Canada – She Wanted to End Her Pregnancy. Her Abusive Partner Took Her to Court

The legal case that won Canadian women the right to abortion

by Karin Wells
Jun. 4, 2025

They met at a RadioShack in Montreal in November 1988. She was barely twenty, a waitress new to the city. He was five years older, a big man, six foot three, with a moustache. He seemed nice enough.

Chantale Daigle might have been a young, small-town girl—she was from Chibougamau, eight hours north of Montreal—but she knew her own mind. She lived with Jean-Guy Tremblay for five months, and it turned out he was not so nice. She got pregnant. One night, he knocked her to the ground and said that he would “bring her into line once and for all.”

Continued: https://thewalrus.ca/she-wanted-to-end-her-pregnancy-her-abusive-partner-took-her-to-court/

USA – Project 2025 and Vance agree: “The Dobbs decision is just the beginning.”

Shawn Musgrave
July 17 2024

DONALD TRUMP HAS tried to distance himself from Project 2025, the conservative playbook for a new Trump administration penned by dozens of right-wing organizations — and especially its hard-line anti-abortion proposals.

In the lead-up to the Republican convention, many credulously lauded Trump for “softening” or “moderating” the GOP platform on the issue, despite the fact that the platform proposes fetuses and embryos already have full constitutional rights.

Continued: https://theintercept.com/2024/07/17/jd-vance-trump-project-2025/

The Six-Week Abortion Ban in Florida Is Only the Beginning

The history of these bans suggests they’re far from the anti-abortion movement’s endgame.

BY MARY ZIEGLER
MAY 01, 2024

Florida has long been a destination state for abortion-seekers in a region defined by sweeping criminal bans. And, despite being under Republican control, Florida had long been a place with one of the highest abortion rates in the nation. Yet this week, a six-week ban signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis in April 2023 is set to go into effect. Florida’s law will cut off access for a large number of patients, many of whom will have to travel as far as North Carolina and Virginia, where clinics have already reported long waiting periods and struggles to meet demand.

Six-week bans block a sizable share of abortions—as of 2021, nearly 60 percent of procedures in Florida occured after that point in pregnancy. But the history of six-week bans like Florida’s suggests that this will not be the stopping point for the anti-abortion movement. Six-week bans were designed to be a stopgap in the fight for fetal personhood.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/florida-six-week-abortion-ban-only-the-beginning.html

When Fetal Rights Are More Important Than Democracy

After Roe, the anti-abortion movement faces a new opponent: popular opinion.

By Mary Ziegler
OCTOBER 3, 2022

The anti-abortion movement has
long loved to profess its love for democracy. Clarke Forsythe of Americans
United for Life consistently called on the Supreme Court to reverse Roe v. Wade
and put questions about abortion “back into voters’ hands—where they belong.”
The National Catholic Register proclaimed the day Roe was overturned “a
wonderful day for democracy.”

But now democracy may not look so hot to
anti-abortion activists: In the months since Roe was overturned, voters in
Kansas, a deeply conservative state, decisively rejected a proposal to undo
state constitutional abortion rights, and many expect the result to be the same
when voters confront ballot initiatives in key states such as Michigan. Fueled
by rage about the reversal of abortion rights, Democrats have nearly eliminated
Republicans’ advantage in voter registration and have turned what appeared to
be a landslide loss in the 2022 midterms into a potential nail-biter.

Continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/anti-abortion-movement-roe-v-wade-democracy/671583/

Ireland’s Struggle for Abortion Rights Should Be an Inspiration for the US

Ireland’s Struggle for Abortion Rights Should Be an Inspiration for the US

BY SINÉAD KENNEDY
Aug 22, 2022

Irish pro-choice activists had to overcome a rigid constitutional ban on abortion that was in place for more than 30 years. They succeeded by putting mass mobilization and a confident assertion of the right to choose at the heart of their campaign.

In May 2018, the Irish electorate voted by a two-to-one majority to remove or “repeal” the prohibition on abortion, known as the Eighth Amendment, from the country’s constitution. While opinion polls had suggested that pro-choice campaigners would win, most predicted a nerve-rackingly close result; certainly no one anticipated the sheer scale of the victory and the support for abortion access found across every section of society, from young to old, urban to rural.

Continued: https://jacobin.com/2022/08/ireland-abortion-rights-repeal-campaign-us-roe

USA – Constitutional Rights for the “Unborn” Would Force Women to Forfeit Theirs

If the unborn have 14th Amendment rights, any loss of pregnancy, whether intentional or not, will become the basis for arrest and prosecution.

