Missouri and the Fight for Abortion Rights: How Past Became Prologue

Missouri and the Fight for Abortion Rights: How Past Became Prologue
Missouri’s historic battle for abortion rights presaged in important ways where we are today, and what will be required of reproductive rights advocates in the future.

Aug 1, 2019
Angela Bonavoglia

The time, the late 1960s; the place, St. Louis, Missouri. Judy Widdicombe, a twenty-something self-described supermom, was raising two boys with her husband, working as a labor and delivery nurse in a Catholic hospital, and volunteering one night a week as a counselor on a suicide prevention hotline.

“In those days, there was no official place a woman with an unwanted pregnancy could go for help,” she told me when I interviewed her for my book, The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion.

Continued: https://rewire.news/article/2019/08/01/missouri-and-the-fight-for-abortion-rights-how-past-became-prologue/


U.S.: New HBO Documentary Follows Women On Both Sides of the Abortion Debate

New HBO Documentary Follows Women On Both Sides of the Abortion Debate
By Samantha Cooney
April 3, 2017
'I didn’t want this film to be an advocacy piece'

In 2014, Missouri lawmakers passed a 72-hour waiting period on abortion, one of the most stringent waiting periods in the nation. About a year later, a Planned Parenthood clinic in Columbia would stop performing abortions, leaving only one abortion clinic left in the state. These developments made it even more difficult for Missouri women to access the procedure in the state, which already had a number of other anti-abortion laws on the books.

“I knew that laws were being passed with every legislative session, and there wasn’t much media attention,” director Tracy Droz Tragos, a Missouri native, told Motto in a phone interview. “I wanted to know how these laws were affecting women in my home state.”

So, on the eve of the implementation of the 72-hour waiting period in 2014, director Droz Tragos decided to investigate just that. The result is Abortion: Stories Women Tell, a documentary. The film goes inside the doors of the state’s last abortion clinic, introduces viewers to advocates who both support and oppose the restrictions and provides an intimate look at women wrestling with the decision.

Continued at source: Motto: http://motto.time.com/4722652/abortion-stories-women-tell-tracy-doz-tragos/