America’s abortion debate is being defined by Fox News

America’s abortion debate is being defined by Fox News
A new study shows how the network dominates coverage of abortion — and sets the agenda other networks follow.

By Anna North
Sep 23, 2019

Something strange happened to the abortion debate earlier this year.

Politicians, media outlets, and ordinary people began talking about “post-birth” or “fourth-trimester” abortion, claiming that doctors in America are killing babies after they’re born. This would be murder, not abortion, and it’s already illegal in every state. No abortion-rights group supports this.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/2019/9/23/20875531/fox-news-abortion-cnn-msnbc-virginia


USA – These states are strengthening abortion laws even as others dismantle them

These states are strengthening abortion laws even as others dismantle them

By Tami Luhby, CNN
Sat June 22, 2019

Washington (CNN)The red-state drive to ban or severely limit access to abortion this year has sparked the opposite reaction in Democratic-led states, where lawmakers are cementing abortion rights and making it more accessible.

Driving the moves on both sides is the rightward shift of the US Supreme Court, which is fanning fears on the left that the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal in the US could be gutted or overturned altogether.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/22/politics/abortion-laws-blue-state-red-state-divide/index.html


USA – How Six-Week Abortion Bans Are Fueling a ‘Radical’ Year for Abortion Law

How Six-Week Abortion Bans Are Fueling a 'Radical' Year for Abortion Law
The bans mark an unprecedented year for abortion legislation—and a potential political turning point.

Rosemary Westwood
Apr 12, 2019

The projected political reckoning of abortion rights has arrived. Abortion bills, as expected, dominated state legislatures in early 2019, pushing the issue ever closer to the United States Supreme Court.

Among the 28 states considering abortion bans in the first four months of the year, a handful of the most conservative are aiming to ban abortion at just six weeks' gestation—when an embryonic "heartbeat" (doctors use the term cardiac activity, and embryos don't have hearts so much as tissues that will become the heart) can be detected. Abortion rights groups say the measures are so extreme that they effectively amount to outright abortion bans, since few women who want abortions would be able to access them before the cut-off, or perhaps even know they're pregnant.

Continued: https://psmag.com/social-justice/how-six-week-abortion-bans-are-fueling-a-radical-year-for-abortion-law


USA – Radical Attempts to Ban Abortion Dominate State Policy Trends in the First Quarter of 2019

Radical Attempts to Ban Abortion Dominate State Policy Trends in the First Quarter of 2019

Guttmacher Institute
First published online: April 3, 2019

Abortion rights took center stage in state legislatures during the first three months of 2019. While a number of states took steps to protect abortion access, these efforts were overshadowed by attempts to restrict abortion access. Indeed, antiabortion policymakers wasted no time revealing their true agenda: banning abortion.

Although the overall number of abortion restrictions introduced so far in 2019 was essentially the same as in the first quarter of 2018, the extreme nature of this year’s bills is unprecedented. In particular, conservative state legislatures are looking to enact abortion bans in the hopes of kick-starting litigation that will give the U.S. Supreme Court, and its majority of conservative justices, ample opportunity to undermine or eliminate abortion rights. Legislation under consideration in 28 states would ban abortion in a variety of ways:

Continued: https://www.guttmacher.org/article/2019/04/radical-attempts-ban-abortion-dominate-state-policy-trends-first-quarter-2019


USA – The First Time Women Shouted Their Abortions

The First Time Women Shouted Their Abortions
Fifty years ago, a group of women stood up in a church and talked about ending their pregnancies. The way they did so still shapes how we discuss the topic today.

By Nona Willis Aronowitz
March 23, 2019

You couldn’t just casually threaten suicide — you had to sound like you meant it, the woman onstage recalled. “You have to go and bring a razor, or whatever: ‘If you don’t tell me I’m going to have an abortion right now, I’m going to go out and jump off the Verrazzano Bridge.’”

