‘It’s Happening Even Without You Noticing’: Increasing Barriers to Accessing Sexual and Reproductive Health Care in Romania

7 Apr 2025
reliefweb

(Berlin) – The sexual and reproductive health and rights of women and girls, including the right to abortion and family planning methods, have been significantly eroded in Romania, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The 73-page report, “‘It’s Happening Even Without You Noticing’: Increasing Barriers to Accessing Sexual and Reproductive Health Care in Romania,” documents that, although these rights are partially protected under Romanian law, in practice women and girls are regularly and systematically thwarted in their efforts to exercise these rights.

Continued: https://reliefweb.int/report/romania/its-happening-even-without-you-noticing-increasing-barriers-accessing-sexual-and-reproductive-health-care-romania-enitro

07.04.2025

Scotland – ‘We faced torrent of abuse after JD Vance’s abortion falsehoods’

Feb 23, 2025
By Lucy Grieve, co-founder of Back of Scotland

I co-founded the Back Off Scotland campaign as an undergraduate student in 2020 following a concerning surge in anti-abortion protests taking place outside medical facilities providing abortion care.

In the five years that have elapsed since, members of the campaign have, intermittently, been subjected to a handful of threatening communications.

These have involved threats of litigation, accusations of murder, and we have even received menacing phone calls from anti-abortion activists in the middle of the night.

Continued: https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24956613.we-faced-torrent-abuse-jd-vances-abortion-falsehoods/

UK – Safe zones outside abortion clinics come into effect

It will be a criminal offence to intentionally or recklessly obstruct anyone from accessing abortion services immediately outside of clinics.

Serena Barker-Singh, Sky News
Thursday 31 October 2024

From today, "safe access zones" will be introduced to create a 150m-wide area outside clinics to stop anti-abortion campaigners from handing out leaflets, holding vigils and showing graphic images to women near the sites.

The protection areas will be introduced outside all abortion clinics in England and Wales to ensure women seeking abortion services will be better protected from harassment or distress.

Continued: https://news.sky.com/story/safe-zones-outside-abortion-clinics-come-into-effect-13245090

Abortion Bans Are Empowering Abusive Men—and Prominent ‘Pro-Life’ Activists Are Representing Them

Murder is a leading cause of death for pregnant women. The anti-abortion movement wants to hand more power to abusive men anyway.

May 8, 2024
by JILL FILIPOVIC

The way abortions bans are designed and written allow for all kinds of horrors: women losing their organs, women bleeding out without help, women losing their lives. But they’re also written to empower abusive men. After all, the very foundation of an abortion ban is an assumption that a woman’s body does not belong to her. Abusive men agree. And so it’s perhaps not a huge surprise that several men have indeed taken advantage of these laws in an effort to control their ex partners. And it’s also not particularly surprising—although it is appalling—that they’ve found support and legal representation from some of the most powerful people in the U.S. anti-abortion movement.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2024/05/08/abortion-bans-violence-against-women-ex-boyfriend-husband-abuse/

UK – Anti-abortion activists ramping up protests outside clinics after failure to introduce buffer zones

Exclusive: ‘They also hand out baby toys whose limbs have been removed which are covered in fake blood. They sometimes spit from their mouths at clients,’ says clinic manager

Maya Oppenheim, Women’s Correspondent

May 4, 2024

Anti-abortion activists are ramping up protests outside clinics in the wake of the government’s failure to introduce “buffer zones” outside medical centres, healthcare providers have warned.

MPs voted in favour of nationwide buffer zones outside abortion clinics in England and Wales in October 2022 but the Home Office has failed to roll them out. MSI Reproductive Choices, the UK’s leading abortion provider, called for the government to bring in the safe zones immediately. They are supposed to stop anti-abortion demonstrators standing outside or in close vicinity.

Continued; https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/anti-abortion-protestors-buffer-zones-b2538099.html

Creasy accuses anti-abortion activists of ‘persistent’ personal harassment

Exclusive: ‘Some of the commentary is all about me being held to account by a god, and having my day in hell,’ MP says

Maya Oppenheim
Feb 11, 2024

US-funded anti-abortion activists have begun a crusade of harassment against high-profile Labour campaigner Stella Creasy, targeting her in a “persistent and sustained” pattern, accusing her of “killing babies”.

