Virginia – ‘It’s cruel’: the last southern refuge for abortion rights might soon fall

Virginia is the only southern state that hasn’t restricted abortion post-Roe. Is that about to change?

Carter Sherman in Charlottesville, Virginia
Tue 31 Oct 2023

By the time Chasity Dunans learned about her pregnancy, she had already lost the right to end it.

She had gotten her period in July, but towards the end of the month the 23-year-old mother of one started to have heartburn and wrenching stomach pains. She told herself: you’re not pregnant, you’re just sick. When the pain didn’t stop, she gave in and saw a doctor.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/31/virginia-abortion-rights-ban-south-state

“Hopeless and frustrated”: Idaho’s abortion ban is driving OB/GYNs out of the state

BY ADRIANA DIAZ, JESSICA KEGU, ANALISA NOVAK, CBS NEWS
OCTOBER 31, 2023

Idaho's restrictive abortion laws are fueling an exodus of OB/GYNs, with more than half of those who specialize in high-risk pregnancies expected to leave the state by the end of the year.

Doctors CBS News spoke with said treating non-viable pregnancies, in which the fetus is not expected to survive, puts them and their patients in what they call an impossible position.

Continued: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/idaho-near-total-abortion-ban-driving-doctors-out-of-the-state/

31.10.2023

Commentary

abortion bans

Becca Vincen-Brown

Center for Reproductive Rights

Kenya – Surviving incest, abortions: Kakamega’s struggle to protect girls

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

By Shaban Makokha

In the tranquil heart of Navakholo, Kakamega, a grim narrative unfolds – once shadowed by the specters of incest, teenage pregnancies, and the haunting tales of unsafe abortion.

Young girls find themselves entangled in pregnancies thrust upon them by older men, some of whom are guardians and relatives.

Continued: https://nation.africa/kenya/news/gender/surviving-incest-abortions-kakamega-s-struggle-to-protect-girls-4418232

The hidden abortions of Newfoundland’s ‘Bible Belt’

Every month, nurse Rolanda Ryan and her team hit the road, discreetly performing abortions in rural Newfoundland. CBC/Radio-Canada accompanied her during a recent mobile clinic – in a region known as the island’s “Bible Belt.”

Text and photos by Patrick Butler, Radio-Canada
Oct. 30, 2023

“You squeeze my hand if you want,” offers the nurse. On her back with her knees in the air, the patient breathes hard. “Sixty seconds to go,” says the doctor, laser-focused in the temporary operating room, set up in less than three hours.

The doctor slowly inserts a large tube into the cervix, as the patient’s breath picks up again. “You’re doing so well,” she says. A few moments later, the aspirator, a syringe-like tool attached to the transparent tube, sucks out the embryo with a hollow click.

“All done,” says the doctor. Sighs of relief emanate from everyone in the room: from the single mother, who travelled 600 kilometres to put an end to an unexpected pregnancy, to the nurse at her side, whose devout family doesn’t know she holds the hands of rural Newfoundland women, coaching them through surgical abortion procedures like this one.

Continued: https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/mobile-abortion-clinic-newfoundland-bible-belt

30.10.2023

Commentary

abortion in Newfoundland

mobile abortion clinics

British police testing women for abortion drugs

Forensic reports seen by Tortoise show police requesting tests for mifepristone and misoprostol

Monday 30 October 2023
Phoebe Davis, Tortoise Media

British police are testing women for abortion drugs and requesting data from menstrual tracking apps after unexplained pregnancy losses.

Tortoise has seen forensic reports in which police have requested a mass spectrometry test, which can detect the presence of the abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol in the urine, blood and placenta of women under investigation.

Other reports include requests for “data related to menstruation tracking applications” as part of the police’s investigations.

Continued: https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2023/10/30/british-police-testing-women-for-abortion-drugs/

‘Disproven and unsupportable’: Kansas judge blocks junk science abortion restrictions

The ruling called the long-standing “Women’s Right to Know Act” an attempt to discourage abortion seekers

BY: RACHEL MIPRO
OCTOBER 30, 2023

TOPEKA — A Kansas judge on Monday blocked a combination of long-standing and newly implemented abortion restrictions in the state in what abortion providers described as a “hard-fought” win against “ethically unjustifiable” misinformation.

