USA – When ‘Abortion’ Wasn’t a Dirty Word

The medical term once encompassed any form of pregnancy loss, including miscarriage.

By Rachel E. Gross
Aug. 13, 2024

One morning in 2012, eight weeks into her pregnancy, Shannon Withycombe woke up bleeding: She was having a miscarriage. In the emergency room, however, no doctor or nurse uttered that word. Instead, she had to wait to read her discharge papers, which read “incomplete abortion.”

Dr. Withycombe, a medical historian at the University of New Mexico, knew the term from her research on 19th-century medical journals; it was doctorspeak for a miscarriage that had not fully exited the uterus. But it was jarring to see it on her own 21st-century medical notes.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/13/science/medical-history-abortion.html

USA – Abortion bans are barring people from life-saving pregnancy care, medical groups warn

In a report shared first with The 19th, major medical organizations uniformly told lawmakers that the overturning of Roe v. Wade will also worsen racial inequality and create barriers to critical medical treatment.

Shefali Luthra, Health Reporter
November 1, 2022

Major medical groups say that the loss of federal abortion protections has diminished access to pregnancy care such as treatment for ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages. The groups are sounding the alarm that racial gaps in pregnancy-related deaths will be exacerbated, according to a new Senate report first shared with The 19th.

The analysis comes on the heels of preliminary data suggesting that in the first two months since the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — a case that eliminated federal abortion rights and opened the door for states to ban abortions entirely — abortions fell by about 6 percent, or about 10,000 abortions, across the country.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2022/11/abortion-bans-restrict-critical-pregnancy-care-senate-report/

If Roe falls, more women will be prosecuted for miscarriages

By Radley Balko
May 26, 2022

About 10 years ago, a longtime state medical examiner in Texas and Mississippi told me something that has stuck with me ever since. He said there’s a type of prosecutor who believes that innocent babies just don’t die on their own. “They don’t believe in accidents,” he said, “especially when the parents are poor. Someone must be at fault. So someone has to pay.”

It isn’t hard to find cases to back up his theory. I’ve previously written about Hattie Douglas, a Mississippi woman who was arrested and jailed for a year for killing her infant son with alcohol poisoning until a lab concluded a medical examiner had botched the test results.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/26/if-roe-falls-more-women-will-be-prosecuted-miscarriages/

26.05.2022

fetal homicide laws

fetal personhood laws

forced interventions against pregnant women

Hattie Douglas

legal protection for fetuses

miscarriage

National Advocates for Pregnant Women

prosecuting women for miscarriage

These Laws Are Making Miscarriage More Traumatic in America

April 27, 2022
By Jessica Grose

In December, I wrote a newsletter with the headline, “Overturning Roe Will Make Miscarriage Care Worse.” I pointed out that because the options that doctors have to end a miscarriage that doesn’t happen on its own — medication or surgery — are the same ones involved in an abortion, outlawing abortion would have a chilling effect on medical providers, as evidenced by cases in countries such as Malta and Poland where abortion is severely restricted.

Doctors wind up being afraid to conduct any procedure that may be misconstrued as an illegal abortion, even when they’re treating patients who miscarry. Women can then wind up with little choice about how their miscarriages end, sometimes simply having to wait to miscarry “naturally,” which may take weeks and risk their health in the process.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/27/opinion/abortion-laws-miscarriage.html

USA – Miscarriages Are Awful, and Abortion Politics Make Them Worse

June 22, 2021
New York Times
By Amanda Allen and Cari Sietstra

Up to 26 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. These losses can be as physically painful as they are emotionally wrenching. And yet many patients are not offered the best care for their miscarriages because of abortion politics.

Both of us have had miscarriages. We each visited our doctors for scheduled ultrasounds between eight and 11 weeks of pregnancy, expecting to see a little bean-shaped baby-to-be with a reassuring heartbeat. Unfortunately, all we heard was quiet. No motion. No beautiful pulse. Only stillness.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/opinion/miscarriage-abortion.html

USA – How Abortion Pills Will Shape Our Future

How Abortion Pills Will Shape Our Future
The Supreme Court may make it harder to get to an abortion clinic, but thanks to drugs, coat hangers can remain a thing of the past.

