‘Comstocked’: How Extremists Are Exploiting a Victorian-Era Law To Deny Abortion Access

The 1873 Comstock law prohibits the conveyance of anything used for “the procuring or producing of abortion.” One man believes it’s the gateway to a national abortion ban that even the bluest of states will not be able to evade.

10/25/2023
by SHOSHANNA EHRLICH

In June 2019, the all-male city council in Waskom, Texas, unanimously voted to make the tiny town of just 2,000 residents the nation’s first “sanctuary city for the unborn.” Characterizing fetuses as the “most innocent among us [who] deserve equal protection under the law,” the ordinance expressly bans abortion within its municipal boundaries. The man behind the ban, anti-abortion zealot and pastor Mark Lee Dickson, has since expanded his campaign to outlaw abortion “one city at a time” into at least six other states.

At first glance, this effort may appear superfluous in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which, in overturning Roe v. Wade, ended federal protection of abortion rights. In response to the decision, a growing number of states have enacted outright abortion bans or highly restrictive laws, while others have doubled down on a commitment to keeping abortion legal and accessible.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2023/10/25/comstock-abortion-access-sanctuary-cities/

How Texas Plans to Trap Abortion Seekers

Anti-abortion activists and elected officials hope to keep abortion seekers walled in within the borders of their home states.

9/13/2023
by SHOSHANNA EHRLICH, Ms. Magazine

In 1991, Kathrin K. and her husband were stopped by German border guards as they crossed back into the country on their way home from neighboring Holland on the suspicion they were carrying illegal drugs. Instead of drugs, however, the guards found “incriminating evidence”—specifically, a plastic bag containing a nightgown, sanitary pad and towels. These items suggested that Kathrin had crossed the border into Holland to obtain an abortion—a crime under German law, even if legal where performed. She was transported to a nearby hospital and subjected to a degrading forced vaginal exam.

It is difficult for me to imagine a day when guards are stationed at the Texas-New Mexico border, or along travel routes leading from an abortion ban state into a protective one, with the power to detain those transporting pregnant persons suspected of seeking cross-border abortion services. And yet, on my more cynical or despairing days, I wonder, given the latest plan by Mark Lee Dickson, a pastor at Sovereign Love Church in East Texas, aimed at halting so-called abortion trafficking, if this dystopic vision of intrastate abortion border guards might someday become a reality.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2023/09/13/texas-abortion-travel-ban-sanctuary-city/

USA – A Tale of Two Abortion Clinics

Aug 10, 2023
By Andrea González-Ramírez

Last month, LaDonna Prince received a letter from the state of Indiana telling her that the abortion clinic she owns could no longer operate after August 1. She felt like an axe had been hanging over her head since the state passed a near-total ban, and now it had finally come down on her. Prince is the director of Clinic for Women, a first-trimester abortion facility in Indianapolis that’s been serving patients for more than 40 years. In its final weeks, her team would make sure that no abortion seeker was turned away. “If we had 50 patients in one day, then we started at 6:30 or 7 o’clock in the morning and you got home at 8:30, 9 o’clock at night,” she tells me.

Speaking over the phone, Prince sounds exhausted but resolute. She and her staff had known they were working on borrowed time: Soon after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Indiana became the first state to approve a new law prohibiting abortion throughout pregnancy, with some nearly-impossible-to-use exceptions. The ban went into effect for one week in September 2022 before being put on hold while a legal challenge moved forward. “We were hoping for more time, obviously,” Prince says. “But, I mean, we’re not delusional. We know we live in a red state and we knew that things would probably not go in our favor.” At the end of June, the Indiana Supreme Court issued a ruling that upheld the ban.

Continued: https://www.thecut.com/2023/08/the-abortion-clinic-owner-starting-over-in-a-new-state.html

10.08.2023

Commentary

Clinic for Women

Illinois Right to Life

LaDonna Price

Mary Kate Zander

Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn

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

How a pastor is trying to revive a 150-year-old US law to ban abortion

Mark Lee Dickson is trying to get the federal anti-obscenity law at the heart of ordinances enforced across the US

Cecilia Nowell
Thu 9 Mar 2023

When Amy Hagstrom Miller closed her Texas abortion clinic after Roe v Wade fell, the founder and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health wanted to reopen just across the border in New Mexico, to make care as accessible as possible to Texans who could no longer access it in their state. But anti-abortion advocates had other plans.

