COPS AND REPUBLICANS ARE CRIMINALIZING PREGNANT PEOPLE WITHOUT ROE

by Meg O’Connor
Jun 21, 2023

Abortion opponents have long claimed they only want to criminalize providers, not pregnant people. In a 2023 statement entitled, “Why women are not, and should not be, prosecuted for abortion,” anti-abortion group Americans United for Life said that prosecuting women “for the crime of abortion is unwise and contrary to the goals of the movement.”

This is untrue: even while Roe v. Wade was in place, thousands of people were criminalized for having miscarriages, stillbirths, or abortions. And, in the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, abortion opponents have prosecuted more women for their pregnancy outcomes and introduced laws allowing criminal charges against people who get abortions.

Continued: https://theappeal.org/police-republicans-criminalize-pregnant-people-roe-abortion/

21.06.2023

Commentary

Celeste Burgess

Chelsey Redmon-Zellers

jailing women for abortion

Jessica Burgess

Meg O'Connor

prosecuting women for abortion

punishing women for abortion

Guatemala congress shelves abortion law passed previous week

Guatemala’s Congress has voted to shelve a controversial law stiffening penalties for abortion, prohibiting same-sex marriage and banning discussion of sexual diversity in schools

By The Associated Press
15 March 2022

GUATEMALA CITY -- Guatemala’s Congress voted Tuesday to shelve a controversial law stiffening penalties for abortion, prohibiting same-sex marriage and banning discussion of sexual diversity in schools, acting a week after it passed by a wide margin.

The reversal came after President Alejandro Giammattei threatened a veto because elements of the legislation were considered unconstitutional and in violation of international treaties that Guatemala has signed.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/guatemala-congress-shelves-abortion-law-passed-previous-week-83470946

15.03.2022

Featured

News

Alejandro Giammattei

anti-choice restrictions

Protection of Life and Family

punishing women for abortion

USA – Why the Hyde Amendment and other barriers to reproductive care lead to more domestic violence

Hyde binds the seemingly separable issues of pregnancy, domestic abuse, poverty, and the global pandemic

By KYLIE CHEUNG
PUBLISHED AUGUST 28, 2021

Earlier this month, the House of Representatives passed a historic budget that didn't include the Hyde Amendment, a budget rider that's severely restricted coverage of abortion care by withholding federal funding since 1976. Of course, the gift of hindsight shows us celebrations of this monumental moment proved slightly premature, when it was quietly undone with a single stroke on Aug. 10.

By a narrow margin, determined as ever to deny us good things, the US Senate adopted an amendment to restore Hyde to the budget, and usher in yet another year of abortion care being all but banned for those who are struggling financially. Today, despite the relative quietness and feelings of helplessness attached to this loss for reproductive justice, we're closer than ever to eliminating Hyde, and there's too much at stake — especially for many victims of domestic abuse — to give up now.

Continued: https://www.salon.com/2021/08/28/why-the-hyde-amendment-and-other-barriers-to-reproductive-care-lead-to-more-domestic-violence/

USA – How Republican Policies Force Women to Choose Abortion

How Republican Policies Force Women to Choose Abortion

ZawnVillines
Thursday February 28, 2019

If you believe the social media posts, television screeds, and scare tactics of Republicans, women are murderous by nature. Given half the chance, they’ll undergo invasive surgery to kill a baby for the sheer joy of it. If their unwanted baby is somehow born alive, they’ll happily ask a doctor to snuff out its life.

It’s a nightmarish vision that runs counter to all reason and all evidence. For generations, women have stood at the forefront of every movement to protect human life and dignity. They commit fewer crimes. And though they spend, on average, significantly more time with their children, they’re far less likely to abuse them. When you really start digging into Republican views, it’s hard for them to mask their true feelings: they hate women. They don’t trust them. This depiction of women as infanticidal monsters also ignores hundreds of heartbreaking stories of women who choose to abort children they love, either to spare the child the misery of a few agonizing seconds of life on Earth, or because the child is already dead.

continued: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/2/28/1838316/-How-Republican-Policies-Force-Women-to-Choose-Abortion

Ireland – 8th Amendment demands punishment for women

Fintan O’Toole: 8th Amendment demands punishment for women
Constitutional ban means Ireland too extreme even for mainstream social conservatives

April 30, 2018
Fintan O'Toole

I’m not sure people who want to defend the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution know how extreme their position is. Extreme, that is to say, not by the standards of those of us who always opposed it and would like it to be repealed, but even by the standards of mainstream social conservatism.

