Texas – El Paso woman defies state abortion bans

by Victoria Rossi
December 11, 2022

Ruth runs through a checklist as she packs. There’s ginger chews for nausea, chamomile tea for calm, two thick pads for bleeding. Inside seed packets of cantaloupes, cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers, she slips two smaller plastic baggies containing abortion pills, which she’s labeled by hand.

A few months earlier, Ruth would feel her heart pound as she assembled the kits, a rush of adrenaline as she drove to mail them, wondering if she’d get stopped – and if stopped, arrested. Now, she said, “The fear is gone. And I’m just at righteous indignation.”

Continued: https://elpasomatters.org/2022/12/11/el-paso-texas-woman-distributing-abortion-pills-defies-bans/

How Texas’ abortion laws turned a heartbreaking fetal diagnosis into a cross-country journey

“It was just a matter of time before the baby died, or maybe I’d have to go through the trauma of carrying to term knowing I wasn’t bringing a baby home,” said 27-year-old Lauren Hall. “I couldn’t do that.”

BY ELEANOR KLIBANOFF
SEPT. 20, 2022

The protesters outside the Seattle abortion clinic waved pictures of bloody fetuses, shouting that she was a “baby killer” and begging her to choose life.
Lauren Hall, 27, fought the urge to scream back and tell them just how badly she wished life was a choice she could have made.

Continued: https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/20/texas-abortion-ban-complicated-pregnancy/

The inside story of how John Roberts failed to save abortion rights

Joan Biskupic, CNN legal analyst & Supreme Court biographer
Tue July 26, 2022

Chief Justice John Roberts privately lobbied fellow conservatives to save the constitutional right to abortion down to the bitter end, but May's unprecedented leak of a draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade made the effort all but impossible.

It appears unlikely that Roberts' best prospect -- Justice Brett Kavanaugh -- was ever close to switching his earlier vote, despite Roberts' attempts that continued through the final weeks of the session.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/26/politics/supreme-court-john-roberts-abortion-dobbs/index.html

42 States Have Considered or Passed Anti-Abortion or Anti-Trans Laws This Year

Is your state anti-abortion? It’s probably anti-trans, too.

By Neda Toloui-Semnani
May 24, 2022

“I'm devastated and frustrated and losing sleep. I’m worried out of my mind about it,” said Myriam Reynolds, a Texas resident and mother of a 17-year-old transgender child.

Reynolds and her children live about 30 minutes north of Dallas. A few months ago, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, issued an executive order that directed the state’s child welfare agency to investigate parents and guardians who’ve helped secure gender-affirming care for their trans children. Since then, Reynolds told VICE News, it’s been “absolutely horrible.” The state’s Supreme Court upheld the order in May, allowing the agency to open new investigations of child abuse into these families.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3vamy/states-with-anti-abortion-trans-laws

The New Mexico Provider Trying to Save Abortion for Texas Women

This 73-year-old physician is on a mission to make his clinic a refuge for women’s health care on the border

By Jada Yuan, Washington Post
May 10, 2022

Franz Theard plies his trade in the sunniest of shadow worlds. His innocuously named Women’s Reproductive Clinic of New Mexico is hidden in plain sight, down a slope in a strip mall, neighboring a Subway and a State Farm office, in a border town of a border town. It’s less than a mile from the Texas state line, amid the sprawl of El Paso, which is itself a crossing to Ciudad Juárez in old Mexico, as folks here call it, surrounded by fireworks stores and delicious tacos and the desert beyond.

Here, this 73-year-old Haitian American OB/GYN and abortion provider sits in windowless exam rooms, handing patients pills to end their pregnancies, skirting Texas law by a trick of New Mexico geography.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/05/10/new-mexico-border-provider/

Abortion Refugees Across America

Republican state legislatures are creating abortion refugees across America, many writing legislation that ends all abortions in their states,

SONALI KOLHATKAR
APR 18, 2022

Republican state legislatures are creating abortion refugees across America. After Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a draconian bill, SB 8, into law last year, empowering bounty hunters to sue abortion providers, those seeking care fled to the neighboring states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.

