The Terrifying Global Reach of the American Anti-Abortion Movement

Conservatives have not limited their attack on reproductive rights to the United States. They’ve been busy imposing their will on other countries, too—with disastrous consequences for millions of poor women.

Jodi Enda
March 18, 2024

Because Editar Ochieng knew the three young men, she didn’t think twice when they beckoned her into a house in an isolated area near the Nairobi River. One was like a brother; the other two were her neighbors in the sprawling Kenyan slum of Kibera.

Ochieng did not know the woman who performed her abortion. She and a friend scoured Nairobi until they found her, an untrained practitioner who worked in the secrecy of her home and charged a fraction of what a medical professional would. Mostly, what Ochieng remembers is the agony when this stranger inserted something into her vagina and “pierced” her womb. “It was really very painful. Really, really, really painful,” she told me. Afterward, Ochieng said, she cut up her mattress to use in place of sanitary pads, which she could not afford. She was 16 years old.

Continued: https://newrepublic.com/article/179485/american-anti-abortion-movement-terrifying-global-reach


The abortion myths Republicans are recycling to reframe a losing issue

Anti-abortion activists lost every referendum on the issue in 2022 and the right is scrambling to find a way to talk about a political hot potato

Carter Sherman
Wed 27 Sep 2023

The post-Roe v Wade battle over abortion rights may just torpedo Republicans’ shot at the White House next year, and they know it.

Anti-abortion activists lost every abortion-related voter referendum last year, while ire over the fall of Roe has been credited with boosting Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Now, Republicans in the presidential primary are scrambling to figure out how to talk about and legislate abortion. But they’re regurgitating some common anti-abortion myths to make their case.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/27/abortion-myths-republicans


Republicans have made it clear: No state is safe from abortion bans

BY SVANTE MYRICK, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR
08/28/23

Most Americans believe abortion should be legal in most cases. In every state where voters have voted on the issue since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, voters have sided with reproductive freedom and against abortion bans.

But the Republican presidential debate made it clear that those facts will not stop Republican politicians from doing what is being demanded by the party’s anti-choice zealots: pass a nationwide abortion ban.

Continued: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4173645-the-gop-has-made-it-clear-no-state-is-safe-from-abortion-bans/


Republicans Are Wrong on Abortion—and They Know It

The GOP presidential candidates are trying really hard to confuse voters on abortion. But Americans are not buying it.

Aug 25, 2023
ANGELA VASQUEZ-GIROUX

When Fox News began the Republican debate on Wednesday night with a video introduction noting that voters have mobilized to protect abortion access in elections since the fall of Roe, they admitted the truth: When it comes to abortion access and our right to control our own bodies, they are on the wrong side of the American people.

After a few rounds of bickering and infighting, the debate moderators pressed the candidates on their abortion stances. Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, and others responded by letting loose every piece of anti-abortion disinformation in the party’s arsenal—from pushing falsehoods about abortion later in pregnancy, to ignoring the science to justify bans before many people even know they are pregnant, to peddling the lie that most voters support bans.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/republican-debate-wrong-abortion/


The First Republican Presidential Debate Was Rife With Abortion Misinformation

Alanna Vagianos
Thu, August 24, 2023

The first Republican presidential debate included a lot of fake news about abortion. At least four of the eight candidates standing on the debate stage on Wednesday night repeated the flagrant lie that people are getting abortions “up until birth.”

“I would love for someone to ask Biden and Kamala Harris: Are they for 38 weeks, are they for 39 weeks, are they for 40 weeks? Because that’s what the media needs to be asking,” said Nikki Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, referring to President Joe Biden and his vice president.

Continued:
https://news.yahoo.com/first-republican-presidential-debate-rife-033934005.html


USA – One year later, the Supreme Court’s abortion decision is both scorned and praised

By GEOFF MULVIHILL
Jun 25, 2023

Activists and politicians are marking the one-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned a nationwide right to abortion with praise from some and protests from others.

Advocates on both sides marched at rallies Saturday in Washington and across the country to call attention to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling on June 24, 2022, which upended the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Continued: https://apnews.com/article/abortion-dobbs-roe-anniversary-rally-ff6196c80112b7c9d5e6822b1807bf3e


US activists rally one year after Supreme Court allowed abortion bans

By Julia Harte
June 24, 2023

(Reuters) - Abortion rights supporters and opponents held dueling rallies around the U.S. on Saturday, the first anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that had legalized the procedure nationwide.

In Washington, speakers from national abortion rights groups, including Women's March and NARAL Pro-Choice America, assembled in Columbus Circle to celebrate the defeat of some abortion opponents in the 2022 midterm races and to rally voters ahead of next year's congressional and presidential elections.

Continued: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-activists-rally-one-year-after-supreme-court-allowed-abortion-bans-2023-06-24/


USA – The sleeper legal strategy that could topple abortion bans

Jews, Episcopalians, Unitarians, Satanists and other people of faith say the laws infringe on their religious rights.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
06/21/2023

WEBSTER GROVES, Mo. — Revs. Jan Barnes and Krista Taves have logged hundreds of hours standing outside abortion clinics across Missouri and Illinois, going back to the mid-1980s. But unlike other clergy members around the country, they never pleaded with patients to turn back.

The sight of the two women in clerical collars holding up messages of love and support for people terminating a pregnancy “so infuriated the anti-abortion protesters that they would heap abuse on us and it drew the abuse away from the women,” recalled Taves, a minister at Eliot Unitarian Chapel in Kirkwood, Missouri, as she sat on a couch at Barnes’ stately church in this quiet suburb of St. Louis.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/21/legal-strategy-that-could-topple-abortion-bans-00102468


‘We need to read the room’: GOP divided on abortion as Democrats unite for 2024

Democrats center abortion rights in early stages of presidential campaign while Republicans waver over unpopular position

Lauren Gambino in Washington DC
Sun 30 Apr 2023

Hours after Joe Biden announced his re-election campaign on Tuesday, his vice-president and 2024 running mate, Kamala Harris, delivered a fiery call to action for voters alarmed by the loss of constitutional protections for abortion.

“This is a moment for us to stand and fight,” she said to a packed auditorium at Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington and her alma mater. To the “extremist so-called leaders” rolling back access to reproductive rights, Harris warned: “Don’t get in our way because if you do, we’re going to stand up, we’re going to organize and we’re going to speak up.”

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/30/republicans-divided-abortion-democrats-united-2024-election


State lawsuits defend abortion access with religious freedom

Critics of religious freedom laws often argue they are used to discriminate against LGBTQ people and only protect a conservative Christian worldview

By ARLEIGH RODGERS Associated Press/Report for America
December 27, 2022

INDIANAPOLIS -- Cara Berg Raunick watched with bafflement as Indiana's Republican legislators took less than two weeks to debate and pass an abortion ban that the governor signed quickly into law.

The women’s health nurse practitioner from Indianapolis was struck by just how frequently faith was cited in the arguments as reason to ban the medical practice. But Berg Raunick, who is Jewish, said those views go against her beliefs.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/state-lawsuits-defend-abortion-access-religious-freedom-95854873