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 Insidious Legal Movement to Make Pregnant Women Second-Class Citizens Is Growing

And the Supreme Court may only fuel it.

BY JILL FILIPOVIC
MAY 13, 2024

Should the very state of being pregnant place women in a subclass of citizen, vulnerable to criminal prosecution or civil penalties for behavior that would be perfectly legal from a nonpregnant person? Judging by their proposed legislation and various legal antics, the anti-abortion movement says: Yes. Pregnant women simply should not have the same rights as any other U.S. citizen.

Take, for example, efforts to criminalize the crossing of state lines for abortion. There is a very, very long tradition in the U.S. of allowing people to travel out of state to access medical care, and it’s so deeply ingrained we barely think about it.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/abortion-pregnancy-law-emtala-scotus-medical-care.html

13.05.2024

Opinion

Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act

Jill Filipovic

Jonathan Mitchell

women as second-class citizens

Abortion Bans Are Empowering Abusive Men—and Prominent ‘Pro-Life’ Activists Are Representing Them

Murder is a leading cause of death for pregnant women. The anti-abortion movement wants to hand more power to abusive men anyway.

May 8, 2024
by JILL FILIPOVIC

The way abortions bans are designed and written allow for all kinds of horrors: women losing their organs, women bleeding out without help, women losing their lives. But they’re also written to empower abusive men. After all, the very foundation of an abortion ban is an assumption that a woman’s body does not belong to her. Abusive men agree. And so it’s perhaps not a huge surprise that several men have indeed taken advantage of these laws in an effort to control their ex partners. And it’s also not particularly surprising—although it is appalling—that they’ve found support and legal representation from some of the most powerful people in the U.S. anti-abortion movement.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2024/05/08/abortion-bans-violence-against-women-ex-boyfriend-husband-abuse/

USA – The Anti-Abortion Movement Is Coming for Fertility Treatments

An Alabama court may have just ended IVF in the state—opening up the whole IVF process to politically-motivated legal scrutiny and penalty.

2/20/2024
by JILL FILIPOVIC

The availability of in-vitro fertilization in Alabama may now be in question after the state’s Supreme Court ruled that embryos kept in clinic freezers are considered persons under the law, and protected by the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. It’s a shocking and jarring decision that radically extends the bounds of legal personhood, tosses any claims to originalism aside, and seems primed to make a variety of fertility treatments either extremely costly for patients, or extremely legally risky for clinicians.

If you want a sense of just how overtly theocratic the opposition to abortion and IVF are, I invite you to read the dissent in the Alabama decision, which was penned by the court’s chief justice and is a really really long argument that can be basically summed up as: “God said so.” So that’s who’s leading the court in Alabama.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2024/02/20/fertility-ivf-alabama-supreme-court-anti-abortion/

French women got a wakeup call on abortion rights from their US sisters

Opinion by Jill Filipovic
Thu February 1, 2024

It’s a strange moment to be an American feminist who cares deeply about women’s rights beyond her own country’s borders.

On one hand, there is so much to be heartened by: expansions of women’s rights in much of the world, feminist protests galvanizing women across continents, abortion rights on the rise, necessary attention paid to the particular price paid by women in conflict. And then there is our own country, one of the very few where abortion rights have been radically scaled back rather than expanded, where anti-feminist movements are quickly racking up (often unpopular) wins and broadening their efforts to wind back women’s progress and where a large chunk of the electorate is eager to put a notoriously sexist man found liable for sexual abuse back into the highest office in the land.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/01/opinions/abortion-rights-france-constitution-filipovic/index.html

01.02.2024

Opinion

French National Assembly

USA – The right-wing’s opposition to abortion is not about saving or protecting women lives

by Jill Filipovic
November 1, 2023

A year and a half after Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped the constitutional right to abortion from American women, the Republican Party has been floundering.

It turns out that the American public is broadly pro-choice, according to a CNN poll from August, and many voters are horrified by the predictable results of abortion bans: child rape victims unable to end dangerous pregnancies in their home states, women nearly dying of treatable pregnancy complications, mothers with much-wanted but tragically doomed pregnancies being denied the ability to choose how those pregnancies end.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/01/opinions/over-the-counter-birth-control-gop-filipovic/index.html

01.11.2023

Opinion

Affordable Care Act

birth control pills over the counter

coverage of birth control

Food and Drug Administration

Florida calls teen ‘too immature’ for an abortion. But forced motherhood is fine?

