USA – Where the Conservative War on Abortion Pills Is Headed

By Andrea González-Ramírez, the Cut
March 12, 2025

In his nearly two months in office, President Donald Trump has only made small moves to advance his anti-abortion agenda. But his Justice Department’s decisions to enforce a law that protects abortion clinics from violence only in “extraordinary” cases and to stop defending a Biden-era lawsuit against Idaho that sought to protect access to emergency abortion care in hospitals send a clear signal: The federal government will not defend what curtailed abortion rights remain post-Dobbs. Now, Republican lawmakers emboldened by that message are going after their most urgent target: abortion pills.

Continued: https://www.thecut.com/article/republicans-unleash-new-attacks-on-abortion-pills.html


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/


Can Capitalism Save Abortion Access?

Peter Barker
February 4, 2023

Maureen Farrell worked as a midwife in West Virginia for two years and as a doula for six years. But this fall, she noticed a dramatic shift in her day-to-day life: More clients than ever were seeking miscarriage assistance — not because more of them were miscarrying, but because of the way these patients have been treated since September, as lawmakers said West Virginia has voted to ban abortion in virtually all circumstances.

“The actual medical care they received is the same. But vendor attitudes are understandably very different,” says Farrell. Under West Virginia’s new law, providers who perform abortions will be prosecuted, including prison terms. And since mifepristone and misoprostol — the same two-drug therapy used to terminate unwanted pregnancies — are prescribed to patients who are miscarrying, some doctors are wary of administering them even in perfectly legal circumstances. Farrell says one of her clients was forced to undergo three separate ultrasound appointments that confirmed her pregnancy was not viable before doctors finally prescribed the medication she needed to treat her symptoms. “Everyone’s nervous — and patients are paying for it,” says Farrell.

Continued: https://localtoday.news/va/can-capitalism-save-abortion-access-89613.html