The GOP Plot to Bankrupt Planned Parenthood

By Susan Rinkunas
Jan 15, 2025

Despite the crucial fact that federal money cannot be used for abortions, Republicans have been trying to cut off all sources of federal funding to Planned Parenthood since 2007. The money the health care organization receives through various government programs covers birth control, sexually transmitted infection testing, and cancer screenings, but archconservatives want to shut down the country’s largest abortion provider by excluding it from these programs. Donald Trump pledged to anti-abortion groups during his 2016 and 2020 campaigns that he would “defund” the organization. It’s possible that Republicans for the first time in years have a plausible path to this longtime goal and Trump might not even need to act.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/01/gop-plot-bankrupt-planned-parenthood-abortion-trump.html

USA -Why abortions rose after Roe was overturned

Contrary to many predictions, abortions did not decline nationally after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision. Here's what's behind the trend.

Nov. 26, 2024
By Aria Bendix

It seemed only logical after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade that abortion rates would go down and births would go up. Instead, the opposite happened: Abortions went up last year and the country’s fertility rate hit a historic low.

More than 1 million abortions were recorded in the United States in 2023 — the highest in a decade, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion access. So far this year, abortion rates have remained about the same as in the last six months of 2023, preliminary data show.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/abortions-rose-roe-overturned-why-rcna181094

26.11.2024

Commentary

abortion by mail

Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine Access

abortion pills

Aid Access

Alliance Defending Freedom

American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs

Center for Reproductive Rights

Comstock Act

Diana Greene Foster

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Dr. Amy Whitaker

Dr. Christina Francis

Dr. Remy Coeytaux

Erik Baptist

Florida Access Network

Food and Drug Administration

Guttmacher Institute

Julie Kay

Karoline Leavitt

Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project

Matthew Kacsmaryk

medication abortion

mifepristone

National Right to Life

Stephanie Loraine Piñeiro

telemedicine abortion

The Brigid Alliance

traveling for abortion

USA – The Supreme Court’s Abortion Pill Ruling Should Satisfy Nobody

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK AND MARK JOSEPH STERN
JUNE 13, 2024

On Thursday, the Supreme Court did the bare minimum necessary to operate like an actual court of law, unanimously throwing out an absurd and dangerous lawsuit against medication abortion. The justices do not deserve extra credit for refusing to embrace this deeply unserious litigation, and they should earn no gold stars for maintaining the legal status quo on abortion pills. They merely acted as minimally responsible adults in a room of sugared-up preschoolers, shutting down the lower courts’ lawless rampage over all known rules of standing in desperate pursuit of an anti-abortion agenda. It is chilling to the bone that activist lawyers and judges were able to wreak as much havoc as they did before SCOTUS put them in timeout.

And this bad joke of a case isn’t even over: A lower court has already teed up a do-over that could once again jeopardize access to reproductive care in all 50 states. Don’t call this decision a victory. It is at best a reprieve—an election-year performance of Supreme Court unanimity and sobriety that masks the damage the conservative supermajority has already inflicted, as well as the threats to reproductive freedom that lie ahead.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/06/supreme-court-abortion-pill-ruling-2024-comstock-threat.html

13.06.2024

FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

The Abortion Pill Underground

Since Roe was overturned, thousands of people in red states have found a way to get an abortion—often thanks to providers operating at the edge of the law.

AMY LITTLEFIELD
May 7, 2024

When Kay found out she was pregnant at the end of last year, she knew three things clearly. “I was poor and I had an unwanted pregnancy and knew I couldn’t afford a standard abortion for hundreds of dollars,” she told me. A 29-year-old student already raising one child, Kay lives in Texas, where abortion is banned. The nearest clinic she could find was at least a 12-hour drive away. But Kay thought there might be another option. “I went to Google and started searching if it was possible somehow to receive abortion pills through the Internet.”

It was not only possible; it was much easier and more affordable than Kay had expected. She found online services that offered to ship the same medications that were available in clinics right to her doorstep in Texas for $150 or, if she couldn’t afford that, for free. It seemed so simple that Kay thought it might be a scam. “I was scared I would wait for the pills and they wouldn’t work when I got them,” she said.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/telehealth-abortion-shield-laws/

07.05.2024

Commentary

Abortion Care Network

Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine

abortion funds

abortion pills

abortion pills by mail

Abuzz

Aid Access

Center for Reproductive Rights

Choices Women’s Medical Center

in-person requirement

Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline

National Network of Abortion Funds

self-managed abortion

shield laws

Susan Yanow

telemedicine abortion

“Abortionist”: The Label That Turns Healthcare Workers Into Criminals

The moniker has branded those who help terminate pregnancies as illegitimate, dangerous, and, in turn, allowable targets of violence.

