USA – How Viability Limits End Up Criminalizing Pregnancy

Pregnancy Justice’s legal director, Karen Thompson, warns: “We are in dangerous territory. This is our reality now.”

Nina Martin, Mother Jones
June 30, 2025

When Karen Thompson became the legal director at Pregnancy Justice a year and a half ago, she was still learning about the reproductive justice issues at the heart of the organization’s mission. But after 20 years focused on the criminal justice system, first at the Innocence Project and then at the ACLU of New Jersey, she did know a lot about racial profiling, government surveillance, law enforcement overreach, and wrongful convictions. And to her, the parallels between her earlier work and the increasing criminalization of pregnancy and abortion in post-Roe v. Wade America could not have been clearer. “We are seeing all the same kinds of issues in the repro space that people in the criminal defense space have been talking about for years,” Thompson says.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/06/pregnancy-justice-karen-thompson-viability-limits-fetal-personhood-criminalizing-pregnancy/


Not just liberty, Roe v. Wade legitimised extinguishing the American woman’s right to life

In a country where 20 percent pregnant women face violence, and several are prone to life-altering injuries and health conditions, pregnancy must be examined as an inherently violent circumstance, posing fatal consequences to women, globally, everyday. In the post-Roe U.S., we must collectively acknowledge that this is not a simple contest between the foetus’s right to life and women’s right to liberty and privacy. It is the woman’s survival that is on the line.

Hannah Zobair
28 Feb 2025

WOMEN often describe giving birth as “a scene from a horror movie.” Accounts of mistreatment during childbirth in the United States recall harrowing stories of doctors shoving their hands up the uterus of the mother, leaving her bruised, bloodied, and with severe post-traumatic stress disorder that follows her long after the birth. The choice to have a baby can often be a fatal one, always necessitating exposure to a certain amount of danger.

In the United States, a conservative movement to recognise the fundamental right to life of foetuses, and their corresponding right to not be aborted, has evolved over decades. Conservative proponents have put forth an assertive, moral view - the State cannot perpetuate the killing of babies.

Continued: https://theleaflet.in/women-and-children/not-just-liberty-roe-v-wade-legitimised-extinguishing-the-american-womans-right-to-life


USA – What It Really Means to Get an Abortion After ‘Fetal Viability’

By Chantelle Lee
December 4, 2024

Kate Dineen was about 33 weeks pregnant with her second child when an ultrasound revealed that her baby had suffered a catastrophic stroke in utero and would likely either die before birth or have a short and painful life.

“This was a deeply wanted pregnancy. Everything had been progressing smoothly,” Dineen, now 41, says. “I was just shocked by the diagnosis first, and heartbroken by the diagnosis, and also certain that I wanted to try and obtain a termination so that I could protect my son from pain and suffering. I knew in that moment that I wanted to make the decision.”

Continued: https://time.com/7199856/abortion-fetal-viability-pregnancy/


India’s Abortion Laws Offer Pregnant Women an Illusion of Choice

Complicated, overlapping and contradictory legislation places decisions in the hands of the medical and judicial establishments

Sohel Sarkar
September 9, 2024

In October 2023, a 27-year-old woman approached the Supreme Court in India with a petition to terminate her pregnancy, which was over 24 weeks. She had discovered it late and was undergoing treatment for postpartum psychosis following the birth of her second child, which left her without the “physical, mental, psychological and financial” wherewithal to continue with a third pregnancy. A two-judge bench initially ruled in her favor, affirming “the right of a woman over her body.”

Yet the law in India only allows for terminations over 24 weeks in cases of fetal abnormalities or to save the life of the mother, and the case was later reopened after a doctor from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, a premier hospital and medical college in Delhi where the abortion was to be conducted, asked for a court directive on whether a “feticide” could be performed since the fetus, in her words, was “normal.”

Continued: https://newlinesmag.com/argument/indias-abortion-laws-offer-pregnant-women-an-illusion-of-choice/


Missouri advocates launch campaign to restore abortion access in the state

It’s one of two ballot measure efforts to shore up abortion access in the first state to outlaw abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

Grace Panetta, Political reporter
January 18, 2024

A coalition of abortion rights advocates in Missouri is formally launching a campaign to pass a constitutional amendment restoring a right to abortion, one of two ballot measure efforts in the state this year.

