Cassie Buchman
DEC 1, 2023
(NewsNation) — Thirty years before the overturn of Roe v. Wade, Sandra Day O’Connor, who died Friday at the age of 93, was instrumental in keeping abortion legal at the federal level during her tenure.
In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, deciding that abortion was federally protected in a 7-2 vote. The New Yorker writes that there was immediate backlash from the Christian right, with many leaders seeking to reverse the ruling.
At issue is a court ruling that the state’s abortion ban conflicts with government rules mandating the provision of emergency care
Carter Sherman
Thu 30 Nov 2023
The US supreme court is on the verge of being dragged back into the abortion wars.
Eighteen months after the court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v Wade and abolished the national right to abortion, the state of Idaho, represented by the conservative legal powerhouse the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), has asked the nation’s highest court to allow a law that penalizes abortion providers. The state is requesting that the court halt a federal court decision finding that Idaho’s ban conflicts with government rules governing the provision of emergency care.
Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/idaho-punish-abortion-provider-supreme-court
Jeremy Workman and Robert Lyons’s film reconstructs the passage of a 1970 law that made the state a sanctuary for people seeking abortions, and cost a lawmaker his career.
by Linnea Feldman Emison
November 29, 2023
In April, 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade made it legal nationwide, New York passed the most expansive abortion law in the U.S. Three other states passed similar bills in the same year, but New York’s was of particular national significance because it allowed patients to get an abortion even if they weren’t residents. This made the state a hub for people from other parts of the country seeking to safely end their pregnancies. That role has become a lasting element of New York’s political identity—in anticipation of the Supreme Court overturning Roe, in 2022, it passed a suite of laws to again become a sanctuary state for those seeking abortions—but that 1970 law almost fizzled out in the state legislature.
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
In the book Deep Care, historian Angela Hume offers lessons from generations of underground activists and clinicians who worked to protect abortion access
Adrian Horton
Mon 27 Nov 2023
In the run-up and year following the US supreme court’s reversal of Roe v Wade in June 2022, there emerged a narrative of return: that abortion in states where it was suddenly banned would revert to the underground. It would be a return to 1972, when diffuse, partially anonymous groups such as the Jane Collective, a secret network of abortion providers in Chicago immortalized in the documentary The Janes and in a feature film starring Elizabeth Banks, stood in for legal reproductive healthcare.
In reality, the end of Roe didn’t so much send the US back to a pre-1973 landscape of unsafe abortions, but toward a bleak and unprecedented future of criminalized pregnancy. And the abortion underground never disappeared under Roe, anyway. Far from it – in a new book, the feminist historian, critic and poet Angela Hume draws on dozens of interviews with former unlicensed abortion providers, community clinic workers and volunteer clinic defenders who together formed the vibrant, multi-pronged and under-sung radical edge of the abortion defense movement.
Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/27/deep-care-book-abortion
The first estimate of births since Dobbs found that almost a quarter of women who would have gotten abortions carried their pregnancies to term.
By Margot Sanger-Katz and Claire Cain Miller
Nov. 22, 2023
The first data on births since Roe v. Wade was overturned shows how much abortion bans have had their intended effect: Births increased in every state with a ban, an analysis of the data shows.
By comparing birth statistics in states before and after the bans passed, researchers estimated that the laws caused around 32,000 annual births, based on the first six months of 2023, a relatively small increase that was in line with overall expectations.
Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/upshot/abortion-births-bans-states.html
BY MARY ZIEGLER
NOV 17, 2023
When voters directly consider the abortion issue, it’s bad news for Republicans, who have lost ballot measure after ballot measure upholding reproductive rights since Roe v. Wade was struck down last year. And to hear GOP primary candidates tell it, the next president won’t be willing or able to do much about abortion, a transparent effort to sidestep a losing issue. Donald Trump, the obvious front-runner, has occasionally indulged in magical thinking, suggesting that he can conjure up a national ban that Americans on either side of the issue will love. More realistically, though, he has attempted to neutralize the issue by doing things like calling a six-week ban on abortion “terrible,” while at the same time, in a wink and a nod to evangelical voters, running ads bragging about choosing the justices who overturned Roe. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, another GOP hopeful, has stressed that a national ban is impossible: Congress will never pass one in the near future, and abortion opponents needlessly alienate swing voters by discussing one. The message from these candidates is clear: A Republican president won’t do much on abortion.
Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/11/biden-vs-trump-2024-nationwide-abortion-ban.html
Support for abortion cuts across party lines, performing significantly better at the ballot box than Biden and other Democrats.
By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN, MEGAN MESSERLY and JESSICA PIPER
11/09/2023
Justice Samuel Alito challenged voters to decide the future of abortion when he wrote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade last year. “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond,” he noted as he threw out half a century of precedent.
Now, 17 months later, the court has an answer: Americans want to preserve or restore Roe-like protections.
Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/09/abortion-rights-elections-red-states-00126225
It's clear Americans continue to not like having their rights taken away, and that spells serious trouble for the Republican Party.
Rex Huppke, USA TODAY
Nov 8, 2023
Several political narratives died Tuesday night at the hands of voters, marking a nontragic and fully deserved end to days of nervous liberal-pundit blah-blah.
First, in Ohio, voters turned out and overwhelming approved a ballot measure that will enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution. There had been considerable brow-furrowing in Democratic circles about whether the issue of reproductive rights would remain as powerful a vote motivator as it was in previous elections held since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
BY DAVID S. COHEN AND CAROLE JOFFE
NOV 07, 2023
On Tuesday, Ohio voters passed a ballot measure enshrining the right to an abortion in the state constitution, joining several states where voters have responded to the end of Roe v. Wade by protecting reproductive rights via popular referendum. We recently learned, however, that even without these votes, reproductive rights might be safer than many expected following the end of Roe in 2022.
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the conventional wisdom was that there would be a steep drop in the number of abortions in the United States. As it turns out, though, conventional wisdom was wrong. To many observers’ surprise, two recent studies reveal that national abortion numbers have actually slightly increased since the Supreme Court ended Roe. Based on everything we know about abortion seekers and providers, however, that abortion numbers would go up in the face of Supreme Court retrenchment should have been exactly what was predicted.
Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/11/ohio-vote-abortion-access-is-growing.html
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