The woman was speaking in 1969. Legalized abortion nationwide was still four years away; in New York, so-called therapeutic abortions were legal — but only if a doctor judged you mentally unfit to have a child. And so, the woman explained, she ended up seeing two psychiatrists who, to her relief, deemed her suicide threats real enough to be granted the procedure. The crowd clapped and roared at the absurdity of it all, until the woman explained that after her abortion, she was stuck in the maternity ward to recover — right next to crying babies. The crowd wasn’t laughing anymore.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/opinion/sunday/abortion-speakout-anniversary.html


USA – Later Abortion: A Love Story

Later Abortion: A Love Story

Missy Kurzweil
2/21/19

I recently met someone new and we talked for a while. She asked me where I’m from; I asked her what she does for work. She asked me if I have any children.

That last question gave me pause, not because it was too personal but because I wasn’t sure how to answer. If I said no, it would feel like a sad lie. If I said yes, she might ask how old my child is and I would have to say, “He would have been one in March.” Then she might say, “Oh. I’m so sorry,” and we would sit together in a sea of awkwardness rising around us. Maybe she would stop there, or continue with a sympathetic “May I ask what happened?” And I would have to say, “He died.”

Continued: https://jezebel.com/later-abortion-a-love-story-1832631748?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_todayworld


Why Abortion Rights Groups Are Fighting Their Battles At The State Level In 2019

Why Abortion Rights Groups Are Fighting Their Battles At The State Level In 2019

By Monica Busch
Feb 13, 2019

Abortion rights advocates are upfront about the fact that they believe there are currently very real, tangible threats to Roe v. Wade, especially given the Supreme Court's conservative majority. With this in mind, some organizations say they are spending more time advocating for state-level abortion laws in order to protect access in as many places as possible, should the landmark ruling one day be overturned.

"The truth is, it begins and ends in the state. Even our best [rulings], like Roe v. Wade, came from a challenge to a restrictive Texas law that criminalized abortion," Andrea Miller, president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health (NIRH) and the NIRH Action Fund, tells Bustle. "The reality is that states have long been the arbiters of whether or not women are able to access reproductive health care, and whether their rights are going to be protected."

Continued: https://www.bustle.com/p/why-abortion-rights-groups-are-fighting-their-battles-at-the-state-level-in-2019-15904800


The Catholic Church Has No Moral Argument on Abortions

The Catholic Church Has No Moral Argument on Abortions
After the pope revealed nuns were forced to get abortions while being held as sex slaves, the Church doesn’t seem well positioned to lecture on what women should or should not do with their bodies.

By Jennifer Wright
Feb 11 2019

If you are going to get your information regarding abortion from anyone, perhaps it is best not to get it from an institution that has no women in its higher orders, and is keeping women as sex slaves.

Like, for instance, the Catholic Church. This week Pope Francis admitted there has been clerical abuse of nuns, including sexual slavery. The BBC reports, "He said the Church was attempting to address the problem but said it was 'still going on.'"

Holy shit.
Continued: https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a26236433/nuns-sex-slaves-abused-catholic-church-abortion/


USA – When Your President Calls You a Murderer

When Your President Calls You a Murderer
I have had a third-trimester abortion. And I am not alone.

Feb 6, 2019
T.S. Mendola

It’s a hell of a thing to hear your president call you a murderer.

That’s not quite the whole picture, though, of what President Donald Trump did to later abortion patients during the State of the Union speech Tuesday night. After he invoked the Madonna, a “beautiful image of a mother holding her infant child,” women abruptly vanished for the rest of the time he took to throw enough red meat to the anti-choice base to keep money from the evangelical coffers flowing. Instead, we disappeared into the “womb” from which “beautiful” babies are “ripped moments before birth;” we are nothing more than the “womb” in which “children … can feel pain.”

Continued: https://rewire.news/article/2019/02/06/when-your-president-calls-you-a-murderer/


Why Trump spent so much time criticizing abortion during the State of the Union

Why Trump spent so much time criticizing abortion during the State of the Union
He may see it as a winning issue for 2020.

By Anna North
Feb 5, 2019

“Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life,” said President Donald Trump during his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night. “And let us reaffirm a fundamental truth: All children — born and unborn — are made in the holy image of God.”

In uncharacteristically extensive comments on the subject, Trump criticized efforts to loosen abortion restrictions in New York and Virginia. He also called for federal anti-abortion legislation.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/5/18212521/state-of-the-union-trump-abortion-northam