Missouri was the first state to outlaw abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022 with a law that bans virtually all abortions and threatens physicians who defy the ban with felony charges. The ban has no exceptions for rape or incest, only for a threat to the patient’s health.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2024/01/missouri-abortion-ballot-measure/


Why ‘viability’ is dividing the abortion rights movement

By Associated Press AP
Jan. 16, 2024

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Reproductive rights activists in Missouri agree they want to get a ballot measure before voters this fall to roll back one of the strictest abortion bans in the country and ensure access. The sticking point is how far they should go.

The groups have been at odds over whether to include a provision that would allow the state to regulate abortions after the fetus is viable, a concession supporters of the language say will be needed to persuade voters in the conservative state.

Continued: https://ny1.com/nyc/brooklyn/ap-top-news/2024/01/16/disputes-over-viability-are-dividing-abortion-rights-groups-and-complicating-ballot-measure-efforts


USA – THE ABORTION ABSOLUTIST

Warren Hern has been performing late abortions for half a century. After Roe, he is as busy with patients as ever.

By Elaine Godfrey
MAY 12, 2023

The sky above Boulder was dark when the abortion doctor picked me up for dinner. I had to squint to recognize Warren Hern in his thick aviator glasses and fur-trapper hat.

At the restaurant—a kitschy Italian spot along a pedestrian mall—Hern ignored the table the waiter offered us, pointed at one in the corner, and clomped over in his heavy hiking boots. He’d like to order right away, he said: the osso buco and a glass of Spanish red. How long will that take?

Continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/05/dr-warren-hern-abortion-post-roe/674000/


Are Blue States Ready To Relax Their Bans On Later Abortions?

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
JAN. 30, 2023

You hear people say the term “third rail” all the time in politics, usually in reference to an issue that is too volatile — too charged — to touch. For decades, abortion later in pregnancy has been one of those issues. As recently as four years ago, a proposal to loosen restrictions on third-trimester abortions went down in flames in Virginia after Republicans accused Democratic lawmakers of advocating for infanticide — an attack that was misleading but effective.

But the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has changed the current running through the abortion debate. And now Democratic legislators may have new opportunities to try and expand abortion rights — including abortions in the late second and early third trimester of pregnancy.

Continued: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-blue-states-ready-to-relax-their-bans-on-later-abortions/


‘At death’s door’: abortion bans endanger lives of high-risk patients, Texas study shows

In a preview of what’s to come in half the country, a near-total ban has led some providers to deny care until mothers’ health deteriorated

Mary Tuma
Wed 13 Jul 2022

Facing a rupture of membranes before fetal viability – a condition in which water breaks too early – a pregnant patient in Texas desperately needed an abortion. She risked infection, sepsis, excessive bleeding and even death.

But her healthcare provider’s hands were tied by Senate Bill 8, a near-total ban in effect since September 2021, preventing her from accessing that potentially life-saving care in her home state. Despite the risk associated with air travel, she boarded a plane to obtain the procedure out of state. Her obstetrician cautioned that she could go into labor in-flight and give birth to a stillborn 19-week fetus. “If you labor on the plane, leave the placenta inside of you,” the doctor warned.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/13/texas-abortion-ban-maternal-health-risk


USA – The New Abortion Restriction No One is Talking About

Anti-abortion laws have traditionally allowed an exception to protect the “life of the mother.” Not anymore.

Opinion by MICHELE DEMARCO
04/28/2022

In 1942, my grandmother lay in a hospital bed in center city Philadelphia waiting to die. She was 26 years old, happily married, and pregnant with her first child. Only something went horribly wrong in the last trimester, and suddenly, both she and the baby were in a fight for life.

My grandfather, distraught but resolved, begged the attending physicians to do whatever it took to save my grandmother’s life, even if that meant the life inside her wouldn’t survive. But in those days that wasn’t always the practice; this was also a Catholic hospital, which forbade such a practice because it was considered tantamount to abortion. My grandfather was told she would be kept comfortable, and they would monitor both mother and baby, but that nothing would be done to privilege her life over that of their unborn child. In the end, my grandmother pulled through — barely — but sadly, the baby did not.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/04/28/the-new-abortion-restriction-no-one-is-talking-about-00028171