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

The Abortion-Rights Message That Some Activists Hate

A devastating defeat in the Supreme Court could be a boon to the Democrats’ slim midterm hopes—if they can agree on the way to convert progressive anger into votes.

By Russell Berman
MAY 25, 2022

Democrats appear to have settled on their message for targeting these voters, judging by the ads that the party and its candidates have already produced in the three weeks since the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that would overturn the landmark 1973 ruling in Roe. An initial spot from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee opens on an image of matches about to be struck, with a narrator warning: “If Senate Republicans win in November, they will light women’s rights on fire.” Ads from Senators Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, two of the party’s most vulnerable incumbents up for reelection this year, home in on GOP proposals to “criminalize abortion” and ban the procedure with “no exception for rape, incest, or human trafficking.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/05/roe-overturn-abortion-democrat-midterm-elections/631647/

25.05.2022

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Amelia Bonow

Democrats messaging on abortion

The best way to protect abortion rights? Finalize the Equal Rights Amendment

BY KATE KELLY, Los Angeles Times
MAY 23, 2022

When Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973, it was rooted in rights that flow from privacy — not equality. As the country has now seen in the leaked Supreme Court draft ruling, that right to privacy is about to be demolished.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. bemoans in the draft opinion that Roe “was remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text,” basing the right to abortion on the right to privacy when neither is “mentioned” in the Constitution. While we can’t change the composition of the court poised to overturn Roe, we can change the text they are charged with interpreting. It’s time to finalize the Equal Rights Amendment and enshrine gender equality.

Continued: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-05-23/roe-abortion-equal-rights-amendment

SCOTUS quietly banned the abortion pill from mail — the only mail-in medication barred during the pandemic

Julia Naftulin
Feb 27, 2021

Last month, the Supreme Court voted to ban the abortion pill, which is used to induce a miscarriage in people who are up to 11 weeks pregnant, from mail order during the pandemic.

The move makes the abortion pill the only prescription medication to have such restrictions.

Continued: https://www.insider.com/scotus-ban-abortion-pill-mail-omen-for-roe-v-wade-2021-2