In Abortion Ban States, Women Get Second-Class Healthcare—Across All Specialties

Physicians across specialties, from oncology to dermatology, report that abortion bans are undermining patient care.

11/18/2025
by Shoshanna Ehrlich

In the wake of the Dobbs decision, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) issued a press release pinpointing with prescient accuracy that it would “trigger nothing short of a public health crisis, exacerbate existing health disparities, and further endanger already marginalized populations most.” The U.S. was now in “clear violation of international law and globally recognized health and human rights standards.”

In the years following Roe‘s overturn, PHR has issued state-specific research briefs on the harms of abortion bans. It has also worked to “empower clinicians and advocates to speak out against the human rights violations occurring under these draconian laws.”

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2025/11/18/abortion-bans-impact-oncology-dermatology-healthcare/

18.11.2025

Commentary

“Cascading Harms: How Abortion Bans Lead to Discriminatory Care Across Medical Specialties

Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization

Physicians for human Rights

USA – An Open Letter to Rep. Kat Cammack From a Medical Doctor: It’s Abortion Bans That Make Doctors Afraid to Act, Not ‘the Radical Left’

July 10, 2025
by Chloe Nazra Lee

I remember the day I heard about Dobbs. It was a summer morning during my final year of medical school. I’d awakened in the damp basement apartment I’d rented for a clinical rotation in Pittsburgh. As I scrolled through my news feed, my heart plummeted. There was a resigned and tacitly understood melancholy among the women in the hospital that day. A sisterhood predicated on shared despair was quietly forming during the upheaval of perceived judicial betrayal. Even those of us who barely knew each other might wearily exchange passing glances in the hallway, signaling, “Well, shit. Girl, I know. And it’ll only get worse.”

No woman may escape the cruelty of the nebulous and varying restrictions on reproductive healthcare in the post-Roe world—as Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) discovered in May 2024 when faced with a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy shortly after Florida’s six-week abortion ban took effect.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2025/07/10/rep-kat-cammack-medical-doctor-abortion-bans-that-doctors-afraid-act/

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/

Florida’s abortion ban has an exception for fatal fetal anomalies. So why was this woman forced to go to Virginia?

In November, Florida voters will have a chance to codify abortion rights. It could be the only way that people with medically complex pregnancies could access the procedure in the state.

Shefali Luthra, Reproductive Health Reporter
October 15, 2024

Emily Friend decided to paint the nursery a delicate green. She had originally settled on purple — gentle and welcoming, a color she hoped would make her baby feel at home. But Friend, who lives between Arcadia and Port Charlotte, in Southwest Florida, couldn’t find room furnishings to match the hue. So she and her boyfriend decided on a delicate green that felt joyful, perfect even if it wasn’t their first choice.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2024/10/floridas-abortion-ban-fetal-anomalies/

Idaho – When “abortion travel” becomes a nightmare: A tale of no good choices

She wanted a baby — but her fetus had no chance of survival. How Idaho's abortion laws led to devastating trauma

By NICOLE KARLIS
JUNE 12, 2024

Rebecca Vincen-Brown was still in her first trimester of pregnancy, in the late fall of 2022, when things started to go wrong. She had blood drawn for a standard genetic test called noninvasive prenatal testing, or NIPT, which can detect increased risks for various chromosomal disorders. The results of the test took slightly longer than normal to come back, and when they did, Vincen-Brown received a troubling phone call: The test was “inconclusive” because not enough fetal DNA was detected in her blood.

NIPT cannot diagnose fetal disorders conclusively, but the possibilities were troubling: Her fetus might have triploidy, trisomy 13 or trisomy 18, rare and serious genetic conditions involving either an extra set of chromosomes or an extra copy of one chromosome. While the specifics vary, most infants born with these conditions will live only days or weeks, and almost none will survive to adulthood.

Continued: https://www.salon.com/2024/06/12/when-abortion-travel-becomes-a-nightmare-a-tale-of-no-good-choices/

Tennessee woman denied abortion after fetus’ ‘brain not attached’ slams state ban

State lawmakers ‘don’t see the mourning and the grieving that these moms’ experience after getting a heartbreaking diagnosis, Breanna Cecil tells Kelly Rissman

May 13, 2024

A Tennessee woman who was denied an abortion despite a fatal abnormality says the state’s anti-abortion laws resulted in her losing an ovary, a fallopian tube and her hopes for a large family.

