UK – Our hard-won rights are being erased one letter at a time

The US continues to roll back trans, gay and abortion rights, and the UK is not immune to any of it

Eva Wiseman
Sun 2 Mar 2025

I type this through nervous laughter but, haha, should we all be learning how to perform abortions? Just in case? Should we all perhaps, have a little stash of mifepristone in our makeup bags, a secret number in our phone? Something is happening in the US that requires our attention. Hard-earned rights are being erased and the speed at which history is being rewritten there does not bode well for our freedoms here. We are already seeing dark reflections in the glass. This month the Observer reported how British anti-abortion campaigners are echoing US vice-president JD Vance. He claimed our new buffer zone laws, preventing protests outside abortion clinics, were an attack on the “liberties of religious Britons”, shifting focus away from the reason they were implemented to a debate about freedom of speech.

Buffer zones (intended to protect staff and women using the clinics) are being targeted in a careful campaign by conservative Christian groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a group that wants to ban abortion, opposes same-sex marriage and, in the US, has helped at least 23 states pass legislation barring trans athletes from girls’ and women’s events as well as drafting legislation restricting gender-affirming treatment for minors. With only 1.4% of adolescents in the US identifying as transgender, LGBTQ+ rights groups accused the ADF of “whipping up a panic” over decisions better left to doctors, teachers and parents.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/mar/02/our-hard-won-rights-are-being-erased-one-letter-at-a-time

Abortion Prepping for the Trump Era

Preserving access to Plan B, misoprostol, and more isn’t just about stockpiling doses. It’s about building circles of trust.

Melissa Gira Grant
December 30, 2024

Trump’s return to the White House, accompanied by allies deeply hostile to anything related to reproductive and sexual health and rights, has sparked panic. As in late 2016 during the first Trump transition period, part of the problem is not knowing how far things could go. Checklists and tips are again circulating online, urging people to update the gender listed on government-issued identity documents, get an emergency supply of birth control pills or hormones, assemble an emergency folder of health documentation, buy a stash of Plan B, get an IUD before Inauguration Day. With access not only to abortion medication or hormones threatened but also a wide array of other drugs and vaccines, discourse over stockpiling medication—in case it becomes hard to access or is even taken off the market by a cowed Food and Drug Administration—has escalated, and in a way that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago.

Continued: https://newrepublic.com/article/189502/abortion-trump-era-plan-b-misoprostol

Rock v. Wade

Singing and abortion rights converge in 1972, a new rock opera from the musician and activist Chadwick Stokes, produced by Laurie David

By Elena Clavarino
December 14, 2024

The last time the rock musician Chadwick Stokes performed in a musical, he was in high school. Born in 1976, he wasn’t even alive when Roe v. Wade was decided, in 1973, and abortion became legal throughout the United States. Even so, Stokes has co-written 1972, a riveting rock opera about abortion.

“I’ve always played with the idea of doing a rock opera,” Stokes says over the phone from his home in the West Chop neighborhood of Tisbury, Massachusetts. And he always envisioned it involving freight trains. Growing up, Stokes jumped cargos across the country, once traveling to Denver to open for Rage Against the Machine.

Continued: https://airmail.news/issues/2024-12-14/rock-v-wade

14.12.2024

USA – The Truth About Jane

They were heroes, and human. They could be any of us.

Moira Donegan
Aug 19, 2024

“My fear was that an outsider would paint us as superheroes or Amazon warriors, as extraordinary,” writes Laura Kaplan, one of the members of the service known as Jane, in a 2019 preface to “The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service,” her exhaustive history of the Chicago feminist group that performed secret, illegal abortions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “This is the opposite of the truth and certainly the wrong message to send to a younger generation.”

In the intervening years, Jane members have taken on an unusually active role in shaping the historical understanding of their work, and this is why. Hero worship has a distancing effect: it makes the object seem far away, alien, even semi-divine. It makes the revered people’s lives, their personalities, seem unlike your own. But Jane, Kaplan says, was not some exceptional or otherworldly group. “We were ordinary women,” she insists. “I hope that everyone who reads this history will see herself in us and think: that could be me.”

Continued: https://jessica.substack.com/p/jane-chicago-abortion-history

Making Abortion Safe Outside of the Legal System: A Q&A on Self-Managed Abortion

Sociologist Naomi Braine’s new book on the global feminist movement for self-managed abortion took her to Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Europe to study activists’ work there.

FELICIA KORNBLUH
Jan 30, 2024

From 2017 to 2019, sociologist Naomi Braine, a professor at Brooklyn College, traveled in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Europe to study what she terms a global feminist movement for self-managed abortion (SMA). The result is her new book, Abortion Beyond the Law: Building a Global Feminist Movement for Self-Managed Abortion (Verso, 2023).

