How Ginsburg’s death and Kavanaugh’s maneuvering shaped the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade and abortion rights

By Joan Biskupic, CNN Senior Supreme Court Analyst
Thu March 23, 2023

Editor’s Note: Adapted from “NINE BLACK ROBES: Inside the Supreme Court’s Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences,” by Joan Biskupic, to be published April 4 by William Morrow.

Within days of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s memorial service in late September 2020, boxes of her files and other office possessions were moved down to a dark, windowless theater on the Supreme Court’s ground floor, where – before the ongoing pandemic – tourists could watch a film about court operations.

Grieving aides to the justice who’d served 27 years and become a cultural icon known as the “Notorious RBG” sorted through the chambers’ contents there.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/23/politics/supreme-court-abortion-joan-biskupic-nine-black-robes/index.html

She was one of Alabama’s last abortion doctors. Then they came for everything she had

Dr Leah Torres has endured the ire of the anti-abortion movement without backing down – but now she faces her most daunting challenge

by Poppy Noor
Wed 22 Mar 2023

Dr Leah Torres doesn’t tell people what she does when she meets them, which makes it hard to make friends. She removes her name from every piece of trash before she puts it out for recycling, in case people walking past see her name and find out where she lives. If a package addressed to her arrives on her porch, she calls everyone she knows to identify who sent it before she opens it – it could be a bomb.

Once, coming back from work in the piercing August Alabama sun, she noticed a gray sedan parked in her driveway. Instinctively, she fled to a neighbor’s house – she barely knew him – but asked if he could walk her home anyway. The car turned out to be a stranger’s; the driver had just pulled over to send a text message. “Still, you never know,” says Torres, her big, almond-shaped eyes conveying concern.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/22/alabama-last-abortion-doctor-leah-torres

“You Know What? I’m Not Doing This Anymore.”

There’s a quiet new crisis brewing in Texas following the abortion ban. It could get much worse.

BY SOPHIE NOVACK
MARCH 21, 2023

For three days last fall, Leah Wilson entered her pregnant patient’s hospital room and checked the fetus for a heartbeat. She was waiting for it to stop. The woman’s water had broken at just 19 weeks of pregnancy, well before viability, causing an infection in her uterus. The fetus would not survive, but until it died, or the woman’s condition worsened, there was little the hospital would do, said Wilson, who was her nurse at the time.

Typically in this kind of situation, doctors would terminate the pregnancy to prevent a life-threatening infection or other serious complication. But this patient was in Texas, where abortion is no longer legal.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/03/texas-abortion-law-doctors-nurses-care-supreme-court.html

Republicans Race to Block Access to Ballots for Abortion-Rights Initiatives

Mar 20, 2023
By Ed Kilgore, political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015

Throughout the long but ultimately fragile constitutional regime of Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion advocates and their Republican political partners endlessly inveighed against “activist judges” who were preventing the people and their elected legislators from setting policy in this area by making laws in the states. But now that they’ve won the battle to eliminate any federal right to choose, conservatives are in danger of losing the war in the very court of public opinion they’ve long cited as legitimately supreme. Since the end of Roe last summer, voters in six states have either entrenched abortion rights by constitutional amendment (California, Michigan, and Vermont) or defeated anti-abortion ballot initiatives intended to strip previously established rights (Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana).

Continued: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/republicans-race-to-block-abortion-rights-ballot-measures.html

20.03.2023

Commentary

ballot initiatives on abortion

USA – The anti-abortion movement’s next radical legal argument

If a law is blocked by a court, is it possible to break it?

By Rachel M. Cohen
Mar 20, 2023

Until very recently, nearly everyone accepted some basic ideas about the American legal system. If a state passes a law, and that law is challenged in court, we should act as if that law is still in effect while the case works its way through the court system. That changes only if a judge issues a “preliminary injunction” blocking the law while the lawsuit plays out or a “permanent injunction” to strike the law down. In that case, we all act as if the law is not in effect.

But in recent years, an aggressive wing of the anti-abortion movement has been working to challenge this broadly held idea of legality — a push that has attracted little notice, but is further complicating the debate over abortion access.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/policy/2023/3/20/23641072/walgrens-abortion-pregnancy-jonathan-mitchell-sb8

How close to death must a woman be to get an abortion in Tennessee?

