Report finds independent abortion clinics face more threats, decline post-Dobbs

It’s a tough time to run an abortion clinic.

By Caroline Catherman
December 11, 2024

In May 2023, a man drove a car through a future reproductive health clinic in Danville, Illinois. He arrived with bottles of gasoline, a hatchet, road flares, and matches with plans to set it on fire, authorities reported.

While no one was harmed, the clinic, Affirmative Care Solutions, hasn’t been able to open.

Affirmative Care Solutions Director LaDonna Prince said this is just one example of growing hostility toward her shrinking profession.

Continued: https://www.healthcare-brew.com/stories/2024/12/11/report-independent-abortion-clinics-more-threats-decline-post-dobbs

11.12.2024

Abortion Care Network

Affirmative Care Solutions

Communities Need Clinics

EMW Women’s Surgical Center

funding for abortion clinics

Canada – Conservatives decry ‘procedural nonsense’ as NDP forces House debate on abortion

Surprise move sidelines Conservative non-confidence motion

Kyle Duggan · The Canadian Press
Dec 05, 2024

A surprise tactical move by the NDP forced a debate in the House of Commons on abortion access Thursday, sidelining a Conservative motion designed to use NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh's own words against him.

Just ahead of the time set for the Conservative motion to come up, NDP MP Heather McPherson changed the channel by launching into a debate on a foreign affairs committee report tabled in the House Thursday.

Continued: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ndp-conservatives-house-debate-1.7402136

05.12.2024

A Third Woman Died Under Texas’ Abortion Ban. Doctors Are Avoiding D&Cs and Reaching for Riskier Miscarriage Treatments.

Thirty-five-year-old Porsha Ngumezi’s case raises questions about how abortion bans are pressuring doctors to avoid standard care even in straightforward miscarriages.

by Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana
Nov. 25, 2024

Wrapping his wife in a blanket as she mourned the loss of her pregnancy at 11 weeks, Hope Ngumezi wondered why no obstetrician was coming to see her.

Over the course of six hours on June 11, 2023, Porsha Ngumezi had bled so much in the emergency department at Houston Methodist Sugar Land that she’d needed two transfusions. She was anxious to get home to her young sons, but, according to a nurse’s notes, she was still “passing large clots the size of grapefruit.”

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/porsha-ngumezi-miscarriage-death-texas-abortion-ban

A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms

It took three ER visits and 20 hours before a hospital admitted Nevaeh Crain, 18, as her condition worsened. Doctors insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm “fetal demise.” She’s one of at least two Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban.

by Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana
Nov. 1, 2024

Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.

Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/nevaeh-crain-death-texas-abortion-ban-emtala

ASPIRE calls for cultural change in the Caribbean

21 October 2024
By Robert Andre Emmanuel

Health experts representing Advocates for Safe Parenthood, Improving Reproductive Equity (ASPIRE) have expressed the need for comprehensive reproductive healthcare reform in Antigua and Barbuda, including destigmatisation of abortion, sexuality and sexual education.

The conversation on Observer media’s Big Issues came following a decision by a High Court judge to dismiss a motion to strike out the case brought by ASPIRE, dealing a significant blow to the government’s attempt to quash the lawsuit.

Continued: https://antiguaobserver.com/aspire-calls-for-cultural-change-in-the-caribbean/

21.10.2024

Advocates for Safe Parenthood Improving Reproductive Equity

Aspire

Dr Frederick Nunes

Dr Tonia Frame

Why medical support for safe abortion is growing in a post-Roe world

While the right to safe abortion has been restricted in the United States, elsewhere, governments are liberalising abortion laws.

By Laura Gil and Sangeeta Mishra
Published On 28 Sep 2024

In June 2022, the United States Supreme Court overturned its own decision from 1973 in the landmark Roe v Wade case, which until then protected the right of American women to legal abortion. This resulted in a wave of state-level initiatives to ban abortion. Today, 21 US states partially or fully restrict access to abortion.