The story of self-managed abortion starts from the fact that, according to the Guttmacher Institute, at least half of all abortions around the world in 2017 were medication abortions, in which people used drugs to end their pregnancies. (The ambiguous legal status of abortion in many countries means that the data is incomplete.) This contrasts with the common image of so-called “procedural” abortion, which occurs under professional medical care and mostly or entirely in a clinic or hospital.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/self-managed-abortion-naomi-braine/

‘A story of revolutionary deep care’: revisiting the history of radical abortion defense

In the book Deep Care, historian Angela Hume offers lessons from generations of underground activists and clinicians who worked to protect abortion access

Adrian Horton
Mon 27 Nov 2023

In the run-up and year following the US supreme court’s reversal of Roe v Wade in June 2022, there emerged a narrative of return: that abortion in states where it was suddenly banned would revert to the underground. It would be a return to 1972, when diffuse, partially anonymous groups such as the Jane Collective, a secret network of abortion providers in Chicago immortalized in the documentary The Janes and in a feature film starring Elizabeth Banks, stood in for legal reproductive healthcare.

In reality, the end of Roe didn’t so much send the US back to a pre-1973 landscape of unsafe abortions, but toward a bleak and unprecedented future of criminalized pregnancy. And the abortion underground never disappeared under Roe, anyway. Far from it – in a new book, the feminist historian, critic and poet Angela Hume draws on dozens of interviews with former unlicensed abortion providers, community clinic workers and volunteer clinic defenders who together formed the vibrant, multi-pronged and under-sung radical edge of the abortion defense movement.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/27/deep-care-book-abortion

Ohio’s Issue 1: Three women share their pre-Roe abortion experiences

October 24, 2023
BY GINNY RICHARDSON

On Nov. 7, Ohioans will vote on Issue 1, which would establish a state constitutional right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions,” including decisions about abortion, contraception, fertility treatment, miscarriage care, and continuing pregnancy. Free access to birth control, including abortion when necessary, is a fundamental prerequisite to the emancipation of women and, therefore, all working people.

To contextualize this vote within the history of the struggle for reproductive rights, People’s World has collected three previously unpublished personal stories. Each one addresses an individual woman and her experience in obtaining reproductive care, as well as the impact of the prevailing laws at the time on her decisions and treatment.

Continued: https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/ohios-issue-1-three-women-share-their-pre-roe-abortion-experiences/

USA – These women ran an underground abortion network in the 1960s. Here’s what they fear might happen today

By Sandee LaMotte, CNN
Sun April 23, 2023

The voice on the phone in 1966 was gruff and abrupt: “Do you want the Chevy, the Cadillac or the Rolls Royce?”

A Chevy abortion would cost about $200, cash in hand, the voice explained. A Cadillac was around $500, and the Rolls Royce was $1,000.

“You can’t afford more than the Chevy? Fine,” the voice growled. “Go to this address at this time. Don’t be late and don’t forget the cash.” The voice disappeared.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/23/health/abortion-lessons-jane-wellness/index.html

USA – This activist’s life shows abortion access is not just a ‘white woman’s movement’

Marie Leaner was one of the few Black members of a covert abortion network active in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. On the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, she tells her story.

By Candace McDuffie
Tuesday, Jan. 31

In the late 1960s, Marie Leaner made a tough choice, one criticized by even her mother: to join a group known as the Jane Collective, a covert abortion network that helped women secure services on the South Side of Chicago in the late 1960s.

Born and raised in the Washington Park neighborhood, Leaner was one of the few Black members of the group, which used code names and various fronts — including Leaner’s own home — to provide safe abortions.

Continued: https://www.wbez.org/stories/marie-leaner-on-being-a-black-jane/af19365b-ea29-418e-8eb2-1c416f824dc1

31.01.2023

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Learning to Self-Manage Abortions Is Key in a Post-“Roe” Society

As we head into 2023, we face the collective challenge of working to normalize knowledge of self-managed abortions.

By Kelly Hayes , TRUTHOUT
December 31, 2022

For many of us, the fall of Roe v. Wade was one of the most devastating events of 2022. When Politico published a leaked draft of the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, I was deeply rattled. My intellectual awareness that such an outcome was likely, given the Republican’s seizure of the Supreme Court, had not prepared me emotionally for the sight of those hateful, arcane words. Like many people, I was overwhelmed by the impulse to do something useful. So, I trained to become an abortion doula, which means that, in addition to my work as a writer, organizer and podcaster, I also provide various forms of support to people who are seeking to end pregnancies. Through that work, and my coverage of abortion rights on “Movement Memos,” I have built relationships with some great people who are working to help folks around the country access abortions. About six months out from the fall of Roe, we all agree about one thing: We desperately need to normalize knowledge of self-managed abortion.

Continued: https://truthout.org/articles/learning-to-self-manage-abortions-is-key-in-a-post-roe-society/