4/15/2021
by LYNN M. PALTROW
Ms. Magazine

Ross Douthat’s recent op-ed “What Has the Pro-Life Movement Won?” in the New York Times addresses the possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court, now dominated by justices who oppose abortion, may, in the next abortion case, not merely impose further limits on that right, but more radically outlaw abortion altogether by recognizing that “unborn human beings deserve protections under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” He then suggests “pro-life” advocates will have to support expansion of government programs for the children poor women would be forced to have.

More than minimizing the harm done by outlawing abortions and forced childbearing, the op-ed reinforces the very big lie that the only thing that would be impacted by recognizing constitutional rights for the “unborn” is abortion. The fact is, it would fundamentally change the legal rights and status of all pregnant women.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2021/04/15/abortion-constitutional-rights-unborn-fetus-14th-amendment-womens-rights-pregnant/

Pregnant People of Color are Bearing the Brunt of the War on Drugs

‘Fetal protection’ laws are criminalizing pregnant people who use drugs or alcohol, rather than approaching this as a public-health issue.

by Eleanor J. Bader
January 13, 2021

When Chelsea Becker was eight-and-a-half months pregnant, she delivered a stillborn baby. An autopsy found high levels of methamphetamine in its system, and Becker, then twenty-five, was subsequently charged with first-degree murder. Bail was initially set at $5 million, then lowered to an equally out-of-reach $2 million. As a result, Becker has been in pre-trial detention at the King County Jail in Hanford, California, since November 2019.

Becker is not an anomaly. In fact, over the past five decades, hundreds of people—71 percent of them low-income, and 59 percent people of color—have been locked up, sometimes in mental hospitals and sometimes in prison or mandatory treatment programs, for drug or alcohol use during pregnancy.

Continued: https://progressive.org/dispatches/pregnant-people-of-color-war-on-drugs-bader-210113/

USA – Here’s How Conservatives Are Using Civil Rights Law to Restrict Abortion

Here's How Conservatives Are Using Civil Rights Law to Restrict Abortion
Here Are the Details of the Abortion Legislation in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Elsewhere

By Abigail Abrams
January 1, 2020

Six states passed laws in 2019 banning abortions once a “fetal heartbeat” is detected, which can be as early as six weeks into pregnancy. While most of these new laws were challenged in court and are temporarily blocked, the trend has continued: another 10 states introduced similar bills in 2019 and more are expected this year.

The sudden success of these measures is not an accident. They are the result of a concerted new strategy by abortion opponents, researchers have found.

Continued: https://time.com/5753300/heartbeat-bill-civil-rights-law/

Missouri and the Fight for Abortion Rights: How Past Became Prologue

Missouri and the Fight for Abortion Rights: How Past Became Prologue
Missouri’s historic battle for abortion rights presaged in important ways where we are today, and what will be required of reproductive rights advocates in the future.

Aug 1, 2019
Angela Bonavoglia

The time, the late 1960s; the place, St. Louis, Missouri. Judy Widdicombe, a twenty-something self-described supermom, was raising two boys with her husband, working as a labor and delivery nurse in a Catholic hospital, and volunteering one night a week as a counselor on a suicide prevention hotline.

“In those days, there was no official place a woman with an unwanted pregnancy could go for help,” she told me when I interviewed her for my book, The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion.

Continued: https://rewire.news/article/2019/08/01/missouri-and-the-fight-for-abortion-rights-how-past-became-prologue/

01.08.2019

American Civil Liberties Union

Arlene Carmen

bomb threats

Clergy Consultation Service of Missouri

clinic picketing

Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion

Judson Memorial Church

Judy Widdicombe

Justice Blackmun

Kathryn Kolbert

manual vacuum aspiration

National Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion

peritonitis

Planned Parenthood Missouri

Planned Parenthood v. Casey

Pro-Life Action League

prosecuting women for abortion

Reproductive Health Services of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region

Reverend Howard Moody

Roe v. Wade

self-induced abortion

self-managed abortion

septicemia

The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion

undue burden standard

Webster v. Reproductive Health Services

USA – The terrifying case of a six-week embryo suing an abortion clinic

The terrifying case of a six-week embryo suing an abortion clinic
An Alabama case brings into sharp clarity what is at stake with the legal battle over a woman’s right to choos

Jill Filipovic
Fri 8 Mar 2019

In Alabama, a man is suing for what he believes is his right: to allow any man to force a female partner to give birth against her will. In a bizarre twist, a judge has allowed a no-longer-in-existence embryo to sue as well. It’s a case that highlights the fundamental divide between the pro-choice movement and the anti-abortion (and, often, anti-contraception) one: is the debate just about “life”? Or is it about allowing men and the government to control women – our lives, our futures, and the very skin, organs and bones we live in?

This case brings the stakes into sharp clarity.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/08/the-terrifying-case-of-a-six-week-embryo-suing-an-abortion-clinic