After Years of Silence, Texas Medical Board Issues Training for Doctors on How to Legally Provide Abortions

The course includes examples of when abortion is permitted to protect the life of the patient, but many experts say the complications women face in pregnancy are impossible to capture in a brief presentation.

by Cassandra Jaramillo, Kavitha Surana and Lizzie Presser – ProPublica
February 5, 2026

For the first time since Texas criminalized abortion, the state’s medical regulator is instructing doctors on when they can legally terminate a pregnancy to protect the life of the patient — guidance physicians have long sought as women died and doctors feared imprisonment for intervening.

The new training from the Texas Medical Board comes nearly five years after the state passed its strict abortion ban in 2021, threatening doctors with severe penalties. ProPublica’s reporting has shown that pregnancy became far more dangerous in the state after the law took effect: Sepsis rates spiked for women suffering a pregnancy loss, as did emergency room visits in which miscarrying patients needed a blood transfusion; at least four women in the state died after they didn’t receive timely reproductive care. More than a hundred OB-GYNs said the state’s abortion ban was to blame.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-medical-board-abortion-training-doctors

Anti-life: How U.S. abortion bans actually affect mothers and babies

Svetlana Bozrova
18 January 2026

In early December 2025, a law came into force in Texas banning the sale of medication abortion drugs to residents. Since the summer of 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to set their own reproductive legislation, Texas has become one of the country’s leaders when it comes to restrictions on abortion rights. As of today, the procedure is partially or fully banned in 14 states, leading to a rise in maternal and infant mortality. Experience from elsewhere in the world shows that criminalizing abortion does not increase birth rates, but it does create risks to women’s health and lives, making it harder for them to obtain legal medical care and forcing them to terminate pregnancies underground.

CONTENT:

A fundamental shift

Maternal mortality after abortion restrictions

Social inequality: who suffers most

Ideology versus statistics

Experience from elsewhere

Continued: https://theins.ru/en/society/288559

In Post-Roe America, Abortion Care Is Being Reborn From the Ground Up

A British doctor finds fear and legal chaos being transformed into a new, decentralized model of reproductive freedom

Sabrina Das
Jan 13, 2026

Along the broad, ceremonial expanse of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., its lanes framed by rows of evenly spaced trees, Amy Allina paused to remember how her career began. Years before she established herself as a consultant for reproductive rights nonprofits, she learned how to perform abortions with nothing more than a length of plastic tubing and a mason jar.

It was the early 1990s. She was part of a loose network of feminist health collectives — women who believed, with a conviction that feels almost radical now, that information belonged to everyone, especially when it concerned their bodies. A mentor taught her “menstrual extraction,” a low-tech method capable of removing the contents of the uterus in very early pregnancy. The procedure was performed in living rooms and kitchens, surrounded by friends. There were no machines, no metal instruments, no men in white coats.

Continued: https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/in-post-roe-america-abortion-care-is-being-reborn-from-the-ground-up/

13.01.2026

crisis pregnancy centers

Dr. Victoria Williams

self-managed abortion

Self-Managed Abortion; Safe and Supported project

shield laws

Spiritual Alliance of Communities for Reproductive Dignity

telemedicine abortion

Argentina – We Are All Belén

by Michelle Young
December 15, 2025

Belén (2025) is Argentina’s International Feature Film entry for the upcoming Oscars. The story is a true one, and it follows Belén, a pseudonym for a real woman who is falsely imprisoned for having an abortion, when she really had a miscarriage. Belén is held for over two years in Tucumán, Argentina, before being released in 2016. By telling her story, the film shows us a society that’s happy to predetermine a woman’s guilt when it comes to questions around abortion.

Unaware she’s pregnant, Belén goes to the hospital presenting with severe abdominal pain. The doctor determines she’s having a miscarriage at 22 weeks, which is considered the second trimester. It’s important to know that it’s entirely possible to be pregnant for this long and not know it – there’s even a term for it – a cryptic pregnancy.

Continued: https://latinamedia.co/belen/

Under Texas’ Abortion Ban, Where a Pregnant Woman Lives Can Determine Her Risk of Developing Sepsis

POLITICO - by Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser and Andrea Suozzo
May 7, 2025

Nearly four years ago in Texas, the state’s new abortion law started getting in the way of basic miscarriage care: As women waited in hospitals cramping, fluid running down their legs, doctors told them they couldn’t empty their uterus to guard against deadly complications.

The state banned most abortions, even in pregnancies that were no longer viable; then, it added criminal penalties, threatening to imprison doctors for life and punish hospitals. The law had one exception, for a life-threatening emergency.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-abortion-ban-sepsis-rates-dallas-houston

Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared.

ProPublica’s first-of-its-kind analysis is the most detailed look yet into a rise in life-threatening complications for women experiencing pregnancy loss under Texas’ abortion ban.

by Lizzie Presser, Andrea Suozzo, Sophie Chou and Kavitha Surana
Feb. 20, 2025

Pregnancy became far more dangerous in Texas after the state banned abortion in 2021, ProPublica found in a first-of-its-kind data analysis.

The rate of sepsis shot up more than 50% for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester, ProPublica found.

The surge in this life-threatening condition, caused by infection, was most pronounced for patients whose fetus may still have had a heartbeat when they arrived at the hospital.

https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-abortion-ban-sepsis-maternal-mortality-analysis

What to expect from Trump 2.0: The anti-rights brigade are now in power

We're hurtling into a dark period for abortion rights and beyond. Get out your flashlights

Dr Anu Kumar
20 January 2025

With Trump 2.0, the US enters a new era – one where people’s rights, particularly those of women and girls, LGBTQIA+ people, Black or brown people, or immigrants, are ignored, or worse, violated. Climate change is not a concern. Disinformation is rampant. Reproductive freedom, particularly the access to abortion, is radically curtailed, despite broad voter support.

Most of us are familiar with (and frankly, are already experiencing) the Project 2025 playbook, which calls for dismantling democratic norms in the US, unitary executive power, harsh Christian nationalism, a punitive approach to foreign assistance and multilateralism, and violations of human rights. We're hurtling into a dark period. Get out your flashlights.

Continued: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/trump-project-2025-abortion-rights-inauguration/

Are Abortion Bans Across America Causing Deaths? The States That Passed Them Are Doing Little to Find Out.

The same political leaders who enacted abortion bans oversee the state committees that review maternal deaths. These committees haven’t tracked the laws’ impacts, and most haven’t finished examining cases from the year the bans went into effect.

by Kavitha Surana, Mariam Elba, Cassandra Jaramillo, Robin Fields and Ziva Branstetter
Dec. 18, 2024

In states with abortion bans, ProPublica has found, pregnant women have bled to death, succumbed to fatal infections and wound up in morgues with what medical examiners recorded were “products of conception” still in their bodies.

These are the very kinds of cases state maternal mortality review committees are supposed to delve into, determining why they happened and how to stop them from happening again.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/abortion-bans-deaths-state-maternal-mortality-committees

A Woman Died After Being Told It Would Be a “Crime” to Intervene in Her Miscarriage at a Texas Hospital

Josseli Barnica is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped.

by Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana
Oct. 30, 2024

Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.

The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/josseli-barnica-death-miscarriage-texas-abortion-ban