By Katha Pollitt
Oct 10, 2019

The news that the Supreme Court will hear its first abortion case since Brett Kavanaugh replaced Anthony Kennedy has prompted many to wonder whether Roe v. Wade will finally, unfortunately, be overturned. The case, June Medical Services v. Gee, challenges a Louisiana law requiring clinic doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. Sound familiar? In 2016 in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the court struck down a Texas law over a similar requirement. You’d think that would have settled the matter, but no. The case is essentially the same, but the court is not.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/kavanaugh-pills-abortion/

The Myriad Meanings of a Pregnancy

The Myriad Meanings of a Pregnancy
It is not difficult to support a woman’s right to choose and to help her mourn a baby lost.

By Julia Bueno
June 28, 2019

I meet a lot of women in my working life who are desperate to become mothers, and also those who may have to delay motherhood, or not want to take that path. They seek me out for help with a range of psychological and emotional issues: We discuss their inner and outer worlds, how they relate to others and themselves, their bodies, their pregnancies and in some cases, the babies they’d hoped to have but lost. Our conversations, in England, are rooted in a freedom that is currently imperiled across the United States, from Georgia to Alabama to Iowa, and that my fellow citizens in Northern Ireland also don’t have. I’ve been starkly reminded in recent months how the state can have a tremendous bearing on a woman’s private life.

I am a psychotherapist specializing in pregnancy loss. I am also a firm believer in a woman’s right to her bodily autonomy. I could never have predicted how my work would buttress my belief that a woman’s desperate desire for her pregnancy to end in a live birth is as equally valid and honorable as the next woman’s choice to end hers.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/opinion/abortion-miscarriage.html

28.06.2019

USA – How the abortion debate has skewed Americans’ understanding of pregnancy

How the abortion debate has skewed Americans’ understanding of pregnancy
What led a Walgreeens pharmacist to deny a woman her prescription.

by Lara Freidenfelds June 26, 2018

Last week, Nicole Arteaga lost her very-much-wanted pregnancy. As often happens in early miscarriages — Arteaga was only nine weeks along — her body had not yet expelled the remains. Her doctor prescribed misoprostol to help her body complete the process.

Yet when she went to fill her prescription, she was turned away. The Walgreens pharmacist who denied her prescription cited his “ethical beliefs.” (Misoprostol is also used to induce abortion.)

His refusal highlights how fundamentally abortion politics have limited our understanding of pregnancy, and how a failure of understanding can translate into a heartbreaking failure of compassion.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/06/26/a-walgreens-pharmacist-denied-a-woman-medication-for-her-miscarriage-his-actions-show-how-the-abortion-debate-has-skewed-our-understanding-of-pregnancy/?utm_term=.327b4bea3a89

Why I ‘Stand in Awe of all Mná’ Voting to Repeal the Eighth

Why I ‘Stand in Awe of all Mná’ Voting to Repeal the Eighth
Regardless of the result on Friday, Irish women have started a rebellion, and women everywhere are grateful.

May 23, 2018
Colleen Hennessy

The Ireland where I lived and worked for ten years, from 2005 to 2015, didn’t have abortion. That Ireland took pride in the Eighth Amendment, added to the nation’s Constitution in 1983 by popular vote, in which the state gave fetuses the same rights as pregnant people in all medical and legal circumstances.

Conversations about abortion were of course happening, and Irish women have and will always need abortions. Every day at least ten women and girls travel from Ireland to UK abortion clinics, but these are lonely journeys without one’s community of doctors, family, or friends.

continued: https://rewire.news/article/2018/05/23/stand-awe-mna-voting-repeal-eighth/

Ireland – ‘My circumstances were the same as Savita Halappanavar’s’

‘My circumstances were the same as Savita Halappanavar’s’
I had symptoms of septicaemia but was refused care, as my baby still had a heartbeat

May 16, 2018
Anonymous

In the run-up to the referendum on whether to retain or repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, on May 25th, The Irish Times has asked readers to share their personal experiences of abortion, which the amendment bans in almost all circumstances. This is one of the accounts we received. To submit yours, click here.

In January 2014 my husband and I sat waiting in the departure lounge to board our flight to Liverpool at 7am. I was extremely unwell; I had pains going down the entire left side of my body and across my stomach.

Continued: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/abortion-referendum/my-circumstances-were-the-same-as-savita-halappanavar-s-1.3492038