March 27, 2023
By Rose Conlon, NPR for Wichita
The pilot, clad in a blue windbreaker, recently pulled his single-engine, four-seater prop plane onto the tarmac of a small municipal airport.
The airport sits in a state where abortion is now banned in virtually all cases. But a short flight away in Kansas, abortion remains legal. That has launched a wave of travel from across the South and Midwest in pursuit of pills and procedures that used to be legal all across the U.S..
Christine Fernando, USA TODAY
March 25, 2023
As a detective led her through the charred remains of the clinic, Julie Burkhart was heartbroken. Everything was black and melted. The smell was overwhelming. Fire and smoke damage had engulfed the building from the basement to the attic.
“I knew then that we were going to have a long road ahead,” said Burkhart, president of Wellspring Health Access in Casper, Wyoming.
By KIMBERLEE KRUESI and GEOFF MULVIHILL
March 25, 2023
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A group of Tennessee Republicans began this year’s legislative session hoping to add narrow exceptions to one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, armed with the belief that most people — even in conservative Tennessee — reject extremes on the issue.
Tennessee law requires doctors to prove in court that they were saving a woman’s life when they performed an abortion. Surely, the lawmakers thought, they could win concessions that would allow doctors to use their good faith judgment about when abortion is necessary to save a woman’s life. But after a key anti-abortion group stepped in, the lawmakers had to settle for a stricter legal standard that moves the needle very little.
BY: SOFIA RESNICK
MARCH 25, 2023
At the center of the federal anti-abortion lawsuit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is the abortion drug mifepristone and the regimen that reportedly accounts for the majority of abortions in post-Roe America. That’s why the whole country is bracing itself for a ruling from a notoriously anti-abortion judge in Amarillo, Texas.
The attention and confusion around this case might end up being the most impactful aspects about it, as many legal scholars doubt the judge has the legal authority to do what plaintiffs are asking for, which boils down to forcing the FDA to essentially recall a drug that for two decades has maintained a record of efficacy and safety. But regardless of the lawsuit’s outcome, legal experts still think a ruling that even briefly or partially favors plaintiffs will likely have lasting consequences on U.S. abortion access and affect medication policy beyond abortion.
An entire obstetrics department shuttered. Give the Idaho GOP a round of applause!
Abigail Weinberg
March 25, 2023
An Idaho hospital is ending its labor and delivery services in the wake of a Texas-style, near-total abortion ban signed into state law last year.
Citing the state’s “legal and political climate,” Bonner General Health plans to stop delivering babies and providing other obstetrical services in mid-May, according to a press release. While the release doesn’t explicitly blame Idaho’s restrictive abortion laws for the decision, the implication is clear: “Highly respected, talented physicians are leaving,” it says, while the state legislature “continues to introduce and pass bills that criminalize physicians for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care.”
Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/the-latest-casualties-of-idahos-abortion-ban-babies/
By AMANDA SEITZ
Mar 25, 2023
FAIRVIEW HEIGHTS, Ill. (AP) — Dr. Colleen McNicholas is fresh off performing two abortions when a ringing phone quickly stops her.
“Oh, ugh,” she said, eyes widened, before she darted off to another room.
Just the day before, 58 women had abortions at the Fairview Heights’ Planned Parenthood clinic, 15 miles east of St. Louis. But the new day is still stacked with appointments; as many as 100 abortion and family planning patients might walk through the doors.
Doctors are left to guess at whether helping their patients will land them in prison.
BY SARA HUTCHINSON
MARCH 24, 2023
Doctors have a code, a set of principles meant to guide their practice: Give care. Act justly. Respect patients. Do no harm. But for Texas doctors, especially obstetrician-gynecologists, following those seemingly straightforward principles has become a legal and ethical minefield.
Physicians are finding themselves torn between providing medically appropriate care and staying in compliance with the state’s draconian anti-abortion laws. The stakes couldn’t be higher: risking major fines and up to life in prison for doctors on one side, and on the other, often putting women’s lives at risk because of delays in care or refusals to provide formerly routine procedures. As a result, medical decisions regarding pregnancy complications now involve a host of new stakeholders—hospital administrators and lawyers—who may put questions of institutional risk above patient well-being.
Continued: https://prospect.org/health/2023-03-24-abortion-laws-pregnant-texans/
These proposals are unlikely to succeed but remind Americans what is at stake, writes Rebecca Kluchin
BMJ 2023; 380 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p711
Published 24 March 2023
Rebecca Kluchin, professor
In January 2023, 24 Republican legislators in the US state of South Carolina sponsored the South Carolina Equal Protection Act of 2023, a bill designed to extend constitutional rights to embryos and fetuses at all stages of development, granting them equality with women already born.1 The bill makes women and pregnant people who undergo abortion subject to the state’s homicide laws and punishments, including the death penalty. It allows exceptions if they face “imminent death or great bodily injury,” as well as to save the life of the mother, but not for rape or incest.
The anti-abortion movement celebrated a huge victory last summer when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. With the ruling for Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court threw abortion policy back to the judgment of individual states, making access to abortion care contingent on where one lives. Since then, 14 states have criminalised abortion.2 South Carolina legislators attempted to ban the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy, but the state supreme court ruled that effort unconstitutional in January. The Equal Protection Act is one of several legislative efforts to ban the procedure again.
Continued: https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p711
BY KATHERINE FUNG
ON 3/24/23
A massive spike in U.S. maternal deaths has abortion-rights and anti-abortion groups debating the cause of the nation's most fatal odds for expectant mothers in more than half a century.
A new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last week said that maternal mortality—deaths that take place during pregnancy or within 42 days after delivery—shot up by 40 percent in 2021. The figure reaffirms America's position as the most dangerous wealthy country to live in when pregnant or while giving birth.
Continued: https://www.newsweek.com/abortion-battle-over-rising-deaths-pregnant-women-1789982
March 23, 2023
Christabelle Sethna, Lori A. Brown
When a draft of an upcoming United States Supreme Court decision curtailing legal abortion access in the U.S. leaked in May 2022, Karina Gould, Canada’s minister of families, children and social development, declared that Americans seeking abortions would be welcomed north of the border.
A month later the Supreme Court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that provided constitutional protection for legal abortion in the U.S. via its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling giving state legislatures the power to regulate the procedure.
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