The strictest abortion law in the US doesn’t allow exceptions for medical emergencies – and efforts to change it face powerful opposition from the right

Stephanie Kirchgaessner
Mon 20 Mar 2023

Months after the implementation of the most stringent abortion ban in the country, conservative lawmakers in Tennessee have publicly acknowledged that the state’s ban poses grave risks to the lives of women.

Now a political debate over how to change the law is centered on questions that would have been considered unthinkable before last June’s reversal of Roe v Wade: like how close to death a woman must be before a doctor may legally treat her if it means terminating her pregnancy, and whether women should be forced to carry embryos with fatal anomalies to term.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/20/tennessee-abortion-ban-strictist-in-us

‘Dobbs did not break us’: How West Virginia’s Katie Quiñonez plans to keep helping women

Lindsay Schnell, USA TODAY
Mar 19, 2023

Katie Quiñonez is one of USA TODAY’s Women of the Year, a recognition of women who have made a significant impact in their communities and across the country. The program launched in 2022 as a continuation of Women of the Century, which commemorated the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote. Meet this year’s honorees at womenoftheyear.usatoday.com.

When the U.S. Supreme court overturned Roe v. Wade, the case guaranteeing women a constitutional right to abortion access, last summer, Katie Quiñonez felt utter devastation.

But heartbreak wasn’t the only emotion coursing through the executive director of the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia – she felt determination, too.

Continued: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/life/2023/03/19/katie-quinonez-west-virginia-usa-today-women-year/11248803002/

19.03.2023

USA Today Women of the Year

Women's Health Center of West Virginia

Professional Herbalists Explain Why Social Media Isn’t the Place to Discuss Herbal Abortions

Sam Manzella
March 18, 2023

When Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that safeguarded abortion access in the United States for nearly 50 years, was overturned last June, herbalist Sarah Corbett of Rowan + Sage wasn’t surprised. “The writing was on the wall for years, if not decades,” she says, citing Black and indigenous activists and healers who sounded alarms while Roe was still the law of the land.

What did shock Corbett was that, in the wake of Roe’s reversal, she and virtually every herbalist she knows received a deluge of direct messages asking them to share information about herbal abortions on social media. It’s a “big ethical battleground” in the herbalism community, she explains. “I can't speak for everyone, but most herbalists hold an ideal of trying not to harm people. And [talking about herbal abortion online] could legitimately cause harm.”

Continued: https://www.wellandgood.com/herbal-abortion/

18.03.2023

Commentary

Cedar Hill Homestead

herbal abortion

herbalists and abortion

Doctors Warned Her Pregnancy Could Kill Her. Then Tennessee Outlawed Abortion.

A Tennessee mother wanted to end her high-risk pregnancy, but doctors feared prosecution.

by Kavitha Surana, photography by Stacy Kranitz, special to ProPublica
March 14, 2023

This story graphically describes serious complications in pregnancies and births, and it mentions suicide.

One day late last summer, Dr. Barry Grimm called a fellow obstetrician at Vanderbilt University Medical Center to consult about a patient who was 10 weeks pregnant. Her embryo had become implanted in scar tissue from a recent cesarean section, and she was in serious danger. At any moment, the pregnancy could rupture, blowing open her uterus.

Dr. Mack Goldberg, who was trained in abortion care for life-threatening pregnancy complications, pulled up the patient’s charts. He did not like the look of them. The muscle separating her pregnancy from her bladder was as thin as tissue paper; her placenta threatened to eventually invade her organs like a tumor. Even with the best medical care in the world, some patients bleed out in less than 10 minutes on the operating table. Goldberg had seen it happen.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/tennessee-abortion-ban-doctors-ectopic-pregnancy

UK -The two doctors rule for authorising abortion should be scrapped, recommends review

BMJ 2023; 380 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p563
Published 08 March 2023
Matthew Limb

The UK government is facing fresh pressure to overhaul abortion law after new research found strong backing among women and healthcare professionals for change.

The Shaping Abortion for Change (Sacha) study, led by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), recommended allowing nurses and midwives to authorise an abortion, prescribe abortion drugs, and perform vacuum aspirations as they do in miscarriage care. If adopted, this would mean scrapping the requirement under the Abortion Act 1967 for two doctors to authorise an abortion.

Continued: https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p563

09.03.2023