Hagstrom Miller was considering purchasing a building in the border town of Hobbs when, last November, the city passed an ordinance banning abortion and declaring itself “a sanctuary city for the unborn”. Earlier this year, the towns of Clovis and Eunice followed suit, as did the counties of Roosevelt and Lea. Hagstrom Miller and her team decided instead to open their new clinic in Albuquerque, a more progressive city about 200 miles from the Texas border, where they hope providers and patients will feel more welcomed. The clinic is currently awaiting approval of its licensing paperwork before officially opening.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/09/pastor-push-national-abortion-ban-sanctuary-cities-for-the-unborn

USA – How anti-abortion advocates are pushing local bans, city by small city

Across Ohio, tactics pioneered in Texas are being deployed in disruptive city council meetings

Audra Jane Heidrichs
Tue 23 Nov 2021

In May of this year, six city council members in Lebanon, Ohio, a city located just north of Cincinnati, voted on an ordinance that would effectively outlaw abortion for the 21,000 people that call it home.

As in countless council meetings in small cities across the country where mask mandates, teaching about race in schools and access to reproductive healthcare have become politically charged in America’s current climate, the night unfolded in a series of near-Shakespearean acts.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/23/anti-abortion-local-bans-ohio

With ban in effect, Texas abortion clinics will no longer terminate pregnancies after 6 weeks

By Caroline Kitchener, Emily Wax-Thibodeaux, Robert Barnes and Ann E. Marimow
Sep 1, 2021

AUSTIN — A Texas law that bans most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy went into effect Wednesday, as a midnight deadline for the Supreme Court to stop it came and went without action.

The court could still grant a request from abortion providers to halt the law, one of the nation’s most restrictive. But for now, abortion providers in Texas, including Planned Parenthood and Whole Woman’s Health, said they will no longer terminate pregnancies more than six weeks from a woman’s last period.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/texas-six-week-abortion-ban/2021/09/01/e53cf372-0a6b-11ec-a6dd-296ba7fb2dce_story.html

The tiny American towns passing anti-abortion rules

In the last year, 23 Texas towns have declared themselves ‘sanctuary cities for the unborn’, making the procedure punishable, and in April, a Nebraska village became the 24^th

Jessica Glenza
Tue 27 Apr 2021

Over the last year of the pandemic, 23 tiny towns in Texas have approved local laws declaring themselves “sanctuary cities for the unborn”, passing ordinances to make the procedure punishable by a $2,000 fine.

In April, the tiny village of Hayes Center, Nebraska, became the 24th, and the first outside Texas.

ontinued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/27/us-tiny-towns-anti-abortion-ordinances

Abortion rights groups drop suit over abortion ordinances

Abortion rights groups drop suit over abortion ordinances

by The Associated Press
Posted May 26, 2020

DALLAS — Two reproductive rights groups have dropped their lawsuit against seven small East Texas towns that had declared abortion-rights organizations “criminal organizations” in anti-abortion ordinances that prohibit them from operating within city limits.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas said Wednesday that the lawsuit had achieved its purpose of compelling the towns to revise their ordinances “to allow pro-abortion organizations to operate within the cities and stop calling them ‘criminal,'” said Imelda Mejia, spokeswoman for the ACLU of Texas.

Continued: https://www.citynews1130.com/2020/05/26/abortion-rights-groups-drop-suit-over-abortion-ordinances/

The Wall Some Texans Want to Build Against Abortion

The Wall Some Texans Want to Build Against Abortion
Around the country, a “sanctuary city” movement is growing on the right and the left, as people seek to keep out views they don’t agree with, legal or not.

By Dionne Searcey
March 3, 2020

LINDALE, Texas — A small group of women at a recent City Council meeting held hands and offered hushed prayers in an otherwise silent room.

Everyone was waiting for the council members to decide whether their community would become the next “sanctuary city for the unborn.”

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/us/politics/texas-abortion-sanctuary-cities.html