Jill Filipovic
hu 18 Aug 2022

A Florida court has held that a pregnant and parentless 16-year-old is not mature enough to have an abortion – but is, apparently, mature enough to raise a child after being forced into childbirth by the state.

This case illustrates the utter absurdity and deep cruelty of parental consent laws, which are in place in 21 states. While parental consent laws seem reasonable enough on their face – who wouldn’t want to know if their child was having an abortion? – they are in practice alternately duplicative or dangerous. If a parent is supportive of their child’s bodily autonomy and has raised that child into a thoughtful, mature teenager, that teenager will either feel comfortable telling their parents about an unplanned pregnancy, or will have the ability and wherewithal to make their own decision and get themselves to an abortion provider. If a parent is abusive or unsupportive of their child’s basic rights, why should the state put young people at risk by requiring that their parents be notified?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/18/florida-teen-abortion-forced-motherhood

18.08.2022

Featured

Opinion

anti-choice cruelty

anti-choice extremism

anti-choice hatred

anti-choice misogyny

Jill Filipovic

judicial bypass for minors

parental consent l aws

GOP delays coronavirus bill in part over complaints that it doesn’t bar federal funds for abortion

GOP delays coronavirus bill in part over complaints that it doesn't bar federal funds for abortion
"Very on-brand for pro-lifers to refuse to save a whole bunch of lives," feminist writer Jill Filipovic says

Igor Derysh
March 12, 2020

The White House and congressional Republicans refused to support House Democrats' coronavirus relief bill, in part over claims that it does not safeguard against federal funds being used to provide abortions.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., announced Thursday that the Senate will not go on its scheduled recess next week to continue negotiations on the legislation. The announcement came after McConnell rejected the bill proposed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., calling it an "ideological wish list." President Donald Trump also objected to what he claimed were Democratic "goodies" in the bill.

Continued: https://www.salon.com/2020/03/12/gop-delays-coronavirus-bill-in-part-over-complaints-that-it-doesnt-bar-federal-funds-for-abortion/

USA – Adoption of separated migrant kids shows ‘pro-life’ groups’ disrespect for maternity

Adoption of separated migrant kids shows 'pro-life' groups' disrespect for maternity

Jill Filipovic
Wed 30 Oct 2019

The shadow of Trump’s family separation policy is long. In its darkness: children who were ripped away from their parents, now being adopted out to American families. All with the help of those who claim to stand up for children because they are “pro-life”.

An Associated Press investigation earlier this month found that children across the country are being stripped from their parents and handed over to new families, who are able to petition for custody of them – and that state court judges can grant that custody without notifying the children’s parents. Thanks to a hastily implemented family separation policy, there are hundreds of migrant children in foster care or detention centers whose parents undoubtedly want them. But if their parents have been deported, reunification is more difficult – especially if more-powerful American foster parents decide they want to keep the child they are supposed to be temporarily caring for.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/30/adoption-separated-migrant-children-pro-lifers-deep-disrespect-for-maternity?wpisrc=nl_todayworld&wpmm=1

Trump’s anti-abortion agenda emboldened an all-out war on women’s rights in dozens of states

Trump's anti-abortion agenda emboldened an all-out war on women's rights in dozens of states
Pro-lifers think they now have the Supreme Court votes to overturn Roe v. Wade. And they're setting up the legal fights to get there.

April 15, 2019
By Jill Filipovic

It’s been a rough two years for reproductive rights. Since Donald Trump took office, a series of attacks on both abortion and contraception have come from the state and federal levels. A re-emboldened anti-abortion movement has emerged, and they’re gunning for major legal changes — and, they hope, a Supreme Court that would overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion broadly legal across the United States.

What triggered this shift? Trump’s Supreme Court judges — including, most recently, Brett Kavanaugh. How appropriate that opponents of a woman’s right to decide what happens to her body have decided that their best hope is in a Supreme Court made more conservative by a judge accused of sexual assault.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-anti-abortion-agenda-emboldened-all-out-war-women-ncna994661