Australia – ‘I was shocked’: Catholic-run public hospitals refuse to provide birth control and abortion

Publicly funded Catholic hospitals across Australia are using the cover of religion to opt out of providing reproductive care – and experts say it has created a ‘postcode lottery’ for access to services

by Donna Lu and Melissa Davey
Mon 21 Aug 2023

When Sarah*, a Melbourne mother, was pregnant with her second child, her GP gave her a surprising warning: if she had any serious complications, concerns about the viability of the pregnancy or believed she might be miscarrying, she should go to the Royal Women’s hospital rather than the Mercy Hospital for Women, where she was planning to deliver the baby.

The reason, the GP told her, was that the Mercy – a public hospital in Melbourne’s north-east – would not assist in terminating a pregnancy due to its Catholic affiliation.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/aug/22/do-australian-catholic-hospitals-perform-abortions-provide-contraception-reproductive-care

Pastors say they support ‘sanctity of life’ after case involving 11-year-old girl

Friday, August 18, 2023
By LYNAIRE MUNNINGS

AFTER an 11-year-old girl allegedly impregnated by her mother’s boyfriend aborted the baby with pills procured by her mother, two prominent religious leaders said yesterday that many churchgoers still oppose abortion in such circumstances.

...Alicia Wallace, director of Equality Bahamas, said given the degree of gender-based violence in The Bahamas, it is “ridiculous and inhumane to expect women or children to suffer through unwanted pregnancies”.

"There is absolutely no reason to criminalise a child or the people who helped her to access critical healthcare that likely saved her life, preventing further physical and mental harm,” she said on Wednesday.

Continued: http://www.tribune242.com/news/2023/aug/18/we-oppose-abortion-even-case-rape-pastors-say-they/

A legal scholar sizes up the religious argument against abortion bans

ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
JULY 9, 2023

(JTA) — The abortion debate is often portrayed as a clash between religious beliefs on the pro-life side and secular or humanist convictions on the pro-choice side. Indeed, lawmakers and activists have often invoked God in enacting state bans on abortion since the Supreme Court, in last year’s Dobbs decision, struck down a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy.

Some clergy and faith groups, however, including a number of Jews, are pushing back. In efforts to overturn these restrictions, they have been pressing a legal strategy claiming that abortion bans violate their religious liberty. In Kentucky, a case brought by three Jewish women argues that the state’s near-total abortion ban violates their religious beliefs about when life begins and protecting a mother’s life. In Indiana, a suit brought by Hoosier Jews for Choice and four women who represent a variety of faiths demands exemptions from the state’s abortion ban for people whose religions support abortion rights.

Continued: https://www.jta.org/2023/07/09/ideas/a-legal-scholar-sizes-up-the-religious-argument-against-abortion-bans

Majority of Kenyans against abortion, new study shows

Monday, July 03, 2023
By Angela Oketch, Health and Science reporter

Nine out of 10 Kenyan adults say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, a new study shows.

A 24-country study by the Pew Research Center found that attitudes varied widely across countries, with religiously unaffiliated adults, people on the ideological left and women more likely to support legal abortion.

Continued: https://nation.africa/kenya/health/majority-of-kenyans-against-abortion-new-study-shows-4291138

03.07.2023

News

anti-choice ignorance

anti-choice misogyny

maternal mortality

opinion polls on abortion

Pro-choice Catholics fight to seize the narrative from the religious right

Maya Yang
Mon 3 Jul 2023

Since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade a year ago, reproductive rights have become an even more contentious issue in an already polarized landscape. With more than 1,500 politicians – mostly men – helping ban abortions since Roe fell, Catholic and pro-choice organizations are increasingly trying to carve out space for themselves in the nationwide dialogue to center their own messaging: that being Catholic and pro-choice are not mutually exclusive.

