A State Supreme Court Just Issued the Most Devastating Rebuke of Dobbs Yet

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK AND MARK JOSEPH STERN
JAN 30, 2024

The Supreme Court’s eradication of the constitutional right to abortion in 2022’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization had an immediate and devastating impact on gender equality in the United States. … [Alito] dismissed his ruling’s ruinous impact on gender equality in a single conclusory paragraph asserting that abortion restrictions could not possibly discriminate against women.

… This week the Pennsylvania Supreme Court responded to that conclusion: no. On Monday, the court issued a landmark opinion declaring that abortion restrictions do amount to sex-based discrimination and therefore are “presumptively unconstitutional” under the state constitution’s equal rights amendment. The majority vehemently rejected Dobbs’ history-only analysis, noting that, until recently, “those interpreting the law” saw women “as not only having fewer legal rights than men but also as lesser human beings by design.” Justice David Wecht went even further: In an extraordinary concurrence, the justice recounted the historical use of abortion bans to repress women, condemned Alito’s error-ridden analysis, and repudiated the “antiquated and misogynistic notion that a woman has no say over what happens to her own body.”

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/01/pennsylvania-supreme-court-dobbs-sam-alito-abortion.html

USA – Abortion debate has dominated this election year. Here are Tuesday’s races to watch

BY ROBERT YOON
November 6, 2023

WASHINGTON (AP) — The most-watched races in Tuesday’s off-year general election have all been dominated by the ongoing debate over abortion rights.

From a reelection bid for governor in Kentucky to a statewide ballot measure in Ohio to state legislative elections in Virginia, access to abortion has been a frequent topic in campaign debates and advertising, as it has since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in June last year overturning Roe vs. Wade.
Here’s a look at three major races and how abortion has shaped each contest.

Continued: https://apnews.com/article/election-2023-kentucky-mississippi-governor-virginia-ohio-abortion-uvalde-houston-c1ebf7c4af31da60bd96a8158c86fb29

06.11.2023

USA – The Philly ‘heiress’ who died from an illegal abortion, sending a saloon manager to jail

The 1955 case of Doris Jean Ostreicher became a media sensation.

by Avi Wolfman-Arent
October 7, 2023

In August of 1955, a young woman attempted to get an abortion. After she died inside a North Philadelphia apartment, her case became a media sensation.

Doris Jean Silver grew up just north of Philadelphia. Her uncles founded a grocery store chain called Food Fair Stores Inc., which operated hundreds of locations. And her father, Herman, was a vice president with the company.

Continued: https://billypenn.com/2023/10/07/philadelphia-heiress-doris-jean-illegal-abortion-death-prison/

07.10.2023

On Pennsylvania’s campaign trail, the doctor will see you now

The state’s medical sector is campaigning in unprecedented ways, motivated by abortion and concerns about their profession.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
10/10/2022

PHILADELPHIA — Physicians across Pennsylvania are politicking in unprecedented ways with less than a month to go before the midterm election, making the case that the abortion restrictions proposed by Republicans would threaten one of the state’s most important economic sectors.

They’re flanking Democrats at campaign rallies and knocking on doors in flippable state legislative districts. They are registering patients and colleagues to vote. At town halls and in ads, they warn that doctors, residents and medical students will avoid a state where they could be prosecuted for helping a patient terminate a pregnancy — damaging one of the largest and most recession-proof pieces of the economy.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/10/pennsylvanias-campaign-trail-doctor-abortion-00061063

Pence makes pitch to anti-abortion voters in battleground states

By Caroline Kelly, CNN
Sat September 5, 2020

(CNN) Vice President Mike Pence is making a strong pitch to a potentially crucial base of swing-state anti-abortion voters heading into the last two months of the presidential campaign.

On a visit to North Carolina this week, he attacked Democratic nominee Joe Biden on abortion and reminded people of President Donald Trump's record appointing conservative judges.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/05/politics/mike-pence-abortion-battleground-states/index.html

05.09.2020

Naral Pro-Choice America

Planned Parenthood Votes in North Carolina

USA – Coronavirus pandemic is fueling efforts to increase access to abortion pills

Coronavirus pandemic is fueling efforts to increase access to abortion pills

Marie McCullough - The Philadelphia Inquirer (TNS)
May 29, 2020

The pandemic is helping U.S. abortion-rights advocates achieve a long-standing goal: Make it easier for women to use pills to end pregnancies up to 10 weeks.

