The Christian right has set the US on the road to Gilead. Without a fight, other nations may follow

Organisations that pumped money into overturning Roe v Wade are making inroads in Europe. Women’s rights are truly at risk

Deborah Frances-White
Sat 5 Apr 2025

With Donald Trump as president, there is now a heavy strain of Christian nationalism driving the US political agenda. From draconian abortion policies to ending birthright citizenship, some of Trump’s first executive orders sound startlingly like something out of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopian novel turned TV show set in Gilead, a fundamentalist, fascist version of the US where women have no rights. But it is urgent we understand that what is happening in the US could happen here. This road to Atwood’s Gilead is charting a course straight through the UK and Europe, and we may well be sleepwalking on to it.

In November 2024 I debated with the American conservative lawyer Erin Hawley at the Oxford Union. The motion was “This house regrets the overturning of Roe v Wade”, the US supreme court’s landmark decision that once protected the right to have an abortion at the federal level. Hawley is vice-president of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an “anti-LGBTQ+ hate group”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, founded by the US Christian right. She is also a high profile lawyer and supported the state of Mississippi on the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that overturned Roe.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/05/christian-right-us-gilead-roe-v-wade-europe-women-rights-abortion

U.S. Supreme Court unanimously strikes down legal challenge to abortion pill mifepristone

The ruling preserves access to the mail-order medication nationwide.

By Devin Dwyer
June 13, 2024

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ruled a group of doctors lacked legal standing to challenge the Food and Drug Administration's regulation of the abortion pill mifepristone, preserving access to the medication nationwide.

The unanimous opinion was authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

The case put abortion access back in the spotlight for the court for the first time since its conservative majority voted to overrule Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/supreme-court-unanimously-strikes-legal-challenge-abortion-pill/story?id=110439079

13.06.2024

abortion pills

Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

Food and Drug Administration

Katie Daniel

mifepristone

Roe v. Wade

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America

U.S. Supreme Court

USA – Red state abortion bans headed for clash with blue state shield laws

BY NATHANIEL WEIXEL
05/20/24

A clash is looming between anti-abortion red states and the blue state telemedicine shield laws trying to preserve abortion access.

More than a dozen states have laws shielding medical providers and others from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions regarding abortions and gender affirming care. But six states — Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, California, Vermont and Washington — have gone even further.

Continued: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4671299-abortion-bans-clash-shield-laws/

USA – Justices appear skeptical of call to restrict abortion pill

A decision, likely to come in June, would be a major victory for the FDA’s authority to regulate prescription drugs and for abortion-rights advocates who have sought to protect access to mifepristone.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and JOSH GERSTEIN
03/26/2024

The Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared skeptical of an effort to restrict access to a widely used abortion pill — with conservative and liberal justices alike raising questions about whether anti-abortion doctors can prove concrete injuries that give them standing to sue and whether a national judicial ruling rolling back availability of the drug is justified.

During the roughly 90 minutes of oral arguments, two conservative justices likely to be pivotal votes in the case — Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — expressed repeated doubts about harms the anti-abortion physicians claimed they’ve faced in treating patients who’ve taken abortion pills and needed follow-up care. Those two justices also questioned whether curtailing access to the drug would address those alleged harms.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/26/scotus-restrict-abortion-pill-mifepristone-00149039

26.03.2024

News

Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

Amy Coney Barrett

Chief Justice John Roberts

Elizabeth Prelogar

Erin Hawley

Ketanji Brown Jackson

USA – The Current Attack on Abortion Pills Will Fail. The Next One Will Be So Much Worse.

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK AND MARK JOSEPH STERN
MARCH 26, 2024

There are always a couple of tells when the most conservative Supreme Court in more than a century finds itself adjudicating a truly mortifying and meritless case. One is that it’s coming up by way of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, a court that so consistently shovels its worst constitutional garbage upward that the high court conservatives are often forced to reluctantly lob it back. Another tell is when the facts of the case are so laugh-out-loud insane that even conservative justices can’t bring themselves to adopt them or the underpinning legal reasoning with a straight face. There’s yet a third tell: when the conservative justices start injecting a bunch of nonsense and randomized pet peeves into oral argument to distract from how embarrassing it would be to discuss the merits of the actual case.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/mifepristone-supreme-court-alito-national-abortion-ban.html

Federal judges grill Biden administration on abortion pill

During a two-hour oral argument, the judges appeared sympathetic to an anti-abortion medical group seeking to revoke the FDA’s approval of mifepristone.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and JOSH GERSTEIN
05/17/2023

NEW ORLEANS — Three federal judges seemed poised to rule against the Biden administration in its efforts to preserve access to the abortion drug mifepristone.

During an occasionally combative, two-hour hearing Wednesday before a panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, the judges — all Republican appointees — grilled attorneys from the Justice Departments and Danco Laboratories, the pill’s manufacturer, who are battling to keep the drug available in the U.S.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/17/federal-judges-appear-skeptical-of-biden-administration-in-abortion-pills-case-00097477

Two months after the Dobbs ruling, new abortion bans are taking hold

August 23, 2022
Sarah McCammon

WASHINGTON, D.C. — This week marks two months since the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision reversed decades of precedent guaranteeing abortion rights, and the effects of the decision are continuing to unfold as abortion bans take effect around the country.

Well before the opinion was issued on June 24, more than a dozen states had so-called "trigger bans" in place – laws written to prohibit abortion as soon as Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that had legalized the procedure for nearly 50 years, was overturned.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/23/1118846811/two-months-after-the-dobbs-ruling-new-abortion-bans-are-taking-hold

Abortion opponents pushing for more restrictions, laws across U.S.

By Amy Forliti and Geoff Mulvihill, The Associated Press
Posted July 30, 2022

Now that Roe v. Wade has been toppled, abortion opponents are taking a multifaceted approach in their quest to end abortions nationwide, targeting their strategies to the dynamics of each state as they attempt to create new laws and defend bans in courts.

One anti-abortion group has proposed model legislation that would ban all abortions except to prevent the death of a pregnant woman. New legal frontiers could include prosecuting doctors who defy bans, and skirmishes over access to medication abortions already are underway. Others hope to get more conservatives elected in November to advance an anti-abortion agenda.

|Continued: https://globalnews.ca/news/9027063/u-s-abortion-opponents-more-restrictions/

30.07.2022

Alliance Defending Freedom

model anti-choice bills

National Right to Life

Roe v. Wade

If Roe falls, some fear ripple effect on civil rights cases

If the Supreme Court decides to overturn or gut the decision that legalized abortion, some fear that it could undermine other precedent-setting cases, including civil rights and LGBTQ protections

By LINDSAY WHITEHURST, Associated Press
7 December 2021

If the Supreme Court decides to overturn or gut the decision that legalized abortion, some fear that it could undermine other precedent-setting cases, including civil rights and LGBTQ protections.

Overturning Roe v. Wade would have a bigger effect than most cases because it was reaffirmed by a second decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, three decades later, legal scholars and advocates said. The Supreme Court's conservative majority signaled in arguments last week they would allow states to ban abortion much earlier in pregnancy and may even overturn the nationwide right that has existed for nearly 50 years. A decision is expected next summer.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/roe-falls-fear-ripple-effect-civil-rights-cases-81604652