UK – Buffer zones outside abortion clinics should protect women so why are women still being harassed?

Women are still waiting for the implementation of a new law to stop abortion clinic harassment, despite it being passed more than a year ago.

Sunday 18 August 2024
Olivia Petter

On 3 May last year, things were finally looking up for reproductive rights campaigners. After years of relentless pressure from abortion healthcare providers, the government had signed “buffer zones” into law, subsequently making it an offence to influence, obstruct, or harass those seeking terminations within 150 metres of a clinic.

“We were so relieved,” says Nichola Dowell, the clinical services matron at one such clinic, MSI in Camden, London. For years, she has witnessed the distressing impact that anti-abortion campaigners have on patients. “Abortion should be treated as healthcare, and everyone should be able to access it free from harassment.”

Continued: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women/abortion-buffer-zones-delay-2024-b2596299.html

Unlike Joe Biden, Kamala Harris will be a genuine champion for abortion rights

It was hard to get the president to talk about abortion at all, but Harris seems to realize that abortion rights are a winning issue

Moira Donegan
Thu 25 Jul 2024

When he was still the nominee, Joe Biden’s preferred euphemism for abortion was “Roe”. He would talk about “upholding” Roe v Wade even after June 2022, when the US supreme court struck it down. Reproductive rights advocates bristled at this, pointing out how many people had been denied abortions under Roe, and how flimsy the decision’s protection of reproductive rights had been on personal-autonomy or sex-equality grounds.

Frankly, it was hard to get the president to talk about abortion at all. He seemed to avoid even the word “abortion”. When he did talk about the procedure – and the bans on it that Republicans have unleashed across the country – he preferred to focus on women who had been denied emergency abortions for wanted pregnancies in the midst of tragic health complications.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/25/kamala-harris-abortion-rights-biden

25.07.2024

Poland – Tusk government faces first crisis after abortion and court setbacks

Two embarrassing blows in the space of less than a week have left Donald Tusk’s government facing its first serious crisis, raising questions over the unity and competence of the ruling coalition.

JUL 18, 2024
By Daniel Tilles, Notes from Poland

When Donald Tusk’s coalition came to power late last year, two of its key promises were to soften Poland’s strict abortion laws and to restore the rule of law, including by holding to account figures from the former ruling Law and Justice (PiS) administration for their alleged crimes.

But fulfilling these aims has proven much harder in practice, as two setbacks over the past week have demonstrated.

Continued: https://notesfrompoland.com/2024/07/18/tusk-government-faces-first-crisis-after-abortion-and-court-setbacks-opinion/

18.07.2024

Law and Justice party

Polish People’s Party

Ireland – Abortion numbers are in line with predictions

Letter of the Day
Mon Jul 15 2024
by Dr Peter Boylan, Former chair, Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists,

Sir, – Breda O’Brien’s claim that there has been an “astonishing rise” in abortion services accessed by women in the Republic of Ireland since the repeal of the Eighth Amendment is misplaced (“In Ireland, you can tell people abortion figures won’t rise and still be unaccountable when they double”, Opinion & Analysis, July 13th).

The statistic of 3,019 women from the Republic accessing abortion in England and Wales in 2017 refers only to the number of women who gave addresses in the Republic. Many others provided the UK addresses of family, friends or supporters. This practice was well-identified over many years when abortion was illegal here. Similarly, the number of women who used abortion pills prior to repeal cannot be accurately determined.

Continued: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/2024/07/15/abortion-numbers-are-in-line-with-predictions/

15.07.2024

Brazilian politicians want criminal penalties for abortion

June 30, 2024
By Cassiane Saraiva, Nicole Luna

Rio de Janeiro, BRAZIL – In recent weeks, conservative efforts to punish women who get abortions – including child victims of rape – as criminals has spurred demonstrations and discussion on social media. Unfortunately, abortion access is something that we, as a society, must fight to achieve.

Abortion in Brazil is allowed in cases when childbirth is a risk to life to the mother or in cases of rape or if the fetus has brain damage. The problem is that here in Brazil, the process to be able to receive the right to abort is extremely slow.

