Call the Midwife is a look at life for women when there’s no abortion, contraception care

by Suzanne Rent, Halifax Examiner
April 7, 2025

Sometimes a work of fiction is just the taste of reality a world in crisis needs.

I thought that last week when I was catching up on some episodes of the British series Call the Midwife, which I just discovered last year, even though the show is heading into its 14th season.

If you don’t know, Call the Midwife is a British period drama about a group of nurse midwives working in the East End of London. Some of the nurse midwives are also sisters in the Anglican religious order. They all live together the fictional Nonnatus House in a real-life East End neighbourhood called Poplar.

Continued: https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/morning-file/call-the-midwife-is-a-look-at-life-for-women-when-theres-no-abortion-contraception-care/

07.04.2025

Film, Art, Books

Call the Midwife

Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950s

Trump’s win spells disaster for abortion rights

I’ve spent years tracking the far right attack on reproductive rights. Here’s what Trump’s win means for abortion.

Sian Norris
6 November 2024

Trump is heading back to the White House and the consequences for reproductive health in both the USA and globally are catastrophic.

When Trump first came to power in 2016, it provided Christian nationalists with what the author Anne Appelbaum described as their “biblical moment”. This was their unique opportunity to push forward their project and to fulfil their desired policies – to ban abortion, to roll back LGBTIQ rights, and to protect whiteness in America.

Continued: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/trump-abortion-rights-catastrophe/

USA – Abortion Bans Are Designed to Kill

'Pro-family’ politicians and lobbyists spent years carefully, strategically, and callously planning for our deaths

Jessica Valenti
Oct 15, 2024

I watched a movie recently about men who got away with horribly abusing women by erasing their memories. These men told themselves and their victims that it was better to forget—why relive the trauma? As if erasing the abuse was some favor they were doing for the women, rather than a transparent move to avoid responsibility.

I couldn’t help but think about what’s happening right now, in these critical weeks before the election, as Republican legislators work so hard to make women forget the horrors we’ve endured over the last two plus years. Anything to avoid responsibility for the nightmare they spent five decades creating.

Continued: https://jessica.substack.com/p/abortion-bans-are-designed-to-kill

15.10.2024

The Anti-Abortion Movement Is Relentless. But So Is Jessica Valenti.

She once worried there wouldn’t be enough abortion news to cover. Now she’s just trying to keep up.

Ruth Murai
Oct 8, 2024

“Today’s newsletter will probably overwhelm you,” Jessica Valenti wrote in a note preceding the Wednesday, September 25, edition of Abortion, Every Day, the Substack where she breaks down the news on reproductive rights. The first order of business: an explanation of how a powerful anti-abortion group is directing an ad campaign that blames pro-choice advocates for the deaths of Candi Miller and Amber Nicole Thurman. Miller and Thurman were two Georgia women who, according to a ProPublica investigation, died because of the state abortion ban. “Honestly, how dare they,” Valenti wrote. “How dare they use these women’s names; how dare they use their pictures. It’s just beyond the pale.”

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/10/jessica-valenti-abortion-book-profile/

Jessica Valenti Says Her Work on Abortion Isn’t “Preaching to the Choir.” It’s Arming It.

In an interview with Vanity Fair about her new book, Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win, Valenti discusses whom she’s writing to, how the right is forecasting its next move, and why she’s never bought into the mainstream framing of abortion rights.

By Katie Herchenroeder, Vanity Fair
October 1, 2024

Jessica Valenti writes and talks about abortion like someone who thinks about it for dozens of hours every week—because she does.

For around two years—since the fall of Roe—Valenti has been writing about reproductive justice every day in her newsletter, aptly titled Abortion, Every Day. But, in her new book, Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win, she jokes that she could have called the newsletter Abortion, Every Hour, because “that’s how quickly things are moving in post-Roe America.”

Continued: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/jessica-valenti-says-her-work-on-abortion-isnt-preaching-to-the-choir-its-arming-it

01.10.2024

EXCLUSIVE: Here’s the Anti-Abortion Group Pulling Trump’s Strings

New documents show where Trump's 'post-birth' abortion lie comes from

Jessica Valenti
Sep 24, 2024

When Donald Trump claims that Democrats support ‘post-birth’ abortion—a noxious and dangerous lie that he’s repeated countless times on the campaign trail—the assumption has largely been that this is just ‘Trump being Trump.’ After all, we’re used to seeing the disgraced former president make up extreme stories to sow disinformation and distract from his incompetence.

But Trump’s horrific talking point that states are “executing babies” isn’t some wild off-the-cuff claim from a habitual liar. Instead, it’s a carefully crafted message fed to Trump by a powerful anti-abortion organization that positions itself as mainstream and credible. And Abortion, Every Day has the documents to prove it.

Continued: https://jessica.substack.com/p/exclusive-heres-the-anti-abortion

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

Florida Supreme Court Rules on Abortion

The Court allows 6-week ban & for voters to decide in November

JESSICA VALENTI
APR 01, 2024

The Florida Supreme Court came down with two abortion rulings today, one good and one very, very bad.

The Ron DeSantis-packed Court ruled that privacy protections in the Florida constitution don’t apply to abortion—undoing decades of precedent. A response to a challenge against the state’s 15-week ban, this decision means that a newer, 6-week ban—one that DeSantis signed into law last April—will go automatically into effect within 30 days. As we know, a 6-week ban in practice is not that different from a total ban.

Continued: https://jessica.substack.com/p/breaking-florida-supreme-court-rules

USA – Study: Abortion Bans Creating OBGYN Crisis

Docs in anti-choice states are depressed, scared, and getting worse

JESSICA VALENTI
FEB 1, 2024

A new study shows that abortion bans have created an “occupational health crisis” for OBGYNs in anti-choice states, 93% of whom report that they or a colleague have been unable to follow standards of care because of abortion laws.

Researchers from Harvard’s School of Public Health, Boston College, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, report “deep and pervasive impacts” not just on patient outcomes—but physicians’ own health, and on state workforce sustainability.

Continued: https://jessica.substack.com/p/study-abortion-bans-creating-obgyn

01.02.2024

Commentary

Jessica Valenti

mental health and abortion

mental health crisis for abortion providers

occupational health crisis for Ob/Gyns

State Democrats are leading on abortion policy. D.C. Democrats don’t want to get left behind.

Democrats in Washington want to show voters they're working on abortion rights ahead of the 2024 election, with most of the action in the states.

Jan. 18, 2024
By Julie Tsirkin and Kate Santaliz

WASHINGTON — After several successful state efforts to codify abortion access, Democrats are marking the 51st anniversary of the defunct Roe v. Wade ruling with an all-out reproductive freedom campaign — in an election year when abortion rights could once again help determine the balance of power in Washington.

Senate Democrats held a briefing on abortion access Wednesday focusing on the impact of state abortion bans. More than half of the Democratic caucus, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, heard from and questioned medical professionals and experts.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/state-democrats-are-leading-abortion-policy-dc-democrats-dont-want-get-rcna128932

18.01.2024