As Expected, Minors Are Among Those Most Impacted by Anti-Abortion Laws

“Without access to abortion, these girls have lost the ability to control their lives and their futures,” one researcher said.

By Kylie Cheung
April 7, 2025

In the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, advocates warned that minors, whose ability to travel across state lines or buy abortion pills online is already constrained, would be among those most impacted by state abortion bans. A new study published in JAMA Pediatrics this week found that two-thirds of girls ages 13 to 17 now live in states that ban or severely restrict their abortion access.
Specifically, the study reported that 66% of teen girls in this age range live in states with total bans, bans with severe gestational limits (between six and 22 weeks), and parental involvement requirements for them to access abortion.

“Minors are often targeted by restrictive policies and less able to use routes to abortion care common for adults—traveling to another state or using telehealth—leaving them disproportionately impacted,” Laura Lindberg, a professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health and author of the study, said in a statement. “Without access to abortion, these girls have lost the ability to control their lives and their futures.”

Continued: https://www.jezebel.com/as-expected-minors-are-among-those-most-impacted-by-anti-abortion-laws

07.04.2025

parental consent for abortion

Rutgers School of Public Health

USA – Why speech could be a target for the anti-abortion movement in 2025

The anti-abortion movement is looking at ways to control information about how and where to obtain abortions

Carter Sherman
Fri 27 Dec 2024

The next front in the US abortion wars may be what people are allowed to say about it.

More than two years after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in the case Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, US abortions are on the rise, thanks in large part to the spread of abortion pills and travel across state lines. This has infuriated anti-abortion advocates, who have proposed policies to help the incoming Trump administration curtail the mailing of abortion pills and targeted individuals and groups that help women get out-of-state abortions. In a sign of how the issue is pitting states against one another, Texas earlier this month sued a New York-based doctor who allegedly provided a telehealth abortion to a Texan woman.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/27/speech-anti-abortion-movement

If Trump wins the election, this is what’s at stake

Women and doctors describe heart-wrenching decisions under what may be the US’s strictest abortion ban in Idaho

Carter Sherman in Boise, Idaho
Mon 21 Oct 2024

When Jennifer Adkins and her husband were considering having a second child in Idaho, they vaguely thought how the state’s near-total abortion ban could affect them. But Adkins’ first pregnancy had gone so smoothly, she didn’t even use an epidural when she gave birth. Her next pregnancy, she expected, would be similar.

But in April 2023, 12 weeks into her second pregnancy, an ultrasound scan shattered that hope.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/oct/21/idaho-abortion-trump

USA – Helping a minor travel for an abortion? Some states have made it a crime.

Last year, Idaho became the first state to outlaw ‘abortion trafficking,’ and in May, Tennessee enacted a similar law

By: Anna Claire Vollers
August 26, 2024

Helping a pregnant minor travel to get a legal abortion without parental consent is now a crime in at least two Republican-led states, prompting legal action by abortion-rights advocates and copycat legislation from conservative lawmakers in a handful of other states.

Last year, Idaho became the first state to outlaw “abortion trafficking,” which it defined as “recruiting, harboring or transporting” a pregnant minor to get an abortion or abortion medication without parental permission. In May, Tennessee enacted a similar law. And Republican lawmakers in Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma introduced abortion trafficking bills during their most recent legislative sessions, although those bills failed to advance before the sessions ended.

Continued; https://idahocapitalsun.com/2024/08/26/helping-a-minor-travel-for-an-abortion-some-states-have-made-it-a-crime/

The choice: a rural mother and abortion care on the Washington-Idaho border

Even in places where abortion is legal, the inaccessibility of the procedure elsewhere can seep over state lines by Katia Riddle in Clarkston, Washington

Fri 24 Nov 2023

As she walks in the door on a recent afternoon to relieve her parents of caring for her five-month-old daughter, Jasmine feels a familiar pang of guilt.

Jasmine*, 28, is a single mother raising four kids in a small town in far eastern Washington, near the border of Idaho. Her partner of more than a decade – and father of her children – is incarcerated for an assault charge that she brought against him.

Without her parents stepping in to help, she’d struggle to hold down her job at a factory. But she knows it’s hard on them.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/24/accessing-abortion-clinics-washington-idaho

USA – Where does the fight to stop travel bans for abortion stand?

Nov. 13, 2023
By GEOFF MULVIHILL, Associated Press

A federal judge and the U.S. Department of Justice this week said that states are going too far by trying to block people from helping others cross state lines for abortion.

A ruling in Idaho and the federal government taking sides in an Alabama lawsuit are far from the final word, but they could offer clues on whether an emerging area of abortion regulation may eventfully hold up in court.