But GOP leaders were ready for them. Oklahoma’s Republican Governor Kevin Stitt on April 12 signed the nation’s strictest abortion ban into law, ending all abortions in his state except in cases of danger to the pregnant person’s life. Now, reports are emerging of Oklahomans turning to the neighboring state of Kansas for abortions.

Continued: https://www.laprogressive.com/progressive-issues/abortion-refugees-across-america

‘A Massive Ripple Effect’: Oklahoma Banning Abortion Will Worsen a Crisis

One Oklahoma abortion provider says she keeps "finding staff members crying in corners."

By Susan Rinkunas
April 4, 2022

Oklahoma, the state to which droves of Texans have been fleeing to access abortion, is itself on the verge of banning abortion. Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, a provider in both states, could tell during her shifts last week that the impending laws were weighing on the minds of her colleagues. “They’ve been taking care of folks through the fallout,” she told Jezebel Thursday. “It has hit them so differently that now this is their home that it’s gonna happen to, too. I kept turning a corner and finding staff members crying in corners, just trying to really emotionally process what they’re about to go through.”

In the spring of 2020, after Texas Governor Greg Abbott dubiously shut down abortion clinics by executive order, Dr. Moayedi, who’d been providing abortions in Texas since 2004, realized it was time to get licensed in neighboring Oklahoma.

Continued: https://jezebel.com/a-massive-ripple-effect-oklahoma-banning-abortion-wi-1848745388

State-level Republicans are going all in on extreme anti-trans, anti-abortion laws

The GOP is trying to win votes with a wave of “anti-woke” bills.

By Natasha Isak
Mar 20, 2022

Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country are taking up anti-trans and anti-abortion bills at a shocking rate, as lawmakers seize on an enforcement mechanism first tested by Texas’s SB 8.

Multiple states — including Florida, Idaho, and Texas — have enacted, or hope to enact, new and draconian restrictions, including banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy (functionally equivalent to an outright ban on abortion), or banning gender-affirming health care for transgender children.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/2022/3/20/22987539/anti-trans-anti-abortion-laws-texas-florida-idaho

Most Women Denied Abortions by Texas Law Got Them Another Way

New data suggests overall abortions declined much less than previously known, because women traveled out of state or ordered pills online.

By Margot Sanger-Katz, Claire Cain Miller and Quoctrung Bui
March 6, 2022

The impact of the Texas abortion law was partly offset by trips to out-of-state clinics, and by abortion pills

In the months after Texas banned all but the earliest
abortions in September, the number of legal abortions in the state fell by
about half. But two new studies suggest the total number among Texas women fell
by far less — around 10 percent — because of large increases in the number of
Texans who traveled to a clinic in a nearby state or ordered abortion pills online.

Two groups of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin counted the
number of women using these alternative options. They found that while the
Texas law — which prohibits abortion after fetal cardiac activity can be
detected, or around six weeks — lowered the number of abortions, it did so much
more modestly than earlier measurements suggested.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/upshot/texas-abortion-women-data.html

USA – Abortion Bans Are Disregarding the Lives of Sexual Assault Survivors

By removing even exceptions for rape from their anti-abortion legislation, Republican politicians are finally starting to say the quiet part out loud.

By Kylie Cheung
Feb 22, 2022

Anti-abortion politicians have always been clear on one thing: Abortion is murder. But for years, this “logic” hasn’t held up against their occasional concession that abortion bans make exceptions for rape. Of course, if these politicians genuinely believed that abortion is murder, they wouldn’t allow any concession at all. Instead, they have long used the rape exception to have it both ways, claiming to simultaneously care about women and also be “pro-life”—two antithetical positions to take.

This dynamic is beginning to shift. Since the much-publicized feud between Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and fellow Republican Rep. Nancy Mace last December over whether abortion bans should include rape exceptions at all, a string of recent proposed and enacted state abortion bans have been made in Taylor Greene’s image more so than Mace’s.

Continued: https://jezebel.com/abortion-bans-rape-exceptions-effect-survivors-1848516164