KATIE HERCHENROEDER, Mother Jones
May/June 2024 issue (posted April 15)

In 2007, after Paul Ross Evans pleaded guilty to leaving a bomb outside of a women’s health clinic in Austin, he assured the judge: He never meant for anyone to get hurt. “Except,” he clarified, “for the abortionists.”

For almost two centuries, the moniker “abortionist” has branded those who help terminate pregnancies as illegitimate, dangerous, and, in turn, allowable targets of violence. Before Roe v. Wade, the label turned midwives and doctors into criminals to be cracked down on by the state. After the 1973 decision, right-wing movements continued to deploy the term to imply only back-alley doctors performed abortions.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/abortionist-the-label-that-turns-healthcare-workers-into-criminals/

USA – The Current Attack on Abortion Pills Will Fail. The Next One Will Be So Much Worse.

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK AND MARK JOSEPH STERN
MARCH 26, 2024

There are always a couple of tells when the most conservative Supreme Court in more than a century finds itself adjudicating a truly mortifying and meritless case. One is that it’s coming up by way of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, a court that so consistently shovels its worst constitutional garbage upward that the high court conservatives are often forced to reluctantly lob it back. Another tell is when the facts of the case are so laugh-out-loud insane that even conservative justices can’t bring themselves to adopt them or the underpinning legal reasoning with a straight face. There’s yet a third tell: when the conservative justices start injecting a bunch of nonsense and randomized pet peeves into oral argument to distract from how embarrassing it would be to discuss the merits of the actual case.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/mifepristone-supreme-court-alito-national-abortion-ban.html

USA – The Anti-Abortion Movement’s Biggest Fear

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK
MARCH 25, 2024

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a case that could determine national access to mifepristone, one of two pills used as part of medication abortion. In this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Carrie N. Baker, whose book, History and Politics of Abortion Pills in the United States, is being published by Amherst College Press this year.

Lithwick and Baker discussed the anti-abortion movement’s decadeslong efforts to target the abortion pill, how those efforts hampered FDA approval of the medication in the first place, and how having easier access to reproductive care through a pill that can be sent in the mail and taken at home fundamentally threatens the strategy of those seeking to dismantle abortion rights in this country. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/abortion-pill-supreme-court-preview-mifepristone-history.html

USA – How the abortion pill case at the supreme court could undo the FDA

The medical industry watches with trepidation as mifepristone case could have huge consequences for drug regulation

Jessica Glenza in New York
Mon 25 Mar 2024

A supreme court case about one little pill – mifepristone – has the medical and pharmaceutical world on edge. … Despite a more than 20-year track record of safe real-world use, backed up by more than 100 peer-reviewed studies, a group of anti-abortion doctors is seeking to roll back US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decisions that changed and relaxed some prescribing rules.

If the doctors succeed, despite contested and in some cases now-retracted evidence of harm, the case could reshape abortion access in the US and have enormous and unpredictable consequences for how drugs are prescribed, regulated and developed.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/25/abortion-pill-case-fda

25.03.2024

Food and Drug Administration

Juan Hincapie-Castillo

USA – Abortion influences everything

By inhibiting drug development, economic growth, and military recruitment, as well as driving doctors away from the places they’re needed most, bans almost certainly harm you — yes, you.

By Keren Landman, MD
Mar 20, 2024

Last year in Texas, federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that, based on his read of some very bad science, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) needed to withdraw its approval of the safe and widely used abortion drug mifepristone. He claimed that the FDA hadn’t adequately considered its safety (it had) and that the lack of restrictions on the drug (there were plenty) had led to many deaths and severe adverse events (demonstrably false).

… Restricting abortion means removing women’s control over not only their bodies, but also their futures — and giving that control to someone else. In a nation where sex education and contraception access are already spotty and about half of all pregnancies are unplanned, that act is a population-level assault on women’s autonomy. The result is a psychic wound even to those who aren’t seeking abortions.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/even-better/24106111/abortion-mifepristone-kacsmaryk-fda-economic-military-readiness-mortality-mental-health-poverty

USA – Yes, some medication abortion patients go to the ER — but it may not be for what you think

A small portion of patients do visit ERs after an abortion, but it's not because mifepristone is unsafe

By NICOLE KARLIS
MARCH 20, 2024

Next Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will finally hear a case about mifepristone — the first drug used in a medication abortion.

A ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine — an organization of anti-abortion activists backed by the Christian right-wing lobbying group Alliance Defending Freedom — could severely limit access to mifepristone across the country. As women’s health specialists and doctors have told Salon before, the effects of such restrictions will be "devastating,” and have far-reaching consequences beyond impacting reproductive health.

Continued: https://www.salon.com/2024/03/20/yes-some-medication-abortion-patients-go-to-the-er--but-it-may-not-be-for-what-you-think/