USA – What Would It Mean to Defend All Abortions?

Democrats love to avoid it, and Republicans love to lie about it. But later-abortion care has never been more important.

Amy Littlefield
May 13, 2025

Ayana, 28 years old and 28 weeks pregnant, eases herself onto the procedure table at Partners in Abortion Care in College Park, Maryland. She is a Black woman with the tiny bearing and erect posture of a bird. Above her head, a flock of pink and blue butterflies decorates the ceiling. In a few minutes, a doctor will perform an injection to the fetal heart to end her pregnancy.

Ayana had spent months in turmoil over this abortion. As she chased after her two older kids while lugging her 1-year-old on family outings to the arcade and the movies, she tried to imagine hauling two car seats instead of one. While she changed her baby’s diapers, she thought about what a newborn would subtract from him. The family was already stretched thin.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/defending-all-abortions/

USA – Abortion Bans Upended Their Lives—Now They’re Fighting Back, One Story at a Time

Across the country, abortion storytellers are putting the struggle for reproductive freedom into powerful new words.

Regina Mahone, The Nation
April 7, 2025

Shanette Williams sat patiently on the stage of an auditorium in Austin, Texas, staring at the photograph of her daughter Amber that was resting in her lap. The photo appeared on the front of a rose-dappled pamphlet, below the words “Celebration of Life” and “September 16, 1993–August 19, 2022.”
Occasionally, Williams looked up, out past the audience of 200 or in the direction of the other women who shared the stage with her, each recounting the horrors they had experienced under new, extreme abortion bans. Then it was Williams’s turn to speak.

“Good morning, everyone,” she said. “My name is Shanette.”

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/abortion-in-america-storytelling/

The Hidden Majority: Indian Americans Support Abortion Rights—So Why Aren’t We Speaking Out?

Indian Americans widely support abortion rights, yet remain largely silent. It’s time to turn private beliefs into public advocacy and protect women’s autonomy.

1/21/2025
by Jaime Patel

On Jan. 22, we mark the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that affirmed a woman’s constitutional right to abortion. Yet, nearly two years after its reversal, reproductive rights remain under relentless attack—making this anniversary a sobering reminder of what’s at stake.

Indian Americans have built a reputation as one of the most successful and influential immigrant communities in the United States, celebrated for our dedication to education, hard work and family values. Yet, when it comes to reproductive rights, our community has largely remained silent, even as these rights come under increasing attack across the country. This silence, quite frankly, is no longer acceptable.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2025/01/21/indian-american-support-abortion/

21.01.2025

Commentary

Aruna Miller

Indian-Americans and abortion

Women’s Health Protection Act

United States

Activism

Human Rights

Biden declares Equal Rights Amendment adopted, sparking a debate about his abortion legacy

The move has no immediate legal force but will likely spark lawsuits that advocates hope will restore abortion rights.

By Alice Miranda Ollstein
01/17/2025

President Joe Biden’s Friday announcement declaring the Equal Rights Amendment part of the U.S. Constitution is reviving long-simmering tensions in the abortion-rights movement about the outgoing president’s legacy on reproductive rights.

The last-minute move, three days before the end of Biden’s term, has sparked arguments between Biden’s defenders and his detractors over its significance, since even the White House acknowledged the announcement does not have the force of law. And the president’s declaration is also fueling a broader debate about whether Biden did enough to prepare for and respond to the fall of Roe v. Wade.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/17/biden-era-abortion-legacy-00199115

USA – Harris hoped to ride abortion to another post-Dobbs Democratic victory. It didn’t work.

The issue failed to stop Donald Trump, who on Tuesday overcame a large gender gap — and Democrats’ relentless focus on women’s reproductive health — to win back the White House.

By Alice Miranda Ollstein and Megan Messerly
Nov 6, 2024

Abortion has haunted Republicans since the fall of Roe v. Wade. But the issue failed to stop former President Donald Trump, who on Tuesday overcame a large gender gap — and Democrats’ relentless focus on women’s reproductive health — to win back the White House.

