Conservatives have pushed infant safe haven laws as an alternative to abortion. But few American women use them

By Isabelle Chapman and Daniel A. Medina
Tue August 9, 2022

As many American women reckon with the sudden loss of their constitutional right to abortion, conservatives have floated an alternative they say makes abortion less necessary: safe haven laws.

The laws, which allow mothers to anonymously abandon infants at hospitals and other designated sites shortly after giving birth, have been in place in all 50 states since 2008.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/09/us/infant-safe-haven-law-abortion-invs/index.html

The inside story of how John Roberts failed to save abortion rights

Joan Biskupic, CNN legal analyst & Supreme Court biographer
Tue July 26, 2022

Chief Justice John Roberts privately lobbied fellow conservatives to save the constitutional right to abortion down to the bitter end, but May's unprecedented leak of a draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade made the effort all but impossible.

It appears unlikely that Roberts' best prospect -- Justice Brett Kavanaugh -- was ever close to switching his earlier vote, despite Roberts' attempts that continued through the final weeks of the session.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/26/politics/supreme-court-john-roberts-abortion-dobbs/index.html

We’re the Women Who Chose Adoption Over Abortion. Ask Us Why Abortion Rights Matter

6/2/2022
by JULIA FRANKS

The pee test came up positive. There they were, two lines, side by side, rose and ghostly.

It was the 1980s, and I was a full-time college student. I’d just been dumped by a guy I was convinced I loved and I was trying to figure out what the rest of my life was going to look like. I was frozen with indecision, attracted to every kind of career. So many could-be lives beckoned and called to me that I found it impossible to decide on just one. Even choosing a single academic major meant a dozen other fields I’d never master, a whole array of breath-taking magical lives I’d never get to live.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2022/06/02/adoption-abortion/

Why the Republican offensive on abortion is escalating

Ronald Brownstein
Tue April 19, 2022

(CNN) When three red states finalized severe restrictions on abortion over consecutive days last week, they highlighted the GOP's rising militancy on the issue -- and the political and legal calculations underpinning it.

Separate actions last week in Oklahoma, Florida and Kentucky made clear the red state drive to retrench, or eliminate, access to abortion is escalating as the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority nears a decision, expected in late June, in which it is widely anticipated to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established a nationwide right to abortion.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/19/politics/abortion-laws-red-states-republicans/index.html

Physicians Have Abortions Too: Maintaining Access to Abortion Supports Women’s Careers

Abortion is personal for physicians and healthcare workers, not just professional. We must help protect abortion access.

4/18/2022
by ARGHAVAN SALLES, MORGAN S. LEVY and VINEET ARORA

Being alive in 2022 means facing never-ending attacks on human rights. With the most conservative Supreme Court since the 1930s, there now seems to be little standing between those of us with a cervix and the autonomy over our own bodies.

When Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2020, many believed it would only be a matter of time before the precedent set by Roe v. Wade, securing the right to abortion, would be overturned. According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2021, 19 states enacted 108 abortion restrictions, more than in any year since 1973. Prior to the end of 2021, the Supreme Court heard arguments related to two such bills: Senate Bill 8 (S.B. 8) in Texas and Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health in Mississippi. The verdict on Dobbs is expected to be delivered this summer.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2022/04/18/abortion-doctors-physicians-career-roe-v-wade/

USA – Anti-Abortion Groups Once Portrayed Women as Victims. That’s Changing.

March 19, 2022
By Mary Ziegler

With Roe v. Wade on thin ice, state legislatures are producing a wave of anti-abortion bills, some of them truly eye-popping. Missouri alone has in recent weeks tried to limit out-of-state travel for abortion, proposed treating the delivery or shipment of abortion pills as drug trafficking, and moved to make it a felony to perform an abortion in the event of an ectopic pregnancy (in which a fertilized egg implants outside the womb), a condition that can be life-threatening.

In the past, many extreme bills like these would have captured the public’s attention and then quickly disappeared, swept under the rug by lawmakers and abortion opponents who had easier-to-enact plans for dismantling abortion rights.

