US anti‑abortion cash floods UK free speech frontlines

Democracy for Sale investigation finds US anti‑abortion lawyer funding Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, while Alliance Defending Freedom’s UK spending soars.

May 31, 2025
By Peter Geoghegan and Max Colbert

Nigel Farage has often described himself as ‘pro-choice’ - but this week the Reform leader declared that plans to decriminalise abortion up to 24 weeks are “utterly ludicrous”.

Farage’s comments were striking. Not least as the abortion proposals have been backed by a cross-party group of MPs. But the Reform leader is not the only figure on the political right who seems to have a growing interest in Britain’s abortion laws.

Continued: https://democracyforsale.substack.com/p/us-antiabortion-cash-floods-uk-free-speech-union-adf

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 – How promises of a ‘post-Roe future’ have fallen short

By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN
Sun September 22, 2024

Weeks after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, a then-little-known Republican congressman from Louisiana introduced a short bill that proposed amending the Social Security Act to ensure child support payments be made for an “unborn child.”

“The Unborn Child Support Act” has gone nowhere. But the congressman has. He’s Mike Johnson, now the speaker of the House. More than two years after the Dobbs decision and nearly a year into a job that gives him control over which legislation get debated and voted on, Johnson hasn’t touched the bill or any of its provisions.

Continued: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/22/politics/abortion-dobbs-promises-republicans/index.html

Anti-abortion centers raked in $1.4bn in year Roe fell, including federal money

Exclusive: memo shows anti-abortion pregnancy centers received at least $344m in government money in 2022

Carter Sherman
Wed 14 Feb 2024

Anti-abortion facilities raked in at least $1.4bn in revenue in the 2022 fiscal year, the year Roe v Wade fell – a staggering haul that includes at least $344m in government money, according to a memo analyzing the centers’ tax documents that was compiled by a pro-abortion rights group and shared exclusively with the Guardian.

These facilities, frequently known as anti-abortion pregnancy centers or crisis pregnancy centers, aim to convince people to keep their pregnancies. But in the aftermath of Roe’s demise, the anti-abortion movement has framed anti-abortion pregnancy centers as a key source of aid for desperate women who have lost the legal right to end their pregnancies and been left with little choice but to give birth.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/14/anti-abortion-centers-funding

With Roe Gone, Some House Republicans Back Away From National Abortion Ban

Nearly three dozen House Republicans who supported a federal abortion ban in the last Congress have yet to sign on this year, reflecting a shifting political calculus after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

By Annie Karni
Jan. 12, 2024

In 2021, Representative Michelle Steel, a California Republican whose district President Biden won in 2020, cosponsored the Life at Conception Act, a bill to recognize a fertilized egg as a person with equal protections under the 14th Amendment.

It was a year before the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade. Ms. Steel was one of 166 House Republicans — then roughly three-quarters of the conference — who would ultimately sign on to the legislation, which amounted to a nationwide abortion ban. She did so just weeks after it was introduced.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/us/politics/house-republicans-abortion-ban.html

Anti-abortion attorneys ascend federal government ranks with Christian right legal training

The conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom’s expansive ties include federal judges and most recently Speaker of the House

BY: SOFIA RESNICK
DECEMBER 10, 2023

When Mississippi Solicitor General Scott G. Stewart presented Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2021, he argued that state lawmakers should be able to ban abortion at any time in pregnancy, not just after so-called “viability,” the point where a fetus could survive outside of a uterus. The U.S. Constitution, he said, does not specifically protect the “purposeful termination of a human life.”

“The viability line discounts and disregards state interests,” Stewart said, according to the transcript of the oral arguments, contending that state lawmakers should be able to draw an earlier line on when they believe human life officially begins.

Continued: https://www.nevadacurrent.com/2023/12/10/anti-abortion-attorneys-ascend-federal-government-ranks-with-christian-right-legal-training/

10.12.2023

Commentary

Alliance Defending Freedom

Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State

Amy Coney Barrett

Andrew Seidel

anti-choice lies

anti-choice misinformation

anti-choice misogyny

Blackstone Legal Fellowship

Center for Judicial Renewal

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act

Food and Drug Administration

Movement Advancement Project

Young Lawyers Academy

USA – Is a Fetus a Person? An Anti-Abortion Strategy Says Yes.

Fetal personhood, which confers legal rights from conception, is an effort to push beyond abortion bans and classify the procedure as murder. In Georgia, it also means a $3,000 tax credit.

By Kate Zernike
Aug. 21, 2022

Even as roughly half the states have moved to enact near-total bans on abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, anti-abortion activists are pushing for a long-held and more absolute goal: laws that grant fetuses the same legal rights and protections as any person.

So-called fetal personhood laws would make abortion murder, ruling out all or most of the exceptions for abortion allowed in states that already ban it. So long as Roe established a constitutional right to abortion, such laws remained symbolic in the few states that managed to pass them. Now they are starting to have practical effect. Already in Georgia, a fetus now qualifies for tax credits and child support, and is to be included in population counts and redistricting.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/us/abortion-anti-fetus-person.html

USA – The next frontier for the antiabortion movement: A nationwide ban

Advocates and some GOP lawmakers have started mobilizing around potential federal legislation to outlaw abortion after six weeks of pregnancy

By Caroline Kitchener
May 2, 2022

Leading antiabortion groups and their allies in Congress have been meeting behind the scenes to plan a national strategy that would kick in if the Supreme Court rolls back abortion rights this summer, including a push for a strict nationwide ban on the procedure if Republicans retake power in Washington.

The effort, activists say, is designed to bring a fight that has been playing out largely in the courts and state legislatures to the national political stage — rallying conservatives around the issue in the midterms and pressuring potential 2024 GOP presidential candidates to take a stand.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/02/abortion-ban-roe-supreme-court-mississippi/