USA – 3 years after abortion rights were overturned, contraception access is at risk

June 23, 2025
Cynthia H. Chuang, Carol S. Weisman

On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization eliminated a nearly 50-year constitutional right to abortion and returned the authority to regulate abortion to the states.

The Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has vastly reshaped the national abortion landscape. Three years on, many states have severely restricted access to abortion care. But the decision has also had a less well-recognized outcome: It is increasingly jeopardizing access to contraception.

Continued: https://theconversation.com/3-years-after-abortion-rights-were-overturned-contraception-access-is-at-risk-258458

23.06.2025

Above and Beyond Restoring Roe

Abortion rights aren’t enough. The best reproductive care outcomes result from meeting basic needs.

By Jade Prévost-Manuel
Mar 5, 2025

Taylor Young has never wanted to be a mom. From the time the now 27-year-old began dating, she experienced persistent anxiety around the thought of getting pregnant in Ohio, a Republican-controlled state where Young felt her right to abortion was tenuous.

In 2018, she discovered the childfree subreddit, an online forum on Reddit for people who do not have children and do not want them. In that forum, she learned about bilateral salpingectomy, a procedure that removes both fallopian tubes and permanently prevents pregnancy.

Continued: https://www.yesmagazine.org/body-politics/2025/03/05/progress-2025-beyond-roe

USA – The Supreme Court Could Gut Access to Birth Control This Year

By Susan Rinkunas
January 27, 2025

With Donald Trump back in the White House, access to contraception is, sadly, not something that people can bank on anymore — whether they know it or not. This issue didn’t get much airtime during the chaotic 2024 campaign, but birth control has been in conservatives’ crosshairs for years. And while Trump’s administration will undoubtedly attack it, he’ll likely have additional help from his appointees to the Supreme Court.

On Jan. 10, the justices agreed to hear a case, Braidwood v. Becerra, that threatens the Affordable Care Act’s insurance coverage of preventive care. A group of conservative Texas employers who object to paying for birth control and pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV argue that the Affordable Care Act can’t require preventive services be covered without costs like copays because the panels that determine coverage are unconstitutional.

Continued: https://www.democracydocket.com/opinion/the-supreme-court-could-gut-access-to-birth-control-this-year/

Kamala Harris, once Biden’s voice on abortion, would take an outspoken approach to health

By Stephanie Armour, Julie Appleby, Julie Rovner, KFF Health News
July 21, 2024

Throughout Joe Biden's presidency, he leaned on the outspoken former prosecutor and senator he selected as his vice president, Kamala Harris, to be the White House's voice of unflinching support for reproductive health rights.

Now, as Democrats rebuild their presidential ticket just a few months before Election Day, Harris would widely be expected to take an aggressive stance in support of abortion access if she became the party's new presumptive nominee — hitting former President Donald Trump on an issue that could undermine his chances of victory. Biden endorsed Harris on Sunday when he announced his decision to leave the race.

Continued: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kamala-harris-campaign-abortion-outspoken-approach-health/

USA – Why Smashing the Administrative State Is a Disaster for Reproductive Rights

The latest Supreme Court rulings are already being weaponized against gender identity. Abortion and birth control are next.

NINA MARTIN, Mother Jones
July 10, 2024

It turns out the most consequential reproductive rights case before the Supreme Court this past term—arguably, the most significant since the overturn of Roe v. Wade—wasn’t the religious right’s attack on the abortion drug mifepristone, or the battle over whether the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requires hospitals to provide emergency abortions in states with strict bans. It was a fight over who should pay to monitor commercial fishing boats so they don’t deplete the herring population off the Atlantic coast.

Reproductive health and gender equality advocates are just beginning to digest the sweeping implications of the ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, in which the court’s conservative supermajority overturned a 40-year-old cornerstone of US administrative law known as “Chevron deference.” In doing so, the justices vastly limited the power of federal agencies to issue regulations on everything from financial markets to industrial pollution to drug pricing to workplace safety.