(This link goes to an unlocked version of the article.) Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/opinion/abortion-laws-bans-missouri.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhkS1UaCibSRdkhrxqAwvHFx6Ygh3j4aSycVi0Hxe0TGM2F-lzWYrd5Zp0zwzGfDpdnAYMYecZTnKVZLlA_DE6huIeFk5AIZCxp-du4BW5vmsyXUeh9rG7hYCzpcrcuge3h5kjYaGi7WabchGYzZ1ow-esTflGr3XECz63EA7Q1joE4haF9c8g8ETQQZyCKvO3qCQF9MLiGbRLa7Ao1X4JJSG2Z3I7cu_9bLlIkWR-RR2h_4G089NpaJNoXWa3_JBMlc8L66q4DPqR7ajO07TGHKYxX6XKpbQ&referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwAR3XEiGRZDlwpR7rVBS_SBHTuzhFumvaYtnRfq5o_9BuR-Etz1hSf56cuoo

Roe Is Dead. Long Live Roe?

The first state constitutional protection of reproductive rights hints at the contradictions and fears of a divided movement.

Judith Levine
March 14 2022

IF THE SUPREME COURT overturns Roe v. Wade, 26 states are “certain or likely to ban abortion,” according to the Guttmacher Institute. In December, the court heard arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, addressing Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act banning abortion after 15 weeks’ pregnancy. The law is a deliberate violation of Roe, the 1973 ruling legalizing abortion. Most observers expect the conservative majority to rule in Mississippi’s favor. In that case abortion law would revert to the states, where in vast red swaths of this nation it has been so slashed and shredded that it’s already practically confetti.

Continued: https://theintercept.com/2022/03/14/abortion-roe-wade-vermont-human-right/

USA – How abortion bans widen the gender pay gap and diminish women’s economic power

Paul Constant, Business Insider
Feb 26, 2022

When the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in December for and against a Mississippi law that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, Justice Amy Coney Barrett seemed confused why lawyers arguing for legal abortion, as she put it, "focus on the ways in which forced parenting, forced motherhood, would hinder women's access to the workplace and to equal opportunities."

Justice Barrett asked the lawyers, "Why don't the safe-haven laws [in which any mother can give up her new baby to the state for adoption, no questions asked] take care of that problem?"

Continued: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-legalizing-abortion-bans-could-impoverish-women-for-generations-2022-2

Pregnancy and Childbirth Endanger Women’s Lives and Health: “Pregnancy Is Not a Benign Condition”

Why are we warned in lurid detail about the minimal risks of abortion, but not told a word about the tremendous risks of continuing a pregnancy?

2/13/2022
by CARRIE N. BAKER, Ms. Magazine

During oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that now that all 50 states have “safe haven” laws that allow mothers to relinquish parental rights after birth, the burdens of parenthood discussed in Roe and Casey are irrelevant, and the decisions are obsolete. Putting aside the surprisingly callous assumption that giving up a baby is not burdensome, Barrett’s argument ignores the physical and psychological effects of pregnancy, labor and childbirth.

“Pregnancy is not a benign condition,” said Dr. Warren M. Hern, director of the Boulder Abortion Clinic. “Women die from pregnancy.”

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2022/02/13/pregnancy-childbirth-women-death-maternal-health-adoption/

USA – The Supreme Court is leading a Christian conservative revolution

Almost as soon as Justice Barrett was confirmed, the Court handed down a revolutionary “religious liberty” decision. It hasn’t slowed down since.

By Ian Millhiser
Jan 30, 2022

Justice Amy Coney Barrett had been a member of the Supreme Court for less than a month when she cast the key vote in one of the most consequential religion cases of the past century.

Months earlier, when the seat she would fill was still held by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court had handed down a series of 5-4 decisions establishing that churches and other houses of worship must comply with state occupancy limits and other rules imposed upon them to slow the spread of Covid-19.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/22889417/supreme-court-religious-liberty-christian-right-revolution-amy-coney-barrett