Federal and state regulations have restricted access to “medication abortion” ever since the Food and Drug Administration approved it two decades ago. Nonetheless, use of the two-drug regimen has grown steadily, accounting for at least 40% of all abortions, even as the national abortion rate has fallen to historic lows, data show.

Continued: https://www.readingeagle.com/living/health/coronavirus-pandemic-is-fueling-efforts-to-increase-access-to-abortion-pills/article_7e9ee4b3-0d65-5160-8d96-481d14e7ee63.html

USA – Seeing Abortion Laws From a Teenager’s Point of View

Seeing Abortion Laws From a Teenager’s Point of View
Eliza Hittman explains how she came to make her timely odyssey “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” the unusual movie about abortion rights that makes bureaucracy the villain.

By Reggie Ugwu
April 3, 2020

Before writing her new movie, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” about the odyssey of a 17-year-old girl in present-day Pennsylvania seeking a legal abortion, the director Eliza Hittman embarked on a journey of her own. Hittman makes movies of quietly operatic intensity about vulnerable characters in unremarkable places. To find their narratives, she begins in the field, exploring prospective locations like a sculptor wandering a quarry.

Hittman, who is 40 and lives in Brooklyn, traveled by bus to a blue-collar town in Pennsylvania, where state law forbids minors from receiving an abortion without a parent’s consent. There, she toured so-called crisis pregnancy centers, which counsel against abortion regardless of circumstance, and posed as a woman who feared she might be pregnant and needed advice.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/movies/abortion-movie-director.html

“Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” Reviewed: Eliza Hittman’s Ingenious Portrait of the Bureaucracy of Abortion

“Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” Reviewed: Eliza Hittman’s Ingenious Portrait of the Bureaucracy of Abortion

By Richard Brody
March 12, 2020

With her third feature, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” the writer and director Eliza Hittman accomplishes something extraordinary: she expands her method and her style into a vision of the world. Her first feature, “It Felt Like Love,” from 2013, centered on a teen-age girl in a Brooklyn community that Hittman knows well, and extended the tendrils of the protagonist’s dramatic experience into the broader life of the neighborhood. In her second feature, “Beach Rats” (2017), she did something similar and carried it further, scratching and scraping the surface of social connections to reveal the passions and prejudices underlying it. Now, in her new feature, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”—a stark and harrowing story of a teen-ager’s quest to get an abortion—Hittman creates an intimate drama that’s also a story of the social fabric and, in particular, its bureaucratic abstractions and administrative minefields.

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/never-rarely-sometimes-always-reviewed-eliza-hittmans-ingenious-portrait-of-the-bureaucracy-of-abortion

12.03.2020

Featured

Film, Art, Books

abortion film

anti-choice restrictions

Autumn Callahan

Eliza Hittman

Never Rarely Sometimes Always

USA – New film shows harsh realities of abortion restrictions

New film shows harsh realities of abortion restrictions

March 11, 2020
Carla Hay

There have been several movies about abortion, but none quite like Never Rarely Sometimes Always. That’s because this compelling dramatic film, written and directed by Eliza Hittman, takes an unflinching look at the harsh realities of what a 17-year-old in rural Pennsylvania has to go through to get an abortion for an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. The teenager at the center of the story is a fictional character named Autumn Gallagher (played by Sidney Flanigan), but the obstacles and emotional journey that Autumn experiences are very real for anyone who’s been through a similar situation.

Focus Features will release Never Rarely Sometimes Always in select U.S. theaters on March 13. It has already won prestigious awards, including the Silver Bear (second-place prize) at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival and the Special Jury Award for Neorealism at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Continued: https://womensmediacenter.com/news-features/new-film-shows-harsh-realities-of-abortion-restrictions

11.03.2020

Never Rarely Sometimes Always

USA – These 5 States Are the Next Battlegrounds in the Abortion Wars

These 5 States Are the Next Battlegrounds in the Abortion Wars
Abortion rights groups are pouring tens of millions into these states to flip their legislatures in 2020.

by Carter Sherman
Oct 22 2019

When Americans think about the future of abortion, they often think of the Supreme Court decision to legalize abortion nationwide in Roe v. Wade. But over the last decade, the real battle over abortion hasn’t been in Washington, D.C. — it’s played out in statehouses across the country, where legislators have passed restriction after restriction on the procedure.

Now, abortion rights activists believe they have a unique chance to wrest back those state legislatures from abortion opponents. And though Election Day 2020 is still more than a year away, they’re already preparing.

Continued: https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/43kpy3/these-5-states-are-the-next-battlegrounds-in-the-abortion-wars