Speaking to The Independent in an exclusive interview, Stella Creasy said she is facing “a bonfire of abuse” from anti-abortion ideologues on social media in punishment for campaigning on abortion rights.

The Labour MP for Walthamstow said protesters have harassed nearby residents and leafletted her constituency with graphic imagery.

Continued: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/stella-creasy-anti-abortion-activists-b2493669.html

Religious exemptions to abortion buffer zones law could ‘overturn will of Parliament’

18 January, 2024
Humanists UK

The UK Government has proposed draft guidance for Abortion Safe Access Zones that would effectively overturn the will of Parliament through expansive religious loopholes which would render the legislation incapable of protecting women from abuse and harassment.

In 2022 and 2023, in a resolute response to escalating harassment of women at the hands of evangelical protesters outside abortion clinics, the UK Parliament voted overwhelmingly to establish Safe Access Zones around abortion clinics in England and Wales. These zones were expressly intended to protect women from a barrage of bullying and psychological abuse as they sought access to clinics, ensuring their right to medical care in a safe and dignified environment.

Continued: https://humanists.uk/2024/01/18/religious-exemptions-to-abortion-buffer-zones-law-could-overturn-will-of-parliament/

Outrage as Texas Supreme Court Halts Kate Cox’s Abortion

Dec 09, 2023
By Sean O'Driscoll

Legal commentators have reacted with outrage after the Texas Supreme Court temporarily blocked a pregnant woman from obtaining an emergency abortion.

The court's ruling has blocked a district court's decision to allow Kate Cox to abort a fetus that has a fatal trisomy 18 genetic defect, also known as Edwards' syndrome. Most babies with the defect will die before or shortly after being born.

Continued: https://www.newsweek.com/outrage-texas-supreme-court-kate-cox-abortion-1850981

Are Texas’s abortion laws being used for state-sponsored spousal harassment?

A Texas man is suing his ex-wife’s friends for helping her get an abortion – whether he wins or not, the lawsuit is sending a terrifying message to women
18 Mar 2023
Arwa Mahdawi

Meet Jonathan Mitchell. The former solicitor general of Texas is not a household name but you’ll be familiar with his work. He’s the architect of the dystopian Texas law that lets private citizens act as vigilantes and sue abortion providers or anyone who “aids or abets” the procedure. As the New York Times noted in a 2021 profile of Mitchell, he’s devoted much of the past decade to “honing a largely below-the-radar strategy of writing laws deliberately devised to make it much more difficult for the judicial system – particularly the supreme court – to thwart them.” In other words: he’s brilliant at finding sneaky ways to inflict his beliefs on everyone else. And he appears to have made it his life’s work to weaponize the law to terrorize and control women.

Mitchell’s latest project is representing a Texas man called Marcus Silva who is currently suing his ex-wife’s friends for helping her get an abortion. Silva is demanding more than $1m in damages from each of the two friends his ex-wife talked and texted with when she planned her abortion as well as the woman who provided abortion pills. He’s also planning to sue the manufacturer of the abortion pills.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/18/are-texass-abortion-laws-being-used-for-state-sponsored-spousal-harassment

18.03.2023

anti-choice abuse

anti-choice cruelty

anti-choice harassment

anti-choice hatred

anti-choice misogyny

anti-choice terrorism

USA – The Fight to Protect Abortion Access Amid the Pandemic

The Fight to Protect Abortion Access Amid the Pandemic

Jordan Smith
June 15 2020

It wasn’t much past 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning in late April, and anti-choice protesters outside the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the only abortion clinic in Mississippi, were already cantankerous: There were three men with bullhorns, including one on top of a ladder; a 1,200-watt speaker pointing toward the clinic’s front door; and another protester blowing a shofar. “Welcome to the circus,” said Kim Gibson, a clinic escort who works to keep the mayhem away from patients.

Even as the coronavirus pandemic has gripped the nation (new cases are still on the rise in Mississippi), protesters disregarded Jackson’s stay-at-home order and have consistently failed to wear masks or keep appropriate social distance — not only from one another, but also from patients, whose cars they readily approach in an effort to “counsel” them and hand out anti-abortion propaganda.

Continued: https://theintercept.com/2020/06/15/coronavirus-pandemic-abortion-acces

15.06.2020