With message discipline that often eluded other parts of his campaign, Trump and his allies positioned themselves as moderates on abortion, arguing the issue should be left to states, pledged to veto a national abortion ban should it reach his desk, pitched government support for in-vitro fertilization and other reproductive health services, and promised to be a champion for women. These attempts to neutralize an issue that has dogged Republicans since Roe’s fall in 2022 helped Trump notch a clear victory against Vice President Kamala Harris with an electorate angry over the economy, inflation and immigration bent on punishing the party in power.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/06/abortion-trump-2024-00187825

Inside the Harris campaign strategy linking abortion and freedom

The messaging is part of an effort to pick up conservative and independent voters in purple and red states in the wake of the end of federal abortion rights.

Jennifer Gerson
November 4, 2024

Speaking to voters in Malvern, Pennsylvania, last month, former Rep. Liz Cheney — a noted anti-abortion Republican — said that the current state of abortion bans was “not sustainable” and needed to be rethought.

“I think that there are many of us around the country who have been pro-life, but who have watched what’s going on in our states since the Dobbs decision, and have watched state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need. I think this is an issue that we’re not seeing break down across party lines,” said Cheney, campaigning alongside Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2024/11/harris-abortion-freedom-campaign-strategy/

Trump’s Abortion Policy Could Go Global

In this year’s U.S. election, abortion is also a top foreign-policy issue.

By Jodi Enda, the Washington bureau chief and senior correspondent for The Fuller Project.
November 1, 2024

Less than two weeks before his 2020 election defeat, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration rolled out a document that purported to promote women’s health and rights while declaring that there was “no international right to abortion.”

“It’s the first time that a multilateral coalition has been built around the issue of defending life,” then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at a signing ceremony, conducted virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic. Brazil, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia, and Uganda joined the United States in sponsoring the nonbinding directive, called the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family. Another 28 countries, many with authoritarian governments that repress women’s rights, signed it.

Continued https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/11/01/trumps-abortion-policy-could-go-global/

Abortion Access for U.S. Immigrants

A reproductive epidemiologist explores the barriers and gateways to abortion access for U.S. immigrants

by Vida Foubister
October 28, 2024

During and for two hours immediately following the presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump in September, abortion was the most searched topic online, according to an analysis by New York University researchers. Not surprisingly, immigration came in second.

As Heidi E. Jones, a reproductive epidemiologist, and her co-authors noted in a recent Journal of Migration and Health article titled "Abortion Care Access and Experience Among U.S. Immigrants: A Systematic Review," "The geopolitical intersection between immigration and abortion policy makes this a particularly salient issue." With the election only weeks away, Think Global Health reached out to Jones to discuss the findings of her study and strategies she believes can help ensure greater abortion access among immigrant populations.

Continued: https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/abortion-access-us-immigrants

28.10.2024

immigrants and abortion

USA – Experts explain how abortion ban exceptions for rape and incest are inaccessible in practice

By Lauren Mascarenhas, CNN
Sat October 19, 2024

“When I was 5, I began getting sexually abused by my stepfather, and he got me pregnant when I was 12,” Hadley Duvall says in a new campaign ad released by Vice President Kamala Harris Thursday.

Duvall, a rape survivor turned reproductive rights advocate, has been featured in several high-profile campaign ads and spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. She has recounted the harrowing pattern of abuse that resulted in her pregnancy as a child in Kentucky, and the options she had about what to do with that pregnancy.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/19/us/abortion-ban-states-rape-exception/index.html

Sally Field Details Her ‘Traumatic’ and ‘Hideous’ Illegal Abortion From 1964 to Urge Voters to Elect Kamala Harris: ‘We Can’t Go Back’

By Zack Sharf
Oct 7, 2024

Sally Field posted a video to Instagram in which she remembered the “hideous” and “traumatic” illegal abortion she underwent in 1964 before her Hollywood acting career took off. The Oscar winner first wrote about the abortion in her 2018 memoir “In Pieces,” but she revived the story ahead of the upcoming presidential election as a call for voters to elect Kamala Harris.

“I’ve been so hesitant to do this, to tell my horrific story,” Field wrote in the caption to the video. “It was during a time even worse than now. A time when contraception was not readily available and only if you were married. But I feel that so many women of my generation went through similar, traumatic events and I feel stronger when I think of them. I believe, like me, they must want to fight for their grandchildren and all the young women of this country.”

Continued: https://variety.com/2024/film/news/sally-field-abortion-story-kamala-harris-support-1236169893/

07.10.2024