USA – How idea of charging women with murder infiltrated the anti-abortion movement

‘Abolitionists’ have migrated out of the fringes and moved toward the center of movement alongside Republicans’ penchant for punishment

Carter Sherman
Wed 23 Apr 2025

So far this year, lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation that would treat fetuses as people and leave women who have abortions vulnerable to being charged with homicide – a charge that, in several of these states, carries the death penalty.

Once seen as politically toxic, this kind of legislation has become more popular in the years since Roe v Wade fell, erasing the national right to abortion. This likely comes as no surprise to Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law and one of the foremost commentators on the US abortion wars. The anti-abortion movement, she writes in her new book Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction, has really “always been a fetal-personhood movement” – one that is so emboldened, it is increasingly unconcerned with public opinion or even democratic norms.

Continued; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/23/anti-abortion-fetal-personhood

If Trump wins the election, this is what’s at stake

Women and doctors describe heart-wrenching decisions under what may be the US’s strictest abortion ban in Idaho

Carter Sherman in Boise, Idaho
Mon 21 Oct 2024

When Jennifer Adkins and her husband were considering having a second child in Idaho, they vaguely thought how the state’s near-total abortion ban could affect them. But Adkins’ first pregnancy had gone so smoothly, she didn’t even use an epidural when she gave birth. Her next pregnancy, she expected, would be similar.

But in April 2023, 12 weeks into her second pregnancy, an ultrasound scan shattered that hope.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/oct/21/idaho-abortion-trump

Republicans Are Using Exceptions to Sell Their Abortion Bans. It’s a Scam.
Exceptions for rape, incest, and medical emergencies are incredibly hard for pregnant people to actually use—and that’s a feature, not a bug.

By Carter Sherman
April 27, 2023

This week, North Dakota’s governor signed into law one of the country’s most extreme abortion bans. It outlaws almost all abortions—and only allows people to get abortions in cases of rape or incest if they undergo the procedure within the first six weeks of pregnancy.

The ban is, for now, an act of political theater. No one is going to an abortion clinic in North Dakota, because the last clinic in the state moved to Minnesota months ago. But the exceptions in the ban are also likely meaningless. Many people do not even realize that they are pregnant at six weeks, and many sexual assault survivors can take far longer to come forward, if they ever do.

Continued: https://www.vice.com/en/article/4a3wvq/republicans-abortion-ban-exceptions

27.04.2023