15-week abortion bans are the center of Republican debate. Experts say that cutoff is arbitrary.

Anti-abortion politicians have recently linked 15-weeks to fetal pain. That benchmark has been moving for years — and it's still not accurate.

Shefali Luthra
December 6, 2023

The Republican debate over abortion has centered around one number: 15. Backers of a 15-week federal ban tout it as a compromise measure, even in the face of recent electoral defeat.

Anti-abortion advocates hope congressional candidates will embrace this measure, and they’re pushing GOP presidential candidates to promise they would sign such a bill.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2023/12/15-week-abortion-bans-arbitrary-number-republican-debate/

Some Republicans Were Willing to Compromise on Abortion Ban Exceptions. Activists Made Sure They Didn’t.

ProPublica reviewed 12 of the nation’s strictest abortion bans. Few changed in 2023, as state lawmakers caved to pressure from anti-abortion groups opposing exceptions for rape, incest and health risks.

by Kavitha Surana
Nov. 27, 2023

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending nearly 50 years of federal protection for abortion, some states began enforcing strict abortion bans while others became new havens for the procedure. ProPublica is investigating how sweeping changes to reproductive health care access in America are affecting people, institutions and governments.

State Rep. Taylor Rehfeldt was speaking on the floor of the South Dakota Capitol, four months pregnant with her third child, begging her Republican colleagues to care about her life. “With the current law in place, I will tell you, I wake up fearful of my pregnancy and what it would mean for my children, my husband and my parents if something happened to me and the doctor cannot perform lifesaving measures,” she told her fellow lawmakers last February, her voice faltering as tears threatened.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/abortion-ban-exceptions-trigger-laws-health-risks

Voters in at Least 10 States Are Trying to Protect Abortion Rights. GOP Officials Are Throwing Up Roadblocks.

Republican officials are undermining citizen-led ballot initiatives that seek to protect the procedure. Ohio is the latest state to get protections on the November ballot.

by Cassandra Jaramillo
Oct. 24, 2023

In Ohio, a GOP-controlled agency rewrote language for a ballot measure that would guarantee access to abortion in the state constitution, swapping in new wording that opponents said was designed to confuse voters. In Missouri, a Republican official launched legal challenges that have stalled a citizen-led effort to pass a law guaranteeing reproductive health care. And in Michigan, a Republican lawmaker went one step further, introducing a bill that would undo a popular new access law.

In the year since Roe v. Wade was overturned, Gallup polling shows that a majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal, with two-thirds of those polled saying it should be permitted in the first trimester.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/abortion-rights-ballot-initiatives-state-law

One Woman’s Story Of Self-Managing Her Abortion In An Anti-Choice State

Managing your own abortion is not a crime in Ohio, but a politically motivated prosecutor might believe Julia should be punished for what she did.

By Alanna Vagianos
Aug 7, 2023

SOMEWHERE IN OHIO — It’s a pretty short drive to the polling site from the cabin where Julia has been self-managing her abortion. Julia took the last of her abortion pills the day before, which she believes have ended her unwanted pregnancy. She still has some minor cramping and is tired from the whole ordeal, but she feels reasonably OK — well enough to go vote on a ballot referendum that could help decide the fate of abortion rights in Ohio.

Issue 1, a ballot initiative to raise the threshold to alter the state constitution from a simple majority — the standard in Ohio for over a century — to 60%, is a preemptive attempt to block a pro-choice constitutional amendment that Ohioans will vote on in November.

Continued: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-womans-story-of-self-managing-her-abortion-in-an-anti-choice-state_n_64c03e6be4b053a7009335eb

One year without Roe: Data shows how abortion access has changed in America

Fewer women are getting abortions, and those without resources are increasingly the least likely to have them.

June 22, 2023
By Jasmine Cui, Chloe Atkins and Sarah Kaufman

The day Mayron Hollis discovered she was pregnant in spring 2022 was the same day doctors gave her terrible news: The pregnancy could be fatal to both her and her fetus.

Hollis had given birth to another child earlier in the year through cesarean section, and doctors were concerned she would experience a cesarean scar pregnancy — a rare type of ectopic pregnancy in which a fertilized egg implants and develops in the cesarean scar. It can cause fatal internal bleeding.

https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/dobbs-abortion-access-data-roe-v-wade-overturned-rcna88947

THE PRESS IS FALLING FOR ANTI-ABORTION “FETAL HEARTBEAT” PROPAGANDA

Reporters are parroting — and spreading — sentimental falsehoods.

