FBI investigating growing attacks on abortion and reproductive health clinics

Christine Fernando, USA TODAY
Jan 30, 2023

The FBI is asking for the public's help in investigating a spate of unsolved attacks against reproductive health facilities nationwide after an Illinois man was charged Wednesday with setting fire to a Planned Parenthood clinic.

Tyler W. Massengill, 32, of Chillicothe, just north of Peoria in central Illinois, was arrested Tuesday after being accused of “malicious use of fire and an explosive to damage, and attempt to damage" the Peoria clinic, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a statement.

Continued: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/01/30/peoria-planned-parenthood-fire-illinois-man-arrested/11132693002/

‘We need to dream bigger’: As Roe v Wade marks 50th anniversary, advocates push further

Christine Fernando, USA TODAY
Jan 19, 2023

Each year since 1973, abortion rights activists have gathered on Jan. 22 for “Roe v. Wade Day” to celebrate the Supreme Court decision that granted a constitutional right to abortion.

But now, 50 years after the decision, Roe v. Wade Day will be different: Sunday will also mark the first anniversary of Roe since the ruling was overturned.

Continued: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/01/19/roe-v-wade-50th-anniversary-abortion-access-womens-march/11030965002/

USA – For-Profit Abortion Telemedicine Start-Ups Are Proliferating in Wake of “Roe”

Garnet Henderson, Truthout
November 26, 2022

In 2020, a federal judge ruled that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must suspend its requirement that patients pick up mifepristone, one of the pills used in medication abortion, in person. After some back-and-forth under the Trump administration, the FDA permanently repealed the rule, which had long been decried by medical experts as unnecessary, in 2021.

This opened the door for providers to send abortion pills by mail in all but the 19 states that outlaw provision of abortion via telemedicine. (Many of those same states now ban abortion entirely.) This regulation change, along with increased popular interest in abortion access following Roe’s overturn, has led to a proliferation of telemedicine companies offering abortion pills. Some of these companies are run by people with prior experience in abortion care and connections in the reproductive health, rights and justice movements; others are not. Regardless, some abortion access advocates are raising concerns about whether the rise of for-profit telemedicine companies is the best way to serve abortion seekers.

Continued: https://truthout.org/articles/for-profit-abortion-telemedicine-start-ups-are-proliferating-in-the-wake-of-roe/

USA – The abortion-rights movement is jubilant after the midterms turned the anti-abortion tide

Bethany Dawson
Sun, November 13, 2022

For abortion-rights campaigners, it has been an exhausting and soul-destroying few months.

Following the reversal of Roe v. Wade in June, the catalog of stories of women's health being in jeopardy due to an inability to access abortions and anxiety-inducing court hearings have provided months of chaos and devastation, Elisabeth Smith, the director for state policy and advocacy at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Insider.

Continued: https://www.businessinsider.com/midterms-2022-pro-choice-votes-helped-democrats-defy-election-blues-2022-11

Abortion clinics in embattled states face another challenge: Money

Many clinics must stop providing abortions or move. Either choice is costly.

By Max Zahn
August 15, 2022

When Katie Quinonez, the executive director of an abortion clinic in West Virginia, saw the Supreme Court decision that overturned the federal guarantee of the right to an abortion, the first word she uttered was an obscenity.

The nonprofit Women's Health Center of West Virginia, located in Charleston, faced the immediate risk of prosecution under a state abortion ban from 1882, so Quinonez and a coworker made 60 calls to patients canceling procedures scheduled for the ensuing three weeks, said Quinonez.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/abortion-clinics-embattled-states-face-challenge-money/story?id=87945089

‘People want me dead’: abortion providers fear violence after Roe overturned

Danger is a daily reality for the health workers, and moments of upheaval raise the risk, expert says
Chris Stein
Sun 3 Jul 2022

Boulder, Colorado, has for decades made its abortion providers feel welcome. The city council passed one of the country’s first laws regulating how close demonstrators could get to patients seeking reproductive care, and residents took to the streets in protest when it became clear that the supreme court was ready to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, as it did last month.

“Boulder is probably the most pro-choice community in the country,” said Warren Hern, director of the Boulder Abortion Clinic. “But there are people in the community who want me dead.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/03/abortion-providers-violence-danger-roe-wade

03.07.2022

anti-choice extremism

anti-choice murders

anti-choice violence

Boulder Abortion Clinic

National Abortion Federation

’Heightened alert’: Abortion providers in U.S. brace for ruling

Sara Burnett, The Associated Press
Published June 21, 2022

In her first week on the job at a Philadelphia abortion clinic, Amanda Kifferly was taught how to search for bombs. About a year later, protesters blocked the entrances and exits of the The Women’s Centers, at one point pulling Kifferly into something resembling a mosh pit, where they surrounded her and shoved her around.

And on the night of last winter's arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in a case that could end the nationwide right to abortion, people gathered outside a clinic in New Jersey with lawn chairs, a cooler and a flaming torch — a sight that brought to mind lynchings and other horrors of the country's racist past, says Kifferly, who now serves as vice-president for abortion access.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/heightened-alert-abortion-providers-in-u-s-brace-for-ruling-1.5957700

21.06.2022

National Abortion Federation

USA – ‘Lock it down right now’: Abortion rights advocates prepare for a new wave of digital security threats

Advocates and abortion providers are reassessing their digital security practices ahead of an expected rise in cyberattacks and surveillance.

by SAM SABIN
06/17/2022

Abortion rights groups are using software that protects privacy and are honing other strategies to combat digital threats that they expect will worsen in a post-Roe world.

Those efforts are gaining new urgency as a looming Supreme Court ruling threatens to open a new wave of security threats for people seeking abortions and their health care providers.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/17/abortion-rights-advocates-digital-security-threats-00040654

USA – Harassment at Abortion Clinics Is Already Bad. It’s Worse When You’re Black.

We need to explicitly name white supremacy and racism as the core drivers of abortion bans and restrictions, as well as violence and harassment.

Apr 21, 2022
MiQuel Davies, Rewire News

Abortion providers and people accessing abortion care are at high risk of violence and harassment. We know this from the well-documented history of providers being murdered, clinics dealing with arson and regular hate mail, and protesters stationed daily outside many abortion clinics, where they harass providers and patients.

What we don’t always talk about—or name explicitly—is that the violence and harassment faced by patients and providers who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color is often heightened and racialized. At Physicians for Reproductive Health, we know this is true from the countless experiences of physicians in our network as well as those working day to day on the ground, especially in hostile states. Unfortunately, this reality is often dismissed or minimized in an attempt to disassociate racism and white supremacy from attacks on abortion rights.
Continued: https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2022/04/21/harassment-at-abortion-clinics-is-already-bad-its-worse-when-youre-black/

USA – Medical waste company denies giving fetuses to antiabortion activists

D.C. police say they are still working to determine how the fetuses were obtained and whether any laws were broken

By Michelle Boorstein, Peter Hermann and Marissa J. Lang, Washington Post
April 5, 2022

Antiabortion activists said Tuesday they obtained five fetuses from a medical waste disposal driver who was outside a Washington abortion clinic, an assertion the waste disposal company denies.

Plainclothes officers removed the fetuses from a Southeast apartment where one of the activists was staying. D.C. police are still working to determine how the fetuses were obtained and whether any laws were broken.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/04/05/lauren-handy-abortion-dc/