USA – The Choice Some Pregnant Immigrants Face: Deportation or Parenthood

“People who are undocumented are scared to go anywhere, to do anything, to go to the doctor.”
Laura C. Morel, Mother Jones
July 3, 2025

Shortly after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, and Texas completely outlawed abortion in communities along the Rio Grande Valley, the effect was swift. In this region, which is home to 1.4 million residents, most of them Latinx or immigrants, the area’s only abortion clinic in McAllen was forced to shut down.

“When we lost that, people lost care. That was the immediate first blow and it did send shock waves,” says Cathy Torres, organizing manager for the Frontera Fund, an abortion fund serving border communities in Texas from Brownsville to El Paso. The organization provides financial support toward abortions, flights, and hotels for people forced to leave the state for medical care. After the Dobbs decision, they also began funding other reproductive health services such as birth control and STI testing.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/the-choice-some-pregnant-immigrants-face-deportation-or-parenthood/

As Expected, Minors Are Among Those Most Impacted by Anti-Abortion Laws

“Without access to abortion, these girls have lost the ability to control their lives and their futures,” one researcher said.

By Kylie Cheung
April 7, 2025

In the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, advocates warned that minors, whose ability to travel across state lines or buy abortion pills online is already constrained, would be among those most impacted by state abortion bans. A new study published in JAMA Pediatrics this week found that two-thirds of girls ages 13 to 17 now live in states that ban or severely restrict their abortion access.
Specifically, the study reported that 66% of teen girls in this age range live in states with total bans, bans with severe gestational limits (between six and 22 weeks), and parental involvement requirements for them to access abortion.

“Minors are often targeted by restrictive policies and less able to use routes to abortion care common for adults—traveling to another state or using telehealth—leaving them disproportionately impacted,” Laura Lindberg, a professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health and author of the study, said in a statement. “Without access to abortion, these girls have lost the ability to control their lives and their futures.”

Continued: https://www.jezebel.com/as-expected-minors-are-among-those-most-impacted-by-anti-abortion-laws

07.04.2025

parental consent for abortion

Rutgers School of Public Health

Abortion Bans Are Making It Impossible for Advocates to Help Abuse Victims

“To have to say to someone, ‘You live in a state where you’re more likely to be criminalized than the person who’s abusing you’—it’s devastating,” If/When/How’s Sara Ainsworth told Jezebel.

By Kylie Cheung
March 26, 2025

In 2007, Erica DuBois learned she was pregnant just two months after becoming cancer-free. And then the abuse began, she recalled to Jezebel. Her partner would invoke religion to justify physically harming her: “He talked about the beatings and violence like a test—if the baby survived, then it was God’s will,” DuBois said. She eventually gave birth to a healthy baby girl, but as a result of these sustained beatings, her first pregnancy was the only one that didn’t end in a miscarriage. She sometimes tried to take birth control pills, but when her abuser found them, he punished her. This violence would only escalate when she inevitably became pregnant.

Continued: https://www.jezebel.com/abortion-bans-are-making-it-impossible-for-advocates-to-help-abuse-victims

USA – Where the Conservative War on Abortion Pills Is Headed

By Andrea González-Ramírez, the Cut
March 12, 2025

In his nearly two months in office, President Donald Trump has only made small moves to advance his anti-abortion agenda. But his Justice Department’s decisions to enforce a law that protects abortion clinics from violence only in “extraordinary” cases and to stop defending a Biden-era lawsuit against Idaho that sought to protect access to emergency abortion care in hospitals send a clear signal: The federal government will not defend what curtailed abortion rights remain post-Dobbs. Now, Republican lawmakers emboldened by that message are going after their most urgent target: abortion pills.

Continued: https://www.thecut.com/article/republicans-unleash-new-attacks-on-abortion-pills.html

USA – Why speech could be a target for the anti-abortion movement in 2025

The anti-abortion movement is looking at ways to control information about how and where to obtain abortions

Carter Sherman
Fri 27 Dec 2024

The next front in the US abortion wars may be what people are allowed to say about it.

More than two years after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in the case Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, US abortions are on the rise, thanks in large part to the spread of abortion pills and travel across state lines. This has infuriated anti-abortion advocates, who have proposed policies to help the incoming Trump administration curtail the mailing of abortion pills and targeted individuals and groups that help women get out-of-state abortions. In a sign of how the issue is pitting states against one another, Texas earlier this month sued a New York-based doctor who allegedly provided a telehealth abortion to a Texan woman.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/27/speech-anti-abortion-movement

The Abortion Pill Underground

Since Roe was overturned, thousands of people in red states have found a way to get an abortion—often thanks to providers operating at the edge of the law.