Judith Levine
May 27 2023

“ONCE A FETAL heartbeat could be detected, typically around the sixth week of pregnancy … ”

When I read this phrase in the New Yorker, referring to Texas’s first abortion ban, I shot off a letter to the editor. “This is misleading,” I wrote. “There is no heartbeat at six weeks because the fetus does not yet have a heart. As San Francisco OB-GYN Dr. Jennifer Kerns told NPR: ‘What we’re really detecting is a grouping of cells that are initiating some electrical activity. In no way is this detecting a functional cardiovascular system or a functional heart.’” I noted that “a six-week fetus is about the size and shape of a baked bean.”

Continued: https://theintercept.com/2023/05/27/abortion-fetal-heartbeat-propaganda-press-coverage/

Doctors Warned Her Pregnancy Could Kill Her. Then Tennessee Outlawed Abortion.

A Tennessee mother wanted to end her high-risk pregnancy, but doctors feared prosecution.

by Kavitha Surana, photography by Stacy Kranitz, special to ProPublica
March 14, 2023

This story graphically describes serious complications in pregnancies and births, and it mentions suicide.

One day late last summer, Dr. Barry Grimm called a fellow obstetrician at Vanderbilt University Medical Center to consult about a patient who was 10 weeks pregnant. Her embryo had become implanted in scar tissue from a recent cesarean section, and she was in serious danger. At any moment, the pregnancy could rupture, blowing open her uterus.

Dr. Mack Goldberg, who was trained in abortion care for life-threatening pregnancy complications, pulled up the patient’s charts. He did not like the look of them. The muscle separating her pregnancy from her bladder was as thin as tissue paper; her placenta threatened to eventually invade her organs like a tumor. Even with the best medical care in the world, some patients bleed out in less than 10 minutes on the operating table. Goldberg had seen it happen.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/tennessee-abortion-ban-doctors-ectopic-pregnancy

Here’s What States Are Doing to Abortion Rights in 2023

In the first full legislative session after Roe v. Wade was overturned, states across the country are looking to further restrict or better protect abortion rights. ProPublica looked at what abortion legislation is on the table in 2023.

by Megan Rose
Feb. 8, 2023

For 50 years, Roe v. Wade shut down the biggest ambitions of the anti-abortion movement. Last summer, the Supreme Court overturned that decision, unleashing a flurry of abortion legislation across the nation. And anti-abortion advocates have eager partners in Republican-controlled legislatures across the country.

“It’s exciting because our hands have been untied,” Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, said. “We’re going to see what we can do and do it.”

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/us-abortion-legislation-2023

Planned Parenthood maps strategy to protect abortion rights

Planned Parenthood leaders from across the country are meeting in California to discuss how to defend abortion rights

By SOPHIE AUSTIN and ADAM BEAM, Associated Press
September 9, 2022

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Planned Parenthood leaders from 24 states gathered in California's capital Friday to begin work on a nationwide strategy to protect and strengthen access to abortion, a counteroffensive aimed at pushing back against restrictions that have emerged in more than half of the country after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Their goal is to emulate the success liberals have had in California, where state lawmakers passed some of the most robust abortion protections in the country this year, culminating in a statewide election this fall that would make abortion a constitutional right in the nation's most populous state.

continued: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/abortion-leaders-gather-california-talk-strategy-89614443

States Where Abortion Is Illegal Also Have the Worst Support Systems for Mothers

The decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has made clear that women with the fewest reproductive rights also live in states that provide the least support for babies they’re now forced to birth.

By Lauren Camera
Aug. 8, 2022

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eviscerating the 1973 landmark case that protected access to abortion for women in the U.S., Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, a lifelong anti-abortion activist, left the convention center in downtown Atlanta where the National Right to Life was holding its annual conference, walked to her hotel room and cried.

“I joined the movement when I was 15 and I went to law school so I could do something like this,” she says. “Every part of my 15-year-old self would be so elated to see Roe overturned. But now I know more and I've seen more and I understand the reality of this. And I'm so scared for so many women.”

Continued: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2022-08-08/states-where-abortion-is-illegal-also-have-the-worst-support-systems-for-mothers