Continued: https://youthjournalism.org/brazilian-politicians-want-criminal-penalties-for-abortion/

30.06.2024

The supreme court abortion ruling hides conservative justices’ partisan agenda

One day soon, this case will come back, and the supreme court will allow states to ban emergency abortions

Moira Donegan
Fri 28 Jun 2024

The supreme court is a messy institution. Its six conservative justices are mired in infighting over both the pace of their shared ideological project of remaking American law and life according to rightwing preferences, and over their preferred methodological course for doing so. Their squabbling is not helped by the fact that two of them, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, keep embarrassing the court with gauche public scandals, which draw attention to the court’s legitimacy crises like a vulgar flag waving above One First Street. For their part, the liberals are exhausted, impotent and at times apparently publicly despairing. Their dissents have sometimes taken on tones of exasperation and peeved sarcasm, as if they’re turning to the country and asking: “Can you believe this?” Their most senior member, Sonia Sotomayor, recently told an interviewer that over the past several terms, since the court’s conservative supermajority was sealed under the Trump administration, she has sometimes gone into her chambers after the announcement of major decisions and wept. She says she anticipates having to do so again: in one recent dissent, she warned ominously about the future of gay marriage rights.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/28/supreme-court-abortion-ruling-conservative-justices

28.06.2024

Opinion

Burwell v Hobby Lobby

Clarence Thomas

emergency abortions

EMTALA

Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Moira Donegan

Moyle v United States

How do we free abortion?

Bethany Rielly learns how feminist movements are organizing to put abortion back in the hands of the people – and keep it there.

17 June 2024
Bethany Rielly

In a narrow street deep in Barcelona’s Raval district is a building with an inconspicuous oval hole in its facade. Above the wooden door is the faint lettering ‘Casa d’Infants Orfes’ (House of Orphaned Infants). From the Middle Ages up to the 19th century, women would place their newborn babies in the wooden hatch and rotate it, allowing the anonymous and safe delivery of the child to the orphanage. This small window into the past is emblematic of a time when the social stigma of having an illegitimate child and extreme poverty forced many women to abandon their child in the dead of night. Today in the US, conservatives are promoting a modern-day equivalent: the ‘baby box’.

An insulated pull-out drawer installed at police and fire stations, these boxes allow desperate women to give up their babies anonymously without fear of prosecution. Introduced in the 1990s to prevent the most extreme cases of child abandonment, the religious Right are now pushing to expand these ‘safe haven’ laws as an alternative to abortion.

Continued: https://newint.org/health/2024/how-do-we-free-abortion

Access to abortion is not just a matter of health, it is a matter of basic human rights

Jun 16, 2024
by Jessica Gosselin, Valerie Jeanneret, Meghan Pritchard

How is it that women in the United States, a society that styled itself as the defender of the “free world” more than 50 years ago, are still fighting for basic human rights in 2024?

In the landmark decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court abandoned its duty to protect fundamental rights by overturning Roe v. Wade, ruling that there is no federal, constitutional right to abortion. In the nearly two years since, 21 states have banned abortion or restricted the procedure to earlier in pregnancies than the standard that had been set by Roe v. Wade that allowed abortion until the fetus became viable, or 24-28 weeks post-conception.

Continued: https://healthydebate.ca/2024/06/topic/abortion-basic-human-rights/

16.06.2024

Opinion

Bill C-311

Cathay Wagantall

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

USA – The Supreme Court’s Abortion Pill Ruling Should Satisfy Nobody

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK AND MARK JOSEPH STERN
JUNE 13, 2024

On Thursday, the Supreme Court did the bare minimum necessary to operate like an actual court of law, unanimously throwing out an absurd and dangerous lawsuit against medication abortion. The justices do not deserve extra credit for refusing to embrace this deeply unserious litigation, and they should earn no gold stars for maintaining the legal status quo on abortion pills. They merely acted as minimally responsible adults in a room of sugared-up preschoolers, shutting down the lower courts’ lawless rampage over all known rules of standing in desperate pursuit of an anti-abortion agenda. It is chilling to the bone that activist lawyers and judges were able to wreak as much havoc as they did before SCOTUS put them in timeout.

And this bad joke of a case isn’t even over: A lower court has already teed up a do-over that could once again jeopardize access to reproductive care in all 50 states. Don’t call this decision a victory. It is at best a reprieve—an election-year performance of Supreme Court unanimity and sobriety that masks the damage the conservative supermajority has already inflicted, as well as the threats to reproductive freedom that lie ahead.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/06/supreme-court-abortion-pill-ruling-2024-comstock-threat.html

13.06.2024

FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

I’m from the UK. Here’s why I chose to pay for my abortion abroad

I felt safer getting my abortion in a country that forthrightly enshrines abortion access in law.

BY HANNAH SHEWAN STEVENS
10 June 2024

“Your boobs are huge,” my partner quipped from the hotel bed as I wiggled into my swimming costume. I laughed it off and jiggled them in his face before taking one last swim on our holiday in the Dominican Republic, trying to quiet that voice in the back of my head, whispering, “What if you are pregnant?”

Annoyingly, the lying, anxious voices were actually right this time. I was pregnant. The day after, we landed in Montreal, Canada, and took a test to discover that my gigantic boobs were, in fact, a harbinger of a pregnancy. The shock overwhelmed me; I spun between numbness, despair, confusing tinges of happiness for a child I’d never wanted, and anticipatory grief for what was to come.

Continued: https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/why-i-chose-abortion-abroad