USA – The Supreme Court Could Gut Access to Birth Control This Year

By Susan Rinkunas
January 27, 2025

With Donald Trump back in the White House, access to contraception is, sadly, not something that people can bank on anymore — whether they know it or not. This issue didn’t get much airtime during the chaotic 2024 campaign, but birth control has been in conservatives’ crosshairs for years. And while Trump’s administration will undoubtedly attack it, he’ll likely have additional help from his appointees to the Supreme Court.

On Jan. 10, the justices agreed to hear a case, Braidwood v. Becerra, that threatens the Affordable Care Act’s insurance coverage of preventive care. A group of conservative Texas employers who object to paying for birth control and pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV argue that the Affordable Care Act can’t require preventive services be covered without costs like copays because the panels that determine coverage are unconstitutional.

Continued: https://www.democracydocket.com/opinion/the-supreme-court-could-gut-access-to-birth-control-this-year/

How American Women Could Lose the Right to Birth Control

BY JILL FILIPOVIC
MAY 20, 2024

When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 1965 ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut and legalized the use of contraception by married women, the public response was muted. There is little evidence of an uproar on the pages of major newspapers or magazines. Even bringing the case was a challenge for reproductive-rights activists, who had tried and failed twice before to challenge Connecticut’s anti-obscenity law, which (fun fact) was introduced by P. T. Barnum in 1879 and (less fun) banned “any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception.” By the 1960s, laws criminalizing contraception often went unenforced, which posed a problem for activists looking to challenge them. Without contraception-seeking patients who had actually been arrested, the Supreme Court said, there was no one with the standing to sue.

Continued: https://time.com/6977434/birth-control-contraception-access-griswold-threat/

USA – The anti-abortion playbook for restricting birth control

Contraception, like IVF, poses problems for those claiming personhood begins at conception.

By Rachel M. Cohen
Mar 3, 2024

The national debate over IVF, unfolding after an Alabama court decision prompted multiple clinics in the state to halt operations, prompts a question: What might be next? Could other fertility treatments and even birth control be under threat given that Roe v. Wade is no longer the law?

If the idea that birth control could be at risk in America strikes you as hard to believe, I understand.
There’s no proposed legislation on the table to ban it, and it does seem unbelievable that contraception — which an overwhelming majority of US women, including religious and Republican women, have used and support — could one day disappear.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/24087411/anti-abortion-roe-dobbs-birth-control-contraception-ivf

The Right to Contraception: State and Federal Actions, Misinformation, and the Courts

Mabel Felix, Laurie Sobel, and Alina Salganicoff
Oct 26, 2023

Introduction
The Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling has heightened interest in affirming the right to contraception. While the Court’s majority opinion stated that the Dobbs decision does not “cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” Justice Thomas argued in his concurring opinion that in future cases, the Court should reconsider precedent that relied on the same principles as Roe – including Griswold v. Connecticut, the Court’s 1965 landmark decision that recognized the right of married people to obtain contraceptives – and overturn those decisions. The prospect of the Court overturning Griswold moved some in Congress to introduce federal legislation that would protect the right to contraception, though that legislation is unlikely to advance in the current divided Congress. Similarly, some state legislators have recently introduced measures to protect the right to obtain contraceptives.

Continued: https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/issue-brief/the-right-to-contraception-state-and-federal-actions-misinformation-and-the-courts/

Inside the 1969 abortion arrest that overturned Wisconsin’s century-old ban

Years before Roe, a doctor's arrest in Milwaukee became a flashpoint for the abortion rights movement

By Sarah Lehr and Rob Mentzer
Wednesday, August 9, 2023

On a Saturday in September 1969, a 23-year-old grad student walked into an office inside the Majestic Building in downtown Milwaukee. She had been there once before, for a consultation with Dr. Sidney Babbitz.

Babbitz was 59 years old and had mostly retired to Florida. But he was known in whisper networks as a doctor who was willing to perform illegal abortions back in Wisconsin.

Continued: https://www.wpr.org/wisconsin-1849-abortion-ban-history-arrest-overturned

Abortion in America: How access and attitudes have changed through the centuries

by: Eliza Siegel, Stacker
Jul 28, 2023

The Postal Service can legally deliver abortion medications in the U.S.—including to states with abortion restrictions or bans—according to a Justice Department decision posted online late Jan. 3. The Postal Service requested that the Justice Department provide guidance on this issue a week after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority voted to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in June 2022. That ruling, which sparked intense debate across the U.S., led to abortion restrictions and bans in many states.