AMY LITTLEFIELD
May 7, 2024

When Kay found out she was pregnant at the end of last year, she knew three things clearly. “I was poor and I had an unwanted pregnancy and knew I couldn’t afford a standard abortion for hundreds of dollars,” she told me. A 29-year-old student already raising one child, Kay lives in Texas, where abortion is banned. The nearest clinic she could find was at least a 12-hour drive away. But Kay thought there might be another option. “I went to Google and started searching if it was possible somehow to receive abortion pills through the Internet.”

It was not only possible; it was much easier and more affordable than Kay had expected. She found online services that offered to ship the same medications that were available in clinics right to her doorstep in Texas for $150 or, if she couldn’t afford that, for free. It seemed so simple that Kay thought it might be a scam. “I was scared I would wait for the pills and they wouldn’t work when I got them,” she said.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/telehealth-abortion-shield-laws/

07.05.2024

Commentary

Abortion Care Network

Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine

abortion funds

abortion pills

abortion pills by mail

Abuzz

Aid Access

Center for Reproductive Rights

Choices Women’s Medical Center

in-person requirement

Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline

National Network of Abortion Funds

self-managed abortion

shield laws

Susan Yanow

telemedicine abortion

NO INDICTMENT for Brittany Watts

Grand jury dismisses charges against Ohio woman arrested for miscarriage

JESSICA VALENTI
JAN 11, 2024

It’s rare to be able to bring you good news, so I’m thrilled to tell you that a grand jury has declined to indict Brittany Watts, the Ohio woman charged with ‘abuse of a corpse’ for flushing her miscarriage.

Brittany’s lawyer, Traci Timko, told The New York Times that when Brittany heard the news, she began to cry:

“It’s just been an emotional roller coaster that she has been on. I’m happy Brittany is able to now begin to heal through all of this and I hope and believe that her story is going to be an impetus for change.”

Continued: https://jessica.substack.com/p/no-indictment-for-brittany-watts

11.01.2024

What Are ‘Missed Period Pills,’ and How Do They Work?

Menstrual regulation—sometimes referred to as “missed period pills"—is a new front in women's battle for bodily autonomy. Here's how it works and what you need to know.

Dec 30, 2023

Cari Siestra first learned about menstrual regulation when they were working on the Myanmar-Thailand border. At the time, abortion was broadly criminalized in both countries. But if a person’s period was late, it was relatively easy to get access to pills that would induce menstruation in just a few days. In Bangladesh, where abortion is largely illegal, menstrual regulation is available up to 10 weeks after a missed period, and public health advocates routinely talk about it as a promising way to reduce maternal mortality and rates of unsafe abortion.

Menstrual regulation isn’t completely unknown in the United States. Melissa Grant, chief operations officer and cofounder of Carafem, recalls friends who would have their periods brought back through manual vacuum aspiration in the 1980s, when early pregnancy tests weren’t as common. But in recent years, it hasn’t been a widespread option, and for a while, Siestra wasn’t sure if there was a place for menstrual regulation in the US.

Continued: https://www.wired.com/story/missed-period-pills-menstrual-regulation-how-it-works/

Fear and confusion over abortion access persists as SCOTUS takes its first post-Dobbs case

Mifepristone will likely remain legal but could prove much harder to access. Legal and pharmaceutical experts have said this case could have far-reaching implications on approval for medications beyond abortion drugs.

by KELCIE MOSELEY-MORRIS AND SOFIA RESNICK
DECEMBER 19, 2023

This year will end on a major cliffhanger for abortion access.

Last November, anti-abortion activists via a powerful conservative Christian law firm asked a federal court to effectively ban or widely restrict the abortion drug mifepristone. Finally on Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take the case, making Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration the high court’s first abortion-related case since overturning the federal right to an abortion in June 2022.

Continued: https://www.thelundreport.org/content/fear-and-confusion-over-abortion-access-persists-scotus-takes-its-first-post-dobbs-case

USA – Could you go to prison for having a miscarriage?

Dec 8, 2023
Aisha Sultan, Columnist and features writer

Imagine dealing with the trauma of losing a pregnancy and facing a police investigation and criminal charges in the midst of your grief and devastation.

It seems like a dystopian nightmare. Why would a woman, already physically and emotionally wrecked, be put through this kind of cruelty by the state? It’s been happening more often than most people realize.

Continued: https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/column/aisha-sultan/sultan-could-you-go-to-prison-for-having-a-miscarriage/article_a5af41d0-9504-11ee-b4e8-33a37eee5d89.html