USA – Abortion Is Not a “Choice” Without Racial Justice

After Roe v. Wade, Angela Davis wrote about how the reproductive rights movement was failing women of color. As Roe is dismantled, her diagnosis is more crucial than ever.

Sara Matthiesen
January 25, 2022

In 2016 researchers at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a public health project focused on reproductive well-being, made headlines with their “Turnaway Study.” The groundbreaking longitudinal study was comprised of nearly 8,000 interviews with 1,000 women who had either been “turned away” from abortion because they were past a clinic’s gestational limits or had successfully received abortions. Through interviews conducted every six months over a period of five years, the study compared the life circumstances of study participants following these two reproductive outcomes. The study, the first of its kind, sought to quantify the effects of being denied a wanted abortion.

Contrary to anti-abortion claims about the supposed psychological harm of ending a pregnancy, researchers found that obtaining an abortion did not increase women’s risk of developing PTSD, depression, or anxiety. Those denied abortions, on the other hand, did not fare as well.

Continued: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/abortion-is-not-a-choice-without-racial-justice/

25.01.2023

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Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health

USA – Next frontier in the abortion wars: Your local CVS

The emerging strategy could further limit the Biden administration’s already limited policy.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and LAUREN GARDNER, Politico
01/11/2023

Fresh off winning their decades-long battle to overturn Roe v. Wade, abortion-rights opponents are pinpointing their next targets: the nation’s biggest pharmacy chains.

Anti-abortion advocates are organizing pickets outside CVS and Walgreens in early February in at least eight cities, including Washington, D.C., in response to the companies’ plans to take advantage of the Food and Drug Administration’s decision last week allowing retail pharmacies to stock and dispense abortion pills in states where they’re legal.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/01/11/pharmacies-anti-abortion-pills-00077349

USA – The new front in the right’s war on abortion

Abortion pills are at the heart of the fight over abortion access in a post-Roe world.

By Rachel M. Cohen
Jan 9, 2023

The Biden administration helped expand access to medication abortion last week, with the US Food and Drug Administration finalizing a rule to make the pills more readily available in pharmacies. But this effort to help patients get pills to end a pregnancy could be dwarfed by a major push to restrict access to the medication from anti-abortion leaders and their Republican allies.

As lawmakers head back to state legislatures this month, many for the first time since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June, Republicans face new pressure to restrict access to the combination of abortion-inducing drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, used typically within the first 10 to 12 weeks of a pregnancy. Medication abortion has become the most common method for ending pregnancies in the United States, partly due to its safety record, its lower cost, diminished access to in-person care, and greater opportunities for privacy.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2023/1/9/23540562/abortion-pills-medication-dobbs-roe-mifepristone

How the Supreme Court’s Abortion Decision Left Many Youth Behind

BY ALEX BERG
DECEMBER 20, 2022

After having an abortion two years ago, B (whose name is withheld for privacy) didn’t think much about her experience with the procedure. As a 17 year-old at the time with a couple of months to go before her high school graduation, she “put it out of sight.” That was until June 24, 2022, the day the Supreme Court issued a decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion in the United States.

“It really snapped me back into reality from it,” B, now 19, tells Teen Vogue.

Continued: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/how-the-supreme-courts-abortion-decision-left-many-youth-behind

USA – ‘Love Is Blind,’ ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and more: How abortion’s portrayal on TV is changing

A researcher found more plotlines around and more mentions of abortion on TV this year — though wealthy White characters are still overrepresented.

Jennifer Gerson
December 15, 2022

For the past five years, researcher Steph Herold has studied portrayals of abortion in television and film as part of the Abortion Onscreen initiative.

The latest study by Herold, a research analyst at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) at the University of California-San Francisco’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health spans this year. It found 60 abortion plotlines or mentions from 52 distinct television shows, well outnumbering the 47 abortion plotlines in 42 shows seen in 2021.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2022/12/abortion-portrayal-television-movies-after-dobbs/

15.12.2022

Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health

ANSIRH

Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health

Gray's Anatomy

Steph Herold

United States

What Abortion Pill ‘Reversal’ Really Accomplishes

It’s more than an unproven medical treatment—it’s a view into the antiabortion movement’s larger project.