The Eighth is, in one crucial respect, on the lunatic fringe of anti-abortion activism. This is because, as has been made clear in recent years, it does not merely outlaw abortion in all but a very small range of circumstances. It does something else, something that most sensible conservatives regard as repugnant – it demands severe punishment for women who have abortions. There is no way around this: while the Eighth is in place, Ireland is committed to treating abortion, not just as a moral wrong, but as a crime more serious than, for example, child rape.

Continued: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-8th-amendment-demands-punishment-for-women-1.3479390

Fintan O’Toole: Ireland’s abortion regime is too cruel even for Trump

Fintan O'Toole: Ireland's abortion regime is too cruel even for Trump
Eighth Amendment law about locking up women and doctors really is step too far

Dec 19, 2017
Fintan O'Toole

Is there no line Donald Trump would not cross? Actually, there is one. It’s not incinerating an entire country, as he threatened to do to North Korea, or incinerating the entire planet by undermining the Paris accord on climate change. It’s not smearing an entire nation, as he did by calling Mexicans rapists. It’s not cosying up to neo-Nazis by claiming that there are some “very fine people” among them. It’s not even republishing to his 40 million Twitter followers anti-Islamic propaganda videos from a British neo-Nazi group. Trump has crossed all of these lines and so many more and never felt that he had gone too far and ought to retreat.

Continued at source: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-ireland-s-abortion-regime-is-too-cruel-even-for-trump-1.3331398

New Zealand: Surely it’s time for a grown-up conversation about abortion?

Surely it’s time for a grown-up conversation about abortion?
By Jessica Hammond Doube | Guest writer
August 24, 2017

More than 13,000 abortions were performed in New Zealand last year. Despite this, abortion in this country is enshrined in the Crimes Act. Jessica Hammond Doube doesn’t think it should be, and she’s doing her best to do something about it.

When I was about 10 years old, my parents took me to an anti-abortion protest. As a good Catholic schoolgirl, I enthusiastically took up my placard, believing it was obvious that abortion was murder.

And then a few months ago I became a political candidate. One of my priorities: getting abortion removed from the Crimes Act.

Continued at source: The Spinoff: https://thespinoff.co.nz/parenting/24-08-2017/surely-its-time-for-a-grown-up-conversation-about-abortion/

Trump Reinstitutes Global Gag Rule, Punishing Women Overseas By Crippling Family Planning Services

By Brian Tashman | January 23, 2017

In a particularly appalling moment in his appalling presidential campaign, Donald Trump said that women who have an abortion should, once the procedure is outlawed, face “some form of punishment.” Trump later attempted to backtrack on his comments, then denied having backtracked, then bragged about all the compliments he supposedly received for his original statement.

Trump eventually came around to the position—after briefly saying he wanted to leave abortion laws the way they are— that while he supports criminal punishments for abortion providers he would not want to impose them on women who obtain the procedure. Once abortion is recriminalized in America, Trump said, women who want an abortion “would perhaps go to illegal places.”

[continued at link]
Source, Right Wing Watch: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trump-reinstitutes-global-gag-rule-punishing-women-overseas-by-crippling-family-planning-services/

23.01.2017

International Food Policy Research Institute

Mexico City policy

punishing women for abortion

U.S.: The dangerous state laws that are punishing pregnant women

In the past 10 years, arrests and forced interventions of pregnant women have skyrocketed.

By Lynn M. Paltrow and Lisa K. Sangoi
Think Progress

On August 31, 2016, Purvi Patel walked out of the Indiana Women’s Prison, after fighting a conviction and 20-year sentence for attempting to have an abortion. By the time she won her appeal, she had already spent over a year in prison.

While the fight for reproductive rights is generally thought of as one about access to abortion and contraception, it is increasingly clear that attacks on reproductive rights also often involve the use of the criminal legal system.

[continued at link]
Source: Think Progress

29.09.2016