“The state of Tennessee took my fertility from me,” Breanna Cecil, 34, told The Independent. She added that state lawmakers “took away my opportunity to have a family like my own biological family because of these horrible laws that they put in place.”

Continued: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/tennessee-denied-abortion-ban-lawsuit-b2529144.html

USA – Patients are being denied emergency abortions. Courts can only do so much.

Doctors say they fear that following their medical judgment could cost them their license or land them in jail.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and MEGAN MESSERLY
04/23/2024

Every state abortion ban has an exception to save a mother’s life. But what qualifies as a life-threatening medical emergency in Texas may not be enough for a doctor in Idaho, and even hospitals within the same state can look at an identical case and reach different conclusions.

The legal and medical murkiness has physicians around the country begging state officials to clarify when they can terminate pregnancies without risking legal peril. And as they await guidance from states, stories of pregnant patients turned away from hospitals in medical emergencies or forced to wait until their vitals crash have become emblematic of the confusion unleashed when the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision ended the federal right to an abortion in 2022.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/23/doctors-abortion-medical-exemptions-00153317

The Biggest Thing Missing From Joe Biden’s State of the Union

BY DAVID S. COHEN, GREER DONLEY, AND RACHEL REBOUCHE
MARCH 08, 2024

On Thursday night, President Joe Biden gave an energetic and compelling State of the Union address that centered reproductive freedom. It was the second topic he addressed, behind only threats to democracy, abroad with Putin and at home with Trump. In turning to reproductive rights, Biden was able to showcase the powerful stories of his invited guests, like Kate Cox and Latorya Beasley, to underscore the real harms of anti-abortion policies.

There was a lot to appreciate in his speech, but there were missed opportunities. Reproductive rights and justice advocates immediately noticed that Biden did not say the word “abortion”—a recurring issue for the president. But we noticed the omission of another word, which we think is possibly even more significant given the coming election: Comstock.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/abortion-comstock-act-joe-biden-state-of-the-union.html

USA – What It Takes to Claw Back Abortion Rights in Court

Feb 19, 2024
By Andrea González-Ramírez, the Cut

Any day now, the Texas Supreme Court is expected to issue its ruling on Zurawski v. State of Texas, the first-of-its-kind legal challenge brought forward last year by 20 women who say that they were denied abortion care in the face of severe and dangerous pregnancy complications. The case seeks to clarify what circumstances qualify as medical emergencies under the state’s three overlapping abortion bans, which threaten providers with up to life in prison, in addition to a civil penalty of no less than $100,000.

Molly Duane, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, came up with the case’s legal strategy and has since filed similar lawsuits in Idaho and Tennessee. … “Brittany Watts, Kate Cox — these are not isolated incidents,” she says. “The cruelty, the confusion, the absolute terror that is pervasive throughout the medical community and is impacting patients every single day, all that was by design.” I talked to Duane about the reasoning behind this focus on medical exceptions and the long game that is trying to claw back some abortion rights through the courts.

Continued: https://www.thecut.com/article/zurawski-v-texas-and-clawing-back-abortion-rights-in-court.html

Maryland – A safe haven for late abortions

At a clinic in Maryland, desperate patients arrive from all over the country to terminate their pregnancies.

Photographs by Maggie Shannon
February 5, 2024

For several years, Morgan Nuzzo, a nurse-midwife, and her friend and colleague Diane Horvath, an ob-gyn, talked about opening a clinic that would provide abortions in all trimesters of pregnancy. In May, 2022, the draft opinion of the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade was leaked, infusing their plan with fresh urgency. The women had launched a GoFundMe campaign earlier that spring, noting that stand-alone clinics made up the majority of providers offering abortion after fifteen weeks, and that many of these had closed in recent years. Within weeks, Nuzzo and Horvath had raised more than a hundred thousand dollars; that summer, they started training employees for the new clinic, Partners in Abortion Care, in College Park, Maryland. They saw their first patient that October, and by the end of 2023 they had treated nearly five hundred. The youngest was eleven years old, the oldest fifty-three.

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/12/a-safe-haven-for-late-abortions