy, women’s reproductive rights are more imperilled than they have been in 30 years.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/20/observer-view-on-abortion-donald-trump-gag-rule

I Saw A Woman Die From A Self-Induced Abortion — That’s The Cost Of Our Silence

I Saw A Woman Die From A Self-Induced Abortion — That's The Cost Of Our Silence

By Nisha Verma
May 1, 2018

A few months ago, I got a tattoo of a coat hanger on my right wrist. When people ask me what it means, I tell them the story of the woman I once met who didn't deserve to die. I tell them about the lack of access to safe and legal abortion that killed her.

Warning: Some readers may find the following details graphic and triggering.

At the time, I worked as a resident at a hospital in Botswana. This woman had tried to end her pregnancy with a "coat hanger abortion" — in her case, by placing sticks through her vagina into her uterus. She was pronounced dead on arrival to the hospital. She was 22 years old. She died because she lived in a country where safe and legal abortion did not exist.  

Continued: https://www.bustle.com/p/i-saw-a-woman-die-from-a-self-induced-abortion-thats-the-cost-of-our-silence-8867712

Not only in Ireland is there a fight to be won on abortion

Not only in Ireland is there a fight to be won on abortion
Sarah Ditum
Dublin might be preparing for change, but in Poland and elsewhere women’s rights are under threat

Sun 4 Feb 2018

Before the end of May, Ireland will hold a referendum that could finally give Irish women legal access to abortion in their own country. It feels like the time is right for change. The taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, who made the announcement last week, called himself “pro-life” as recently as 2015; now he says he’ll be campaigning against the repressive eighth amendment that values a foetus’s right to life equally with a pregnant woman’s (or, in the language of the constitution, the “unborn” and the “mother”). It’s a stunning and very welcome reversal.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/04/not-only-ireland-we-need-new-view-on-abortion