The language we use to talk about pregnancy and abortion is changing. But not everyone welcomes the shift

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN
Sun September 4, 2022

Across the US, mainstream institutions such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and CNN are increasingly opting for gender-neutral terms such as "pregnant people," "people who get abortions" and "birthing parent" in favor of "women" when referencing pregnancy, fertility and abortion.

These shifts in terminology signal an effort to be inclusive of transgender and nonbinary people who can also get pregnant. But the changes have also prompted pushback -- not just from Republican politicians who are openly hostile to LGBTQ people but also from some cisgender women (women whose gender identity conforms with the sex they were assigned at birth) who consider themselves LGBTQ allies and who support abortion rights.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/04/us/abortion-pregnant-people-women-language-wellness-cec/index.html

Jewish congregations mount legal challenges to state abortion bans

BY: ARIANA FIGUEROA
AUGUST 26, 2022

Thousands of years of Jewish scripture make it clear that access to abortion care is a requirement of Jewish law and practice, according to Rabbi Karen Bogard.

“We preserve life at all costs,” she said in an interview with States Newsroom. “But there is a difference between that which is living, and that which is not yet living.”

Continued: https://www.virginiamercury.com/2022/08/26/jewish-congregations-mount-legal-challenges-to-state-abortion-bans/

USA – They Pledged Not to Prosecute Abortions. The Reality Is Tougher

By Evan Peng
20 August 2022

When the US Supreme Court toppled the constitutional right to abortion, some prosecutors in cities and counties across the country vowed to refrain from enforcing new state-imposed bans on the procedure. Such promises may be hard to keep.

Just ask Andrew Warren, the twice-elected state attorney in Hillsborough County, Florida, a state where abortion is now illegal after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In June, after the Supreme Court ruling, Warren joined a group of prosecutors and some state attorneys general in a written pledge not to pursue criminal charges in abortion cases. By August, he was out of a job.

Continued: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-20/they-pledged-not-to-prosecute-abortions-the-reality-is-tougher#xj4y7vzkg

In Guam, the nearest domestic abortion clinic is 4,000 miles away. How will Roe’s reversal change the U.S. territory?

"People in Guam were already living in a post-Roe world," an ACLU deputy director said. "This is what we will see again if extremist politicians enact new abortion bans and force women into second-class status."

Aug 10, 2022
By Claire Wang

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which had made abortion a constitutionally protected right, could have a chilling effect on reproductive rights in Guam.

Advocates say women have already been living under a de facto ban in the largely Catholic U.S. Pacific Island territory and fear it could get more restrictive.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/guam-nearest-domestic-abortion-clinic-4000-miles-away-will-roes-revers-rcna42212

Blueprinting the Kansas Abortion-Rights Victory

Pro-choice forces fought misdirection and marshalled enormous turnout. Can their success be replicated?

By Peter Slevin
August 7, 2022

It was Election Night in a hotel ballroom in Overland Park, Kansas, and Ashley All didn’t know what to think. For months, she had been a public face in the fight to protect abortion rights from a ballot initiative that would change the state constitution and open the door to severe restrictions, or even a ban. Polling had been iffy, the opposition had been relentless, and she was afraid to trust the promising early returns. Nervous, she ducked into a conference room, where Mike Gaughan, a friend and colleague, was sitting at a computer. “He pointed out the impressive numbers in some of the big counties and also great numbers in some not-so-big counties in rural areas,” All told me. It was really happening. A broad coalition with a fresh message was beating the Kansas right-to-lifers at their own game.

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/blueprinting-the-kansas-abortion-rights-victory

An Indiana doctor speaks out on abortion, and pays a price

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Ava Sasani
Jul 28, 2022

Three weeks before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, donned her white lab coat, put her infant daughter into a front-pack baby carrier and joined a few colleagues who marched to the state Capitol, hoping to deliver a letter to Gov. Eric Holcomb. Signed by hundreds of health professionals, the letter implored Holcomb, a Republican, not to convene a special legislative session to further restrict abortions. It contained a pointed political message: “Abortion bans are not popular in our state.”

Continued:https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-aud-nw-nyt-indiana-aobrtion-doctor-20220728-uhkntkt5ifgonel3quzllzp6jy-story.html

Poor Decision-Making: Abortion and American Violations of Human Rights Law

By Chinyere Obasi
July 17, 2022

The most prolific human rights organizations in the United States and abroad value equal and unrestricted access to all maternal care, including abortion, as a human right.

At home, the American Civil Liberties Union has fought for the right to abortion since the 1950s, and Physicians for Human Rights has reaffirmed this stance as recently as May of 2022. Abroad, the Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the World Health Organization have all argued the same: Access to abortion is a human right. The United Nations Human Rights Committee, the U.N.’s official body designed to advocate for and protect such liberties, wrote in a 2018 statement that “States parties must provide safe, legal and effective access to abortion” when the pregnant person is at risk of harm, physical or otherwise, and that those parties should not take steps toward criminalizing abortion, which would inherently promote unsafe abortion.

Continued: https://harvardpolitics.com/poor-decision-making/

US conservatives vow harsh restrictions to curtail abortion pills

Discreet and available by mail, abortion-inducing pills could make conservative abortion bans challenging to enforce.

By Brian Osgood
1 Jul 2022

The US Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that enshrined the legal right to abortion in the United States in federal law, reversing nearly 50 years of precedent and inflaming a sharp ideological divide.

The ruling last week was the result of decades of relentless organising by conservative anti-abortion rights groups in the US, which are now setting their sights on the fight to shape the post-Roe landscape.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/7/1/conservatives-seek-restrictive-measures-to-penalize-abortion-pills

Abortion rights groups launch multi-state court effort to stop or slow enforcement of abortion bans

By Tierney Sneed, CNN
Tue June 28, 2022

Abortion rights proponents have filed court actions in at least seven states seeking to block or slow the enforcement of abortion bans in the days since Friday's US Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for states to prohibit the procedure.

In Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi and Texas, state court lawsuits were filed Monday by abortion providers challenging those states' moves to ban the procedure. They come as state judges in Louisiana and Utah issued temporary restraining orders, halting enforcement of abortion prohibitions in those states, after abortion providers filed suits.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/27/politics/state-court-efforts-against-abortion-bans/index.html

28.06.2022

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The activists going state by state to make abortion rights consitutional law

With Roe v. Wade in the balance, reproductive rights activists in Vermont and Michigan are campaigning to pass state ballot measures to protect abortion rights. As one activist put it, “Legislatures are not representing the people.”

BY ABIGAIL TRACY
JUNE 22, 2022

Lucy Leriche was seated in a Chicago conference room, attending a national policy conference for Planned Parenthood in June 2018, when news of former Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement broke. The announcement sent a chilling effect through the room. With Donald Trump in the Oval Office, an inevitability came into focus: “At that moment, we all knew, I knew, that the end of Roe v. Wade was near,” Leriche, a former Vermont state representative who is now the vice president of Vermont public affairs for the Northern New England chapter of Planned Parenthood and the Planned Parenthood Vermont Action Fund, recalled in an interview. As this reality sunk in, she vowed to do everything she could to protect women’s reproductive rights in her home state of Vermont.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/06/ballot-measures-abortion-rights-constitutional-law-roe-v-wade