Johnson County District Judge Krishnan Christopher Jayaram ruled against several abortion requirements set out in the “Women’s Right to Know Act,” patchwork legislation enacted over the past two decades that uses medically inaccurate information to dictate abortion restrictions.

Continued: https://kansasreflector.com/2023/10/30/disproven-and-unsupportable-kansas-judge-blocks-junk-science-abortion-restrictions/

Opposing parties answer AG in case on Guam abortion ban

John O'Connor | The Guam Daily Post
Oct 30, 2023

Parties opposed to the attorney general's attempt at reviving a decades-old abortion ban on Guam argue that the AG is essentially looking to reset the field at this stage because he failed to lay down specific arguments earlier at a lower court. Additional arguments from the opposition bring up free speech issues imposed by the ban, and comment further that recent changes in the U.S. Supreme Court's position on abortion do nothing to change the unconstitutionality of such provisions.

Guam's abortion ban is found in Public Law 20-134. The ban prohibits abortions at all stages of pregnancy with limited exceptions related to medical intervention and ectopic pregnancies. Victims of rape and incest, for example, are not exempt under the ban unless they meet those limited exceptions. The ban also contains a referendum provision, allowing voters to determine if the ban should stay, but the election date has long passed.

Continued: https://www.postguam.com/news/local/opposing-parties-answer-ag-in-case-on-guam-abortion-ban/article_77bec528-76b6-11ee-9d63-9bf2dc9a7396.html

Sixty-one people in US criminalized for alleged self-managed abortions, report finds

Justice group calls some charges in past 20 years ‘illegitimate uses of state power’ and says over 40% of cases involved people of color

Carter Sherman
Mon 30 Oct 2023

Between 2000 and 2020, 61 people, including seven minors, were criminally investigated or arrested for allegedly ending their own pregnancies or helping someone else do so, according to a Monday report from If/When/How, a reproductive justice group that helps people deal with legal cases related to pregnancy.

Only 14 of those cases arose in the seven states that had bans on “self-managed abortion” on the books between 2000 and 2020. The report found that the vast majority of those cases were charged under other kinds of laws – ones that prosecutors had made elastic enough to fit the supposed crime.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/30/self-managed-abortions-arrest-investiagtion-roe-v-wade

30.10.2023

News

anti-choice callousness

anti-choice cruelty

anti-choice hatred

anti-choice misogyny

anti-choice oppression

criminalizing women for self-managed abortion

If/When/How

Laura Huss

self-managed abortion

United States

Human Rights

Law

Nigeria: UNFPA Supplies Family Planning Commodities to 700 Kaduna Health Facilities – Official

29 OCTOBER 2023

"There is also the problem of unsafe abortion when people are not ready, and the solution is simply contraceptives."
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) says it supplies family planning commodities to over 700 health facilities across Kaduna State every quarter.

The Reproductive Health Analyst, UNFPA Kaduna, Elvis Evborein, made this known in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Kaduna on Sunday.

Continued: https://allafrica.com/stories/202310300025.html

29.10.2023

United Nations Population Fund

ERA and Abortion Are Key to Women’s Vote in 2024

The overturning of Roe v. Wade was a wake-up call and the Equal Rights Amendment is needed now more than ever.

KATHY SPILLAR
Oct 29, 2023

In the majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning the federal right to abortion, Justice Alito purported that the electoral and political process are a sufficient antidote to the Court’s stripping away of privacy rights. Women got the message, loud and clear. Despite warnings from mainstream pundits that outrage over the ruling and commitment to the cause would fade, voters indeed turned out in force in support of abortion rights – again and again, in the 2022 midterms, in judicial elections, and in ballot measure after ballot measure.

As executive editor of Ms. magazine, I have long known the centrality of abortion in U.S. politics. The inaugural issue of Ms. in 1972, for example, featured a group of influential women who signed a petition “We Have Had Abortions” — at great personal risk, as abortion was outlawed in many states at the time. This set the stage not only for Roe v. Wade a year later, but organizing strategies that are still employed today. The Washington Post reported last year that the Ms. petition “changed the course of the abortion rights movement,” as it made visible that which had been invisible — the women who had abortions and the benefits to their lives.

Continued: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/era-abortion-rights-2024