Meet the Mexican women smuggling abortion pills into the US

The right to abortion is becoming one of the defining issues of the upcoming US presidential election. With abortion banned in 14 US states, activists from neighbouring Mexico have mobilised to distribute abortion pills to American women.

4 August 2024
By Sara Tomevska

At the highly policed border crossing between Mexico and California, an organised drug smuggling operation is underway.

The drug in question? Abortion pills.

Mexican activist Crystal waits up to four hours a day to bring the pills across the border, where they're mailed to thousands of American women in states where abortion – once a constitutional right – is now a crime.

Continued: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/dateline/article/meet-the-mexican-women-smuggling-abortion-pills-into-the-us/hqpnakc6a

04.08.2024

Commentary

abortion pills from Mexico

Las Libres

Mark Lee Dickson

Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn

self-managed abortion

The Zombie Law Trump Wants to Use to Ban Abortion Nationwide

Members of the former president’s inner circle are worried that he’ll blab about their plan to gut what remains of our reproductive freedoms.

Melissa Gira Grant
February 20, 2024

Donald Trump’s lawyer really, really hopes that Donald Trump doesn’t blow up their plan to ban abortion nationally by talking about it publicly before the election—at least according to the aforementioned Trump lawyer, speaking to The New York Times. Why Jonathan Mitchell, the conservative attorney from Texas, would boast in a national newspaper about a plan that he also supposedly hopes doesn’t become a campaign issue is unclear. Why he is using an open media channel to muse about what his client may or may not know is equally strange and confusing. But the headline here seems to be “Donald Trump backs a national abortion ban,” though possibly for reasons of which he’s yet to be apprised.

Continued: https://newrepublic.com/article/179137/trump-comstock-national-abortion-ban

USA -Volunteer pilots give flight to women needing abortion

Texas Public Radio | By David Martin Davies, Kayla Padilla
December 28, 2023
LISTEN • 4:16

Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Texas made obtaining an abortion virtually impossible. For a state as large as Texas, getting to where abortion is legal can be the challenge.

But volunteer pilots are giving flight to women in need of abortion care.

Bart — not his real name — rolls back the hanger door where his plane sits.

Continued; https://www.tpr.org/public-health/2023-12-28/volunteer-pilots-give-flight-to-women-needing-abortion

28.12.2023

News

Elevated Access

flying abortion patients

How Texas Plans to Trap Abortion Seekers

Anti-abortion activists and elected officials hope to keep abortion seekers walled in within the borders of their home states.

9/13/2023
by SHOSHANNA EHRLICH, Ms. Magazine

In 1991, Kathrin K. and her husband were stopped by German border guards as they crossed back into the country on their way home from neighboring Holland on the suspicion they were carrying illegal drugs. Instead of drugs, however, the guards found “incriminating evidence”—specifically, a plastic bag containing a nightgown, sanitary pad and towels. These items suggested that Kathrin had crossed the border into Holland to obtain an abortion—a crime under German law, even if legal where performed. She was transported to a nearby hospital and subjected to a degrading forced vaginal exam.

It is difficult for me to imagine a day when guards are stationed at the Texas-New Mexico border, or along travel routes leading from an abortion ban state into a protective one, with the power to detain those transporting pregnant persons suspected of seeking cross-border abortion services. And yet, on my more cynical or despairing days, I wonder, given the latest plan by Mark Lee Dickson, a pastor at Sovereign Love Church in East Texas, aimed at halting so-called abortion trafficking, if this dystopic vision of intrastate abortion border guards might someday become a reality.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2023/09/13/texas-abortion-travel-ban-sanctuary-city/

Anti-choice states aren’t satisfied. Now they want to punish traveling for abortions

A husband who doesn’t want his wife to get an abortion could sue the friend who offered to drive her, according to this legislation’s own architect

Moira Donegan
Tue 12 Sep 2023

How free can any woman be in a country where her right to control her body and family depends on the jurisdiction where she happens to live? Republicans are looking to find out. Over the past few weeks, as Republican officials in anti-choice states seek to make their abortion bans enforceable and compel women into childbirth, a new front has opened up in the abortion wars: roads. The anti-choice movement, through a series of inventive legal theories and cynical legislative maneuvers, is now attacking women’s right to travel.

In a court filing last month, the Alabama attorney general, Steve Marshall, wrote that he believed his office had a right to prosecute those who help women travel across state lines in search of an abortion. The filing comes in a lawsuit from two women’s health clinics and an abortion fund, which sued Marshall after he publicly stated his intention to criminally investigate organizations like theirs, which provide financial and logistical help to pregnant patients seeking to leave the state. In his response, Marshall unequivocally stated that Alabama, which bans all abortions with no rape or incest exemption, views any effort to help women cross state lines as a “criminal conspiracy”.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/12/anti-choice-states-arent-satisfied-now-they-want-to-punish-traveling-for-abortions

12.09.2023

traveling for abortion

The unconstitutional plan to stop women from traveling out of state for an abortion, explained

The age of travel bans is now upon us.