Sep 5, 2022

THE AMERICAN ANTIABORTION movement is on a full-court press to remake the nation in its image. In June, its decades-long campaign to install sympathetic Supreme Court justices paid off with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision, which stripped away the constitutional right to abortion. Now, the movement is pushing for draconian personhood laws (legislation granting fetuses the same rights as people) in an effort to make abortion murder.

In some states, the push is already working. In Georgia, for example, a new law allows expecting parents to claim fetuses as dependents on their tax returns. These victories are the result of a shrewd, ambitious strategy. The rise of an experimental treatment known as abortion pill “reversal” is part of this plan. Although it might appear a peripheral concern—hardly anyone actually seeks out this treatment—it’s a distinctly revealing pet project. The story of the rise of abortion pill reversal contains the antiabortion movement’s blueprint within it.

Continued: https://www.wired.com/story/abortion-pill-reversal-essay/

Why Hollywood keeps getting abortion wrong

This researcher interviewed dozens of writers, creators, and showrunners about onscreen abortion. Here’s what she learned.

By Alissa Wilkinson
Aug 9, 2022

We’re a screen-soaked culture, and that means that what we see on TV and in movies often serves as a framework to look at the world around us. That’s certainly true for abortion. It’s still rare to see an abortion depicted, and even more rare to see it in a situation that matches the circumstances of most abortions in America; research has found that the most common abortion patient is a low-income, unmarried young mother, without a college degree, who is seeking her first abortion. The majority of abortion patients in America are non-white.

Yet that’s not the average depiction. And this affects not just what people think about abortion, but how viewers treat people who seek abortions, as well as how they think about public policy.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/culture/23298225/hollywood-abortion-tv-portrayal

09.08.2022

Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health

Steph Herold

United States

Myths about abortion and women’s mental health are widespread, experts say

By Sandee LaMotte, CNN
Sun July 3, 2022

It's an unfounded message experts say is repeated again and again: Having an abortion may damage a woman's mental health, perhaps for years.

“There's so much misinformation, so many
myths about abortion. Abortion will lead to substance abuse, depression,
suicidal thoughts; abortion is bad for your health; every woman is going to
regret it," said social psychologist Brenda Major, a distinguished professor
emeritus in the department of psychological and brain sciences at the
University of California, Santa Barbara.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/02/health/abortion-myths-mental-health-wellness/index.html

USA – How to Have a Medication Abortion. Where to find the pill and what to expect.

By Rebecca Grant and Elizabeth Isadora Gold
May 23, 2022

s conservative states increasingly legislate away clinic-based channels for accessing abortion, unofficial sources for ordering abortion pills online and self-managing at home are becoming a critical lifeline. These online sources, which have grown in popularity, convenience, and sophistication over the past few years, now represent the future of abortion care for much of America. While there are no reliable projections on how many people will self-manage their abortions using pills, the numbers are sure to go up: Research from Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, found that 7 percent of women will self-manage abortions in their lifetime, and this estimate was made with Roe still in place. “The barriers are going to increase tremendously for people living in one of the estimated 26 states likely to overturn abortion,” said Dr. Daniel Grossman, the director of ANSIRH. “We would anticipate that there will be increased demand for those services.”

Continued: https://www.thecut.com/article/find-abortion-pill-what-to-expect.html

23.05.2022

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Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health

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Rebecca Gomperts

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USA – Harassment at Abortion Clinics Is Already Bad. It’s Worse When You’re Black.

We need to explicitly name white supremacy and racism as the core drivers of abortion bans and restrictions, as well as violence and harassment.

Apr 21, 2022
MiQuel Davies, Rewire News

Abortion providers and people accessing abortion care are at high risk of violence and harassment. We know this from the well-documented history of providers being murdered, clinics dealing with arson and regular hate mail, and protesters stationed daily outside many abortion clinics, where they harass providers and patients.

What we don’t always talk about—or name explicitly—is that the violence and harassment faced by patients and providers who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color is often heightened and racialized. At Physicians for Reproductive Health, we know this is true from the countless experiences of physicians in our network as well as those working day to day on the ground, especially in hostile states. Unfortunately, this reality is often dismissed or minimized in an attempt to disassociate racism and white supremacy from attacks on abortion rights.
Continued: https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2022/04/21/harassment-at-abortion-clinics-is-already-bad-its-worse-when-youre-black/