As a result, women in the US face significant barriers in obtaining safe abortions – with legal uncertainty and lengthy court cases to determine their access to reproductive healthcare. These restrictions have affected not only women seeking to terminate an unwanted pregnancy but also those who have suffered miscarriages, often limiting their access to emergency medical assistance.

Continued: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/9/28/why-medical-support-for-safe-abortion-is-growing-in-a-post-roe-world

28.09.2024

International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics

Laura Gil

safe abortion guidelines

Sangeeta Mishra

SheDecides Champions

World Health Organization

Scotland – ‘Significant fines’ for people who break abortion buffer zones

23 Sep 2024

People who break abortion buffer zones have been warned they face “significant fines”. Legislation establishing protected zones of 200 metres around abortion services comes into force tomorrow.

The Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) (Scotland) Bill was passed in June. Those who break the law may be fined up to £10,000 under summary procedure.

Continued: https://www.scottishlegal.com/articles/significant-fines-for-people-who-break-abortion-buffer-zones

23.09.2024

Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) (Scotland) Bill

anti-choice harassment

anti-choice intimidation

anti-choice misogyny

anti-choice protesters

‘April’ review: A visceral Georgian abortion drama

Déa Kulumbegashvili's sophomore feature, about a brave obstetrician, is riveting and disturbing.

By Siddhant Adlakha
September 7, 2024

Déa Kulumbegashvili's April is a bone-rattling drama about what it means to be a woman in the country of Georgia. The nation's laws permit pregnancy termination only up to 12 weeks — before some people even know they're expecting — and even then, rural stigma prevents many of them from accessing care. Kulumbegashvili places her protagonist Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) against this volatile backdrop, as an obstetrician who risks her career by driving to far-flung villages to help pregnant women in need of abortions.

While the film's focus is the aspersions cast on Nina's character, it tells its story in oblique ways, with stunning confrontations of violence and bodily function that form a visceral fabric. The film presents life as an overlapping showreel of birth, death, pregnancy, abortion, and sex, all facets of female experience that Kulumbegashvili merges into a monstrous beast — not just narratively, but literally, through nightmarish imagery.

Continued: https://mashable.com/article/april-review

07.09.2024

Venice International Film Festival

The Journey of an Abortion in South Carolina

When, at five months pregnant, Emma Giglio discovered her baby had multiple anomalies in utero, she and her husband made the heartrending decision to terminate their pregnancy. But that was just the beginning of her agony.

By Stephanie McNeal
Photography by Lindsey Shorter
September 5, 2024

It shouldn’t be this hard to find a birthday cake in a college town in suburban Maryland, even on short notice.

That’s what Emma Giglio thought as she walked up and down the busy streets, a bleak January air whipping her face. There were fast food joints, sports bars, casual restaurants offering every cuisine you could imagine. Just nowhere, seemingly, to buy a birthday cake.

Emma and her husband, Zach, kept going. Because they had to, even though at 24 weeks of pregnancy, Emma’s gait had changed. She was so much bigger with this baby than she’d been with her older sons, but that’s how it goes when it’s your third.

Continued: https://www.glamour.com/story/election-2024-the-journey-of-my-abortion-in-south-carolina

05.09.2024

Partners in Abortion Care

Siya Giglio

The Brigid Alliance

Zach Giglio

UK – How socialists won unions to fighting for abortion rights

Sheila McGregor was a women’s organiser for the International Socialists, forerunners of the Socialist Workers Party, in the 1970s. She looks at how socialists and trade unionists argued for abortion rights

Sept 2, 2024

An overwhelming majority of people in Britain support abortion rights. This wouldn’t be the case if socialists hadn’t won an argument that abortion rights are a class issue which unions must fight for in every workplace.

In the 1970s the right organised a backlash to the 1967 Abortion Act. Religious bigots had set up the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (Spuc). And in the 1970s it was capable of mobilising tens of thousands of men and women onto the streets to oppose abortion rights.

Continued: https://socialistworker.co.uk/features/how-socialists-won-unions-to-fighting-for-abortion-rights/

03.09.2024