Abortion Shield Laws: A New War Between the States

Doctors in six states where abortion is legal are using new laws to send abortion pills to tens of thousands of women in states where it is illegal.

By Pam Belluck
Feb. 22, 2024

Behind an unmarked door in a boxy brick building outside Boston, a quiet rebellion is taking place. Here, in a 7-by-12-foot room, abortion is being made available to thousands of women in states where it is illegal.

The patients do not have to travel here to terminate their pregnancies, and they do not have to wait weeks to receive abortion medication from overseas.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/health/abortion-shield-laws-telemedicine.html

USA opinion: It’s too dangerous to allow this antiquated law to exist any longer

by David S. Cohen, Greer Donley and Rachel ReboucheComst
Mon January 22, 2024

The most significant national threat to reproductive rights is not a looming Supreme Court judgment or a bill being considered by Congress. It’s already here, in the form of an extant but long dormant law from 1873 that could ban abortion nationwide: the Comstock Act. The act is named after Anthony Comstock, an anti-vice crusader from the late 1800s who used his power as a special agent of the US Postal Service to enforce his beliefs about sex and propriety. He was able to persuade Congress to pass laws against “indecent or immoral” materials, including broad definitions of contraception, pornography and abortion.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/22/opinions/abortion-threat-comstock-act-must-be-repealed-cohen-donley-rebouche/index.html

22.01.2024

USA – Pharmacies begin dispensing abortion pills

A handful of pharmacies are offering the pills 10 months after the Biden administration allowed them to do so.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and LAUREN GARDNER
Oct 6, 2023

A handful of independent pharmacies across the country have quietly begun dispensing the abortion pill mifepristone under new rules created by the Biden administration earlier this year, even as a looming Supreme Court case could reimpose restrictions or ban the drugs entirely.

Thousands of branches of major pharmacy chains are poised to join them — making the drugs more accessible to millions of people nationwide and kicking off a new phase of the legal and political battle over the most popular method of ending a pregnancy.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/06/pharmacies-begin-dispensing-abortion-pills-00120397

What to Know About the Latest Court Ruling on the Abortion Pill

The upshot: Don’t panic.

MADISON PAULY, Mother Jones
Aug 16, 2023

Earlier this spring, the Supreme Court hit pause on a controversial ruling in a massive anti-abortion lawsuit with the potential to eliminate nationwide access to the most common method of abortion. The case, brought by anti-abortion organizations and doctors, challenged the FDA’s two-decade-old approval of mifepristone, a pill used in medication abortion.

In April, a far-right federal district court judge in Texas had sided with the anti-abortion doctors, issuing an unprecedented order to suspend mifepristone’s approval. But before his decision could take effect, the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to step in and pause the order while it went through appeals. The Court agreed.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/08/abortion-pill-mifepristone-texas-supreme-court-ruling/

USA – Group using ‘shield laws’ to provide abortion care in states that ban it

Aid Access ships medication abortion to all 50 states under the protection provided to clinicians serving patients in banned states

Rebecca Grant
Sun 23 Jul 2023

Dr Linda Prine is providing abortion access to people in all 50 states, even those that have banned it. That might seem like an admission to be discreet about in post-Roe America, but Prine and her colleagues at Aid Access, a telemedicine abortion service, are doing it openly and in a way they believe is on firm legal ground.

On 14 July, Aid Access announced that over the past month, a team of seven doctors, midwives and nurse practitioners have mailed medication abortion to 3,500 people under the protection of “shield laws”, which protect clinicians who serve patients in states where providing abortion is illegal. As soon as she learned about shield laws, Prine knew it represented an opportunity to go on the offensive, for those bold enough to try it.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/23/shield-laws-provide-abortion-care-aid-access

In the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ruled states should decide the legality of abortion, voters at the state level have been doing just that: 4 essential reads

June 12, 2023
Lorna Grisby, Senior Politics & Society Editor

When the Supreme Court ruled on June 24, 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that states – some of which have been chipping away at women’s access to abortion for years – should decide the legality of abortion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the court’s majority opinion that “women are not without electoral or political power.”

In one fell swoop, the court’s 6-3 ruling that abortion is not a federal constitutional right overturned Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, and 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey – two decisions that provided federal protections for abortion.

Continued: https://theconversation.com/in-the-year-since-the-supreme-court-overturned-roe-v-wade-and-ruled-states-should-decide-the-legality-of-abortion-voters-at-the-state-level-have-been-doing-just-that-4-essential-reads-207299

USA – Small, rural communities are becoming abortion access battlegrounds

After local leaders in rural Nevada reached an impasse over a proposed Planned Parenthood clinic, an anti-abortion activist pitching local abortion bans arrived at their remote city hall.

May 21, 2023
By Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez | KFF Health News

WEST WENDOVER, Nev. — In April, Mark Lee Dickson arrived in this 4,500-person city that hugs the Utah-Nevada border to pitch an ordinance banning abortion.

Dickson is the director of the anti-abortion group Right to Life of East Texas and founder of another organization that has spent the last few years traveling the United States trying to convince local governments to pass abortion bans.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/small-rural-communities-are-becoming-abortion-access-battlegrounds-rcna84921

Abortion bans are unpopular. Republicans are passing them anyway.

In some cases, anti-abortion legislators have been forced to backtrack from some more restrictive proposals. In others, they’ve tried to subvert the lawmaking process to avoid blowback.

Shefali Luthra
May 12, 2023

With abortion bans becoming increasingly unpopular, Republican-led statehouses are walking a delicate line: Trying to advance bills that would restrict access to the procedure without drawing attention, circumventing normal processes to cram new policies through as legislative sessions come to a close.

Last year, Republican lawmakers across the country pushed restriction after restriction in anticipation of the looming Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which in June of last year allowed states to begin banning abortion. But now that those laws can actually take effect, legislators are newly attuned to potential political consequences.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2023/05/abortion-bans-unpopular-republicans-passing-them-anyway/

12.05.2023

anti-choice restrictions

USA – Anti-abortion legal strategy revives Comstock moral purity laws of late 1800s

BY: ELISHA BROWN
APRIL 27, 2023

When officials in a small New Mexico city sued the governor and attorney general over their ordinance placing restrictions on abortion clinics earlier this month, they argued that a late 19th century federal anti-obscenity law superseded state law. In March, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law a measure prohibiting public entities from interfering with reproductive and gender-affirming care access.

It was the latest legal challenge to abortion access to lean on the Comstock Act of 1873, federal statutes that ban the mailing of anything “obscene, lewd, lascivious” or considered morally impure, including abortifacients or abortion-related materials.

Continued: https://lailluminator.com/2023/04/27/anti-abortion-legal-strategy-revives-comstock-moral-purity-laws-of-late-1800s/

27.04.2023

Information Society Project

Mark Lee Dickson

Michelle Lujan Grisham

USA – Volunteer pilots fly patients seeking abortions to states where it’s legal

March 27, 2023
By Rose Conlon, NPR for Wichita

The pilot, clad in a blue windbreaker, recently pulled his single-engine, four-seater prop plane onto the tarmac of a small municipal airport.

The airport sits in a state where abortion is now banned in virtually all cases. But a short flight away in Kansas, abortion remains legal. That has launched a wave of travel from across the South and Midwest in pursuit of pills and procedures that used to be legal all across the U.S..

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/27/1166262892/volunteer-pilots-fly-patients-seeking-abortions-to-states-where-its-legal

27.03.2023