The anti-abortion plan ready for Trump on Day One

The stakes of the election go far beyond whether a GOP president signs a bill banning the procedure.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
01/29/2024

Anti-abortion groups have not yet persuaded Donald Trump to commit to signing a national ban if he returns to the White House.

But, far from being deterred, those groups are designing a far-reaching anti-abortion agenda for the former president to implement as soon as he is in office. In emerging plans that involve everything from the EPA to the Federal Trade Commission to the Postal Service, nearly 100 anti-abortion and conservative groups are mapping out ways the next president can use the sprawling federal bureaucracy to curb abortion access.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/29/trump-abortion-ban-2024-campaign-00138417


USA – March for Life: Anti-abortion movement stalls as election year politics loom

19th January 2024
By Holly Honderich, BBC News, Washington

On Friday, activists assembled in Washington for the March for Life, the nation's largest annual anti-abortion rally.

The crowds were thinner than in past years, due in part to the cold temperatures and blowing snow that blanketed the capital overnight. But the campaigners in attendance this year also acknowledged the more concerning headwinds facing their movement, now in an election year: a general public broadly supportive of abortion rights, and a Republican party increasingly hesitant to join the fight.

Continued: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68027344


The Contempt for Democracy Driving the Anti-Abortion Movement

As pro-choice advocates plan more statewide initiatives protecting abortion rights, opponents say victory lies in stopping citizens from voting on the issue directly.

JOAN WALSH
Dec 19, 2023

In the wake of major abortion-rights victories in Michigan and Ohio, where majorities of voters enshrined abortion rights in the state Constitutions, and in Kansas and Kentucky, where voters rejected efforts to remove or prevent abortion rights from being included in the state constitution, the anti-abortion movement is mounting an aggressive campaign against such vox populi measures. Steven Aden, the chief legal officer of the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life told Politico, “We don’t believe those rights should be subjected to majority vote.”

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/abortion-rights-state-constitutions/


UK – Pro-choice campaigners deface anti-abortion stand at Bristol Freshers’ Fair

‘It was really weird that there was not a single female face on the stall’

Sep 24, 2023
Sapphire Hope News

Pro-choice activists dismantled the anti-abortion ‘Students for Life’ stall at Bristol’s Freshers’ Fair on Friday.

The pro-life stand, staffed predominantly by men, was approached by three protestors who began taking down pro-life signs.

Two female students from the group unveiled a large banner which read: “Abortion is a Human Right”.

Continued: https://thetab.com/uk/bristol/2023/09/24/pro-choice-campaigners-deface-anti-abortion-stand-at-bristol-freshers-fair-56427


Post-Roe, anti-abortion groups target law protecting clinics from violence

The Face Act penalizes people for blockading and threatening abortion clinics. Anti-abortion activists want it repealed

Carter Sherman
Sat 16 Sep 2023

The inside of the abortion clinic was chaotic. Anti-abortion protesters lined the walls. A few had sat down on the clinic’s lime green chairs and draped themselves in chains. “Please inspire these parents to keep their babies!” one man shouted, before he started singing about the Virgin Mary. As some of the protesters sang and prayed loudly, the police officers crowded inside the clinic tried to urge them to move. They didn’t want to budge.

It was 22 October 2020, and one anti-abortion advocate was livestreaming a group of activists who were at the Washington DC-area clinic to, in their view, “rescue” people from having abortions. One redheaded young woman turned to the camera.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/16/face-act-anti-abortion-threaten-clinics


USA – The GOP’s Plan to Ban Birth Control (Part I)

Redefining Contraception as 'Abortion'

JESSICA VALENTI
AUG 14, 2023

For years, feminists have warned that Republicans want to ban birth control. We’ve pointed to legal and cultural trends showing how contraception is in danger, only to be told again and again that we’re overreacting or being hysterical. Remember how well it turned out when our warnings about Roe were ignored?

This disbelief over the danger to contraception isn’t just run-of-the-mill misogyny—though that’s certainly part of it. Some people simply can’t comprehend why lawmakers who claim to be against abortion would prohibit birth control, which prevents unwanted pregnancies. They haven’t caught onto the fact that Republicans’ real end goal is a return to traditional gender roles, and that overturning Roe was simply a means to that end.

Continued: https://jessica.substack.com/p/the-gops-plan-to-ban-birth-control


USA – How a 150-Year-Old Law Against Lewdness Became a Key to the Abortion Fight

The Comstock Act, named for a public-morals crusader on a mission to “sanitize” the U.S. in the 1870s, makes a comeback in the abortion-pill battle.

By Emily Bazelon
May 16, 2023

Anthony Comstock, a 19th-century crusader against sexual liberty, was mocked as a prude in his own time, but wielded real power. He persuaded Congress in 1873 to pass the Comstock Act, written by and named for him, making it a federal crime to send or deliver “obscene, lewd or lascivious” material through the mail or by other carriers, specifically including items used for abortion or birth control.

By the 1960s, the Comstock Act had fallen out of use — narrowed by court rulings, partly gutted by congressional repeals — and it was made an unconstitutional relic by the Supreme Court’s decision in 1973 in Roe v. Wade, recognizing a national right to abortion. But it stayed on the books.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/us/abortion-comstock-act.html


This doctor says bans won’t stop her from getting abortion pills to women in the U.S.

BY LAURA KINGSTAFF
APRIL 3, 2023

AMSTERDAM —  It was nearly three decades ago, as a young medical trainee in West Africa, that Rebecca Gomperts witnessed scenes that would set in motion her life’s work. Gruesome hemorrhages, perforated wombs, bloodied young women gasping out their lives: all the aftermath of botched illegal abortions.

“The methods — oh, how invasive they were,” the 57-year-old Dutch activist-physician said, shaking her head at the memory of stricken women staggering or being carried into the hospital. “Sticks. Bleach.”

Continued: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-04-03/dutch-doctor-telemedicine-group-abortion-pill-struggle


USA – FDA says it will greenlight pharmacies to fill prescriptions for abortion pill

Pharmacies would have to become certified and a prescription is still needed.

By Anne Flaherty
January 3, 2023

The abortion pill mifepristone is safe enough that retail pharmacies can begin dispensing it so long as a certified health care provider prescribes the drug and if that pharmacy meets certain requirements, according to new rules published Tuesday by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

If pharmacies jump on board, the FDA action could dramatically expand access to the drug in states where it's already legal. Doctors, for example, might be more willing to get certified to prescribe the drug because they would no longer have to stock it themselves and could write a prescription much as they would any other medication.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fda-greenlight-pharmacies-fill-prescriptions-abortion-pill-agency/story?id=96115469


Six Months After Roe v. Wade Demise, Abortion Opponents are Shaken and Angry

No arrests after more than 122 attacks on churches, pregnancy centers

BY JULIA DUIN
12/30/22

Attacks on abortion clinics are nothing new in the U.S., but a surge of incidents targeting abortion opponents in the name of a shadowy group called "Jane's Revenge" and others has left anti-abortion groups shaken—and angry with law enforcement agencies.

The increase in such violence began after the leak in May of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision of its intent to overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling that since 1973 had granted a nationwide right to abortion.

Continued: https://www.newsweek.com/six-months-after-roe-v-wade-demise-abortion-opponents-are-shaken-angry-1769837