Continued: https://www.gulflive.com/news/2023/11/where-does-the-fight-to-stop-travel-bans-for-abortion-stand.html

13.11.2023

Commentary

abortion trafficking

abortion travel bans

anti-choice ordinances

Debora K. Grasham

Melissa Murray

National Right to Life Committee

Steve Marshall

travel bans on abortion

traveling for abortion

How Texas Plans to Trap Abortion Seekers

Anti-abortion activists and elected officials hope to keep abortion seekers walled in within the borders of their home states.

9/13/2023
by SHOSHANNA EHRLICH, Ms. Magazine

In 1991, Kathrin K. and her husband were stopped by German border guards as they crossed back into the country on their way home from neighboring Holland on the suspicion they were carrying illegal drugs. Instead of drugs, however, the guards found “incriminating evidence”—specifically, a plastic bag containing a nightgown, sanitary pad and towels. These items suggested that Kathrin had crossed the border into Holland to obtain an abortion—a crime under German law, even if legal where performed. She was transported to a nearby hospital and subjected to a degrading forced vaginal exam.

It is difficult for me to imagine a day when guards are stationed at the Texas-New Mexico border, or along travel routes leading from an abortion ban state into a protective one, with the power to detain those transporting pregnant persons suspected of seeking cross-border abortion services. And yet, on my more cynical or despairing days, I wonder, given the latest plan by Mark Lee Dickson, a pastor at Sovereign Love Church in East Texas, aimed at halting so-called abortion trafficking, if this dystopic vision of intrastate abortion border guards might someday become a reality.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2023/09/13/texas-abortion-travel-ban-sanctuary-city/

Anti-choice states aren’t satisfied. Now they want to punish traveling for abortions

A husband who doesn’t want his wife to get an abortion could sue the friend who offered to drive her, according to this legislation’s own architect

Moira Donegan
Tue 12 Sep 2023

How free can any woman be in a country where her right to control her body and family depends on the jurisdiction where she happens to live? Republicans are looking to find out. Over the past few weeks, as Republican officials in anti-choice states seek to make their abortion bans enforceable and compel women into childbirth, a new front has opened up in the abortion wars: roads. The anti-choice movement, through a series of inventive legal theories and cynical legislative maneuvers, is now attacking women’s right to travel.

In a court filing last month, the Alabama attorney general, Steve Marshall, wrote that he believed his office had a right to prosecute those who help women travel across state lines in search of an abortion. The filing comes in a lawsuit from two women’s health clinics and an abortion fund, which sued Marshall after he publicly stated his intention to criminally investigate organizations like theirs, which provide financial and logistical help to pregnant patients seeking to leave the state. In his response, Marshall unequivocally stated that Alabama, which bans all abortions with no rape or incest exemption, views any effort to help women cross state lines as a “criminal conspiracy”.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/12/anti-choice-states-arent-satisfied-now-they-want-to-punish-traveling-for-abortions

12.09.2023

traveling for abortion

Women, doctors announce legal action against abortion bans in 3 states

The women allege they were denied abortions despite dangerous complications.

By Nadine El-Bawab
September 12, 2023

Women in Idaho, Oklahoma and Tennessee filed legal actions against their states over abortion bans, saying they were denied abortions despite having dangerous pregnancy complications.

Four women in Idaho -- Jennifer Adkins, Jillaine St.Michel, Kayla Smith and Rebecca Vincen-Brown -- and abortion providers filed a suit against the state, Gov. Brad Little, attorney general and the state's board of medicine, claiming the state's ban has "sown confusion, fear and chaos among the medical community, resulting in grave harms to pregnant patients whose health and safety hang in the balance across the state," according to a copy of the lawsuit shared with ABC News.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/US/women-doctors-announce-legal-action-abortion-bans-3/story?id=103055654

USA – The 113-Year-Old Law Behind Anti-Abortion Activists’ Latest Scheme

The Christian right is pushing a slate of laws to stop a new, vague offense they have dubbed “abortion trafficking.”

Melissa Gira Grant
September 7, 2023

Could driving someone to get an abortion soon be an act punishable by law? It’s not out of the question, if a newly emboldened group of extremists get their way.

A wave of new anti-abortion ordinances have already been adopted in several Texas counties and are under consideration in many others across the state, according to a Washington Post story published last week. These laws are premised on stopping a new, vague offense that anti-abortion activists have dubbed “abortion trafficking.” The language evokes an unwilling participant—someone being forced by someone else to terminate a pregnancy—but is intended instead to bar people who do want an abortion from accessing care. The idea is fairly new—and entirely the invention of anti-abortion activists and legislators.

Continued: https://newrepublic.com/article/175419/113-year-old-law-behind-anti-abortion-activists-latest-scheme