One organization trying to dismantle religious stigma surrounding abortions is Catholics For Choice, a Washington-DC based Catholic abortion rights advocacy group. For CFC, the belief in individual reproductive rights comes as a result of the Catholic faith, not in spite of.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/03/pro-choice-catholics-us

03.07.2023

Nonreligious Americans Are The New Abortion Voters

By Daniel Cox and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
JUN. 29, 2023

When Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, many white evangelical Protestants didn’t just see the Supreme Court’s ruling as a political win — it was a spiritual victory. For decades, religious conservatives have been singularly focused on ending the constitutional right to abortion, a priority that few other demographic groups shared. White evangelical Protestants — a group that has, since the 1980s, voted overwhelmingly for Republicans — were much more likely than other religious groups to say that abortion was a high priority.

The fall of Roe appears to be changing that. In 2021, the share of religiously unaffiliated Americans (a group that includes atheists, agnostics and people who identify with no religion in particular) who said abortion was a critical issue started to rise. And for the first time in 2022, the year the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the share of religiously unaffiliated Americans who said that abortion was a critical issue was higher than the share of white evangelicals who said the same.

Continued: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/nonreligious-americans-are-the-new-abortion-voters/

29.06.2023

Commentary

Research

American Enterprise Institute

Andrew Lewis

atheists and abortion

David Campbell

non-religious and abortion

Pew Research Center

religiously unaffiliated people and abortion

Survey Center on American Life

white evangelicals and abortion

United States

Human Rights

Religion

Poland – MPs who vote for abortion cannot receive holy communion, says head of Polish episcopate

JUN 22, 2023
Notes from Poland

Members of parliament who vote to allow abortion are “committing a grave sin and thus cannot receive holy communion”, the head of the Catholic church in Poland has warned.

His remarks come after all of Poland’s main opposition parties – most of whom have leaders who are practising Catholics – have expressed support for ending the current near-total ban on abortion, which is supported by the church.

Continued: https://notesfrompoland.com/2023/06/22/mps-who-vote-for-abortion-cannot-receive-holy-communion-says-head-of-polish-episcopate/

22.06.2023

Law and Justice party

Poland Constitutional Tribunal

USA – The loss of abortion access demands a day of collective mourning

One year into the reversal of Roe v. Wade, it is clear that forced birth takes lives

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
June 22, 2023

The one-year anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision — the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and ended federal protections on our Constitutionally guaranteed right to abortion access — arrives this Shabbat, on June 24.

Jews must mark this day as a time of collective mourning for all those whose lives were taken from them because the government stripped them of their right to abortion access.

Continued: https://forward.com/opinion/551585/dobbs-anniversary-collective-mourning-abortion-access/

22.06.2023

Commentary

abortion and suicide

abortion and yahrtzeit

National Council of Jewish Women

Orthodox Judaism and abortion

USA – The sleeper legal strategy that could topple abortion bans

Jews, Episcopalians, Unitarians, Satanists and other people of faith say the laws infringe on their religious rights.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
06/21/2023

WEBSTER GROVES, Mo. — Revs. Jan Barnes and Krista Taves have logged hundreds of hours standing outside abortion clinics across Missouri and Illinois, going back to the mid-1980s. But unlike other clergy members around the country, they never pleaded with patients to turn back.

The sight of the two women in clerical collars holding up messages of love and support for people terminating a pregnancy “so infuriated the anti-abortion protesters that they would heap abuse on us and it drew the abuse away from the women,” recalled Taves, a minister at Eliot Unitarian Chapel in Kirkwood, Missouri, as she sat on a couch at Barnes’ stately church in this quiet suburb of St. Louis.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/21/legal-strategy-that-could-topple-abortion-bans-00102468

Jamaica – Church leaders, JFJ differ over Malahoo Forte’s abortion stance

Friday | June 9, 2023
Ainsworth Morris

NUMEROUS CHURCH leaders from various denominations across the island are happy with comments made by Marlene Malahoo Forte, minister of legal and constitutional affairs, which she stated in the House of Representatives on Tuesday.

The church leaders have thrown their support behind Malahoo Forte after she said that the Government did not intend to disturb any savings law clauses in the Constitution or repeal pre-existing laws that would go against fundamental beliefs held by the Church.

Continued: https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/news/20230609/church-leaders-jfj-differ-over-malahoo-fortes-abortion-stance

09.06.2023