By Ian Millhiser

Sep 12, 2023

More than a year ago, anti-abortion activists appeared eager to prohibit anyone seeking an abortion in a state where it is banned from traveling to another state where it is legal. Indeed, many lawmakers appeared so eager to enact such travel bans that Justice Brett Kavanaugh, of all people, attempted to cut off these laws before they could be enacted.

“May a State bar a resident of that State from traveling to another State to obtain an abortion?” Kavanaugh asked in his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the decision overruling Roe v. Wade. “In my view, the answer is no,” Kavanaugh replied to his own question, “based on the constitutional right to interstate travel.” The Constitution has long been understood to allow US citizens to travel among the states.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/23868962/texas-abortion-travel-ban-unconstitutional

USA – The 113-Year-Old Law Behind Anti-Abortion Activists’ Latest Scheme

The Christian right is pushing a slate of laws to stop a new, vague offense they have dubbed “abortion trafficking.”

Melissa Gira Grant
September 7, 2023

Could driving someone to get an abortion soon be an act punishable by law? It’s not out of the question, if a newly emboldened group of extremists get their way.

A wave of new anti-abortion ordinances have already been adopted in several Texas counties and are under consideration in many others across the state, according to a Washington Post story published last week. These laws are premised on stopping a new, vague offense that anti-abortion activists have dubbed “abortion trafficking.” The language evokes an unwilling participant—someone being forced by someone else to terminate a pregnancy—but is intended instead to bar people who do want an abortion from accessing care. The idea is fairly new—and entirely the invention of anti-abortion activists and legislators.

Continued: https://newrepublic.com/article/175419/113-year-old-law-behind-anti-abortion-activists-latest-scheme

“The Message They’ve Received Is That You Don’t Deserve to Be Cared For”: Life on the Abortion Borderland

Patients seeking abortions are flooding across state lines—while anti-abortion activists try to shut clinics down.

June 23, 2023
AMY LITTLEFIELD

One day each week, the Rev. Erika Ferguson puts on leggings and a sweatshirt, pulls her hair back under a baseball cap, and heads to a North Texas airport to meet a group of people who need abortions. She shepherds the strangers through security and onto a short flight to Albuquerque, N.M. There, the group spends the day at an abortion clinic, and later they watch rom-coms in an office packed with cots, tea, and homemade cookies. The women Ferguson has accompanied represent a cross section of Texans—Black, Latina, Asian, and white. There have been rape victims and teenagers. There have been moms with teenage children at home. “I’ve taken women from all walks of life, from all ages,” Ferguson told me.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/abortion-clinics-dobbs-texas/

USA – Don’t rule out a national abortion ban in 2025

Activists think they have a path to stopping abortions nationwide. It runs not through Congress but through the White House, the Supreme Court, and an arcane 19th-century law.

By Mary Ziegler
May 30, 2023

Almost a year ago, when the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court promised that each state would make its own decision on abortion. At the time, a national statute of any kind seemed impossible. Democrats had tried and failed to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have secured abortion rights nationwide. And once Republicans gained a majority in the House of Representatives, they didn’t try to pass a national abortion ban. Their legislative wish list did not include one, and poll after poll showed that most Americans believed abortion to be a right and wanted it to be legal, especially early in pregnancy.

The antiabortion movement had never wanted the issue left to the states. Since the 1980s, the movement had made sure that the Republican Party platform had a plank endorsing a human life amendment. But in the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs ruling, it seemed that there was little chance that antiabortion advocates could get their wish for a national ban.

Continued: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/05/30/opinion/abortion-ban-comstock-act-mary-ziegler/

USA – Small, rural communities are becoming abortion access battlegrounds

After local leaders in rural Nevada reached an impasse over a proposed Planned Parenthood clinic, an anti-abortion activist pitching local abortion bans arrived at their remote city hall.

May 21, 2023
By Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez | KFF Health News

WEST WENDOVER, Nev. — In April, Mark Lee Dickson arrived in this 4,500-person city that hugs the Utah-Nevada border to pitch an ordinance banning abortion.

Dickson is the director of the anti-abortion group Right to Life of East Texas and founder of another organization that has spent the last few years traveling the United States trying to convince local governments to pass abortion bans.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/small-rural-communities-are-becoming-abortion-access-battlegrounds-rcna84921