And abortion. And birth control. And trans equality. And pregnant workers’ rights.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/why-smashing-the-administrative-state-is-a-disaster-for-reproductive-rights/

10.07.2024

Commentary

Affordable Care Act

Alliance Defending Freedom

Becket Fund for Religious Liberty

Chevron deference

Chevron doctrine

Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council

Corner Post decision

Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Democracy Forward

emergency abortion care

EMTALA

Eric Rassbach

Food and Drug Administration

Heritage Foundation

Julie Marie Blake

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

Lisa Heinzerling

Loper Bright decision

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerrce

Mary Ziegler

mifepristone case

National Partnership for Women and Families

Pregnant Workers Fairness Act

USA – The New Autonomy of Abortion

Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, abortion freedom now hinges on access to pills.

BY ANDRÉA BECKER
MAY 23, 2024

When 18-year-old Rachel discovered she was unexpectedly pregnant, she made what she thought was a natural first step: call Planned Parenthood to schedule an abortion. “I wasn’t ready to be a parent or a mom,” she says. “And I didn’t want to go through giving birth just to give the kid away.” Even in an abortion-friendly state like Illinois, the nearest Planned Parenthood was one hour away, and there wasn’t an available appointment for another month.

When Rachel consulted ob-gyns, they either told her they wouldn’t provide an abortion or declined to provide recommendations. And since her insurance doesn’t cover abortion care, she’d have to pay the expensive fee out of pocket. “I just wanted it to be over with,” she says.

Continued: https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/access/2024/05/23/the-new-autonomy-of-abortion

How American Women Could Lose the Right to Birth Control

BY JILL FILIPOVIC
MAY 20, 2024

When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut and legalized the use of contraception by married women, the public response was muted. There is little evidence of an uproar on the pages of major newspapers or magazines. Even bringing the case was a challenge for reproductive-rights activists, who had tried and failed twice before to challenge Connecticut’s anti-obscenity law, which (fun fact) was introduced by P. T. Barnum in 1879 and (less fun) banned “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception.” By the 1960s, laws criminalizing contraception often went unenforced, which posed a problem for activists looking to challenge them. Without contraception-seeking patients who had actually been arrested, the Supreme Court said, there was no one with the standing to sue.

Continued: https://time.com/6977434/birth-control-contraception-access-griswold-threat/

How Hobby Lobby Could Be Trump’s Reproductive Rights Wrecking Ball

The 2014 Supreme Court ruling is even more consequential as we stare down the possibility of Trump’s reelection—and a revival of the Comstock Act.

Susan Rinkunas
March 25, 2024

When Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion in Hobby Lobby v. Burwell 10 years ago, he provided answers to questions that no one had asked—at least, officially. The plaintiffs, two businesses owned by Christians, objected to a mandate in the Affordable Care Act requiring health insurance providers to cover types of birth control known as emergency contraception, or E.C. Colloquially known as the “morning-after pill,” E.C. works after sex to prevent pregnancy by blocking sperm from fertilizing an egg or by preventing the release of an egg in the first place. But anti-abortion activists believe that morning-after pills and IUDs prevent implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus, which they say is tantamount to an abortion.

Continued: https://newrepublic.com/article/179622/hobby-lobby-comstock-alito-contraception

What Would a Second Trump Presidency Look Like for Health Care?

By Julie Rovner
JANUARY 16, 2024

On the presidential campaign trail, former President Donald Trump is, once again, promising to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act — a nebulous goal that became one of his administration’s splashiest policy failures.

“We’re going to fight for much better health care than Obamacare. Obamacare is a catastrophe,” Trump said at a campaign stop in Iowa on Jan. 6.

Continued: https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/donald-trump-health-record-second-presidency-abortion-drugs-covid/

16.01.2024

Commentary

Affordable Care Act

Donald Trump

fetal tissue research

USA – The right-wing’s opposition to abortion is not about saving or protecting women lives

by Jill Filipovic
November 1, 2023

A year and a half after Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped the constitutional right to abortion from American women, the Republican Party has been floundering.

It turns out that the American public is broadly pro-choice, according to a CNN poll from August, and many voters are horrified by the predictable results of abortion bans: child rape victims unable to end dangerous pregnancies in their home states, women nearly dying of treatable pregnancy complications, mothers with much-wanted but tragically doomed pregnancies being denied the ability to choose how those pregnancies end.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/01/opinions/over-the-counter-birth-control-gop-filipovic/index.html

01.11.2023