USA – Abortions Are Rising—Even After Dobbs. A New Book Explains Why.

“It’s a story of resistance and resilience and hope.”

Julianne McShane, Mother Jones
April 17, 2025

New data released this week reaffirmed a seemingly paradoxical reality of the post-Roe v. Wade era: Abortion rates have continued to rise despite the increasing restrictions nationwide.

The latest data, compiled by the abortion rights research and policy organization the Guttmacher Institute, shows that throughout 2024, clinicians provided more than one million abortions in states without total abortion bans, a slight increase compared to 2023. A closer look at the data reflects how healthcare providers and patients have adapted to changing circumstances—which have made access both more difficult and, in some ways, easier—since the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization revoking the constitutional right to abortion.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/abortions-are-rising-even-after-dobbs-a-new-book-explains-why/

Why overturning Roe v. Wade only made America’s abortion rate rise

"They will never stop abortion": "After Dobbs" chronicles "the extraordinary efforts" to help women get healthcare

By Amanda Marcotte, Salon
March 25, 2025

Republican politicians owe the pro-choice community a thank you card for saving the right from the worst impacts of their policies. After the Supreme Court overturned nearly five decades of abortion rights in the infamous Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health case, the fallout has been terrible: women nearly bleeding to death in hospital parking lots, women having to be airlifted to safer states for abortions, and, unfortunately, a few highly publicized deaths because abortion bans prevented timely care. Still, the impacts have fallen far short of what anti-choice activists hoped and what pro-choice activists feared. There haven't been hospitals filling up, as they did in the days before Roe v. Wade, with patients mutilated from botched abortions. It's not because women have, en masse, given up and submitted to forced childbirth. On the contrary, the birth rate continues to decline while the abortion rate went up after the Dobbs decision.

Continued: https://www.salon.com/2025/03/25/why-overturning-roe-v-wade-only-made-americas-abortion-rate-rise/

USA – “We Never Assumed Anything”: A Lifetime of Providing Abortion Care

In their new book We Choose To, Dr. Curtis Boyd and Glenna Halvorson-Boyd reflect on their decades helping women who needed abortions—before, during, and after Roe.

Regina Mahone
November 29, 2024

Five years ago, when Curtis Boyd, MD, and Glenna Halvorson-Boyd, PhD, RN, set out to write a book about their lives and 50-year-career providing abortion care in Texas and New Mexico, Roe was still the law of the land. But their book, which was published in September, made its debut two years after that landmark case was overturned and just a few short months before Donald J. Trump will retake the White House. As they explain in the Afterword of We Choose To: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe (Disruption Books), the work they devoted their lives to, expanding access to abortions, is being undone—and once Trump is back in power, that reversal will only accelerate. We can expect that Trump will seek out ways to impose international abortion bans like the global gag rule, and his supporters would like to see him enforce the Comstock Act, which would ban mailing abortion pills. Knowing all of that, Glenna’s question in the Afterword hits hard: “Why did we bother?”

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/curtis-glenna-boyd-abortion-provider-interview/

Before Roe, a Baptist Preacher Performed Abortions in Secret. Now He’s Helping Texans.

Dr. Curtis Boyd’s career encapsulates our long-fought abortion wars.

CECILIA NOWELL
Dec 14, 2022

The first thing Dr. Curtis Boyd did when he arrived at work one cloudy Monday morning in January was turn on his radio. It was 1973, and Boyd, an ordained Baptist minister, had been providing underground abortions for five years, most recently out of a mountaintop house in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The only people who knew the location of his clinic were members of the Clergy Consultation Service, a national network of faith leaders that discretely connected patients to reliable, and safe, doctors. As far as Boyd knew, he was the network’s only provider in the Southwest.

A group of Texas women had flown in that morning for appointments, but Boyd was distracted. A Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade was expected any day now. He kept one ear tuned to the news as he readied himself for the day. When the story broke that the Supreme Court had recognized the right to an abortion, Boyd and his nurse “looked at each other somewhat in shock” and then embraced. “It’s over, it’s over, thank God at last it’s over,” he says. He no longer had to live in fear that he—or worse, one of his patients—might end up in jail.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/12/curtis-boyd-abortion-clergy-consultation-service-preacher-texas-new-mexico-roe/

Texas Has Turned Citizen Against Citizen Over Abortion. How Did We Get Here?

Oct. 29, 2021
By Joshua Prager

Before the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that abortion was legal in all 50 states, the case did nothing for the women of Texas, where it began. A federal panel in Dallas ruled that Texas’ anti-abortion laws were unconstitutional. But the panel was concerned about interfering in state affairs. And so although it granted doctors and women the legal right to perform and have abortions, they could still be prosecuted.

“Apparently, we’re free to try them,” Dallas County’s District Attorney Henry Wade told the press, “so we’ll still do that.” Fearing the consequences, a hospital refused to abort the pregnancy of a 15-year-old girl who said she had been raped by her father.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/29/opinion/roe-v-wade-texas-abortion-law.html

Abortion-seekers find support in New Mexico interfaith group

Abortion-seekers find support in New Mexico interfaith group

By Sarah Halasz Graham
Nov 3, 2018

She arrived under cover of darkness, alone, a stranger in an unfamiliar city.

In July 2014, El Paso resident Kasey Sanchez was 27 years old — and 27 weeks pregnant. In the seven weeks since she’d learned she was expecting, Sanchez had told no one, except a few muted voices on the phone — voices of people who promised to help.

Continued: http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/abortion-seekers-find-support-in-new-mexico-interfaith-group/article_7788ef9e-6806-5c27-944e-142fee7d75cb.html

U.S. – What It Was Like to Perform Abortions Before Roe v. Wade

Two doctors recall the hardships and horrors facing women before the United States legalized abortion.
By Hannah Smothers
Nov 02, 2016. Cosmopolitan

During the third and final presidential debate, Republican candidate Donald Trump made his views on abortion — and Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized the procedure in 1973 — clear.

"I’m putting pro-life justices on the court," Trump said about overturning Roe v. Wade. "I will say this. It will go back to the states and the states will then make a determination." What Trump described was once a reality in the United States. Forty-three years ago, before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in all 50 states, abortion rights were left to state legislatures. In 1970, just three years before Roe, only four states had legalized abortions. And even where abortion was legal, the lack of a national law allowed states to create severe restrictions that forced women to get permission from a panel of doctors in order to get an abortion, or prove that they were likely to die if they went on with the pregnancy. (Today, states can still make laws restricting the procedure, but many have been challenged, including Texas's House Bill 2, which reached the Supreme Court. Parts of the bill were struck down as unconstitutional.) The reality was that millions of women were terrified of unwanted pregnancies, because unwanted pregnancies relegated them to seeking out illegal, unsafe abortions from people without any medical practice.

[continued at link]
Source: Cosmopolitan

02.11.2016