In its decision, the Justice Department ruled that sending, delivering, and receiving abortion drugs by mail is not in violation of the 1873 Comstock Act —which aimed to prevent morally “corrupt” items from being delivered by mail—because there is no way to determine that the intent of the recipient is to commit an unlawful act. There are also no federal restrictions on the drugs in question.

Continued: https://www.ksnt.com/news/abortion-in-america-how-access-and-attitudes-have-changed-through-the-centuries/

A Year After Dobbs, Advocates Push in the States for a Right to Birth Control

After Justice Clarence Thomas cast doubt on the Supreme Court decision that established a right to contraception, reproductive rights advocates are pressing for new protections at the state level.

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
June 17, 2023

One year after Justice Clarence Thomas said the Supreme Court should reconsider whether the Constitution affords Americans a right to birth control, Democrats and reproductive rights advocates are laying the groundwork for state-by-state battles over access to contraception — an issue they hope to turn against Republicans in 2024.

The justice’s argument in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion, galvanized the reproductive rights movement. House Democrats, joined by eight Republicans, promptly passed legislation that would have created a national right to contraception. Republicans blocked a companion bill in the Senate.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/17/us/politics/birth-control-dobbs-clarence-thomas.html

USA – Don’t rule out a national abortion ban in 2025

Activists think they have a path to stopping abortions nationwide. It runs not through Congress but through the White House, the Supreme Court, and an arcane 19th-century law.

By Mary Ziegler
May 30, 2023

Almost a year ago, when the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court promised that each state would make its own decision on abortion. At the time, a national statute of any kind seemed impossible. Democrats had tried and failed to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have secured abortion rights nationwide. And once Republicans gained a majority in the House of Representatives, they didn’t try to pass a national abortion ban. Their legislative wish list did not include one, and poll after poll showed that most Americans believed abortion to be a right and wanted it to be legal, especially early in pregnancy.

The antiabortion movement had never wanted the issue left to the states. Since the 1980s, the movement had made sure that the Republican Party platform had a plank endorsing a human life amendment. But in the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs ruling, it seemed that there was little chance that antiabortion advocates could get their wish for a national ban.

Continued: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/05/30/opinion/abortion-ban-comstock-act-mary-ziegler/

The best way to protect abortion rights? Finalize the Equal Rights Amendment

BY KATE KELLY, Los Angeles Times
MAY 23, 2022

When Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973, it was rooted in rights that flow from privacy — not equality. As the country has now seen in the leaked Supreme Court draft ruling, that right to privacy is about to be demolished.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. bemoans in the draft opinion that Roe “was remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text,” basing the right to abortion on the right to privacy when neither is “mentioned” in the Constitution. While we can’t change the composition of the court poised to overturn Roe, we can change the text they are charged with interpreting. It’s time to finalize the Equal Rights Amendment and enshrine gender equality.

Continued: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-05-23/roe-abortion-equal-rights-amendment

America Almost Took a Different Path Toward Abortion Rights

Roe v. Wade was never expected to be the case that made history.

By Emily Bazelon
May 20, 2022

For three days in January 1970, they filled the 13th floor of the federal courthouse in Manhattan, women of all ages crowded into a conference room, sitting on the floor, spilling into the hallway. Some brought friends or husbands. One nursed a baby. Another was a painter who also taught elementary school. A third had gone to Catholic school. They’d come to give testimony in the case of Abramowicz v. Lefkowitz, the first in the country to challenge a state’s strict abortion law on behalf of women.

The witnesses in the courthouse were among 314 people, primarily women, brought together by a small team of lawyers, led by Florynce Kennedy and Nancy Stearns, to set up a legal argument no one had made before: that a woman’s right to an abortion was rooted in the Constitution’s promises of liberty and equal protection. New York permitted abortion only to save a woman’s life. Kennedy and Stearns wanted the court to understand how risking an illegal procedure or carrying a forced pregnancy could constrict women’s lives in ways that men did not experience.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/magazine/roe-v-wade-abortion-rights.html

20.05.2022