The abortion pill is safe. But why should Trump let facts get in the way?

RFK Jr is conducting a review of mifepristone, citing a deeply flawed study. The move could be devastating for women

Moira Donegan, Guardian
Mon 29 Sep 2025

Robert F Kennedy Jr’s health department is conducting a new review of mifepristone, the drug used in the majority of American abortions, claiming that a new study from a conservative thinktank has raised concerns about its safety.

Mifepristone, which was approved by the FDA 25 years ago this month, has repeatedly been proven safe and effective for use terminating pregnancies in both multiple medical trials and in widespread patient use over the past quarter of a century. The report cited by Kennedy, meanwhile, comes from the Ethics and Public Policy Center – a group that applies “the Jewish and Christian traditions” to modern law and pushes back “against the extreme progressive agenda while building a consensus for conservatives” – and was not peer reviewed. The study has been heavily criticized by medical experts for its methodology and lack of transparency regarding how it obtained and analyzed its data.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/29/abortion-pill-mifepristone-trump-rfk

29.09.2025

USA – A baby born to a brain dead mother: this is the horror of abortion bans

Adriana Smith was legally dead for months, but kept on life support in Atlanta because she was pregnant

Moira Donegan
Tue 8 Jul 2025

On Friday 13 June, a baby was born in an Atlanta hospital to a woman who had been dead for four months. Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old Black nurse and mother, was declared brain dead in February after blood clots formed in her brain. Legally, and by all meaningful measures, she was dead then: the woman who loved her family, laughed with her friends, comforted her son, helped her colleagues and cared for her patients was gone then, and was never coming back.

But the state of Georgia, and the administrators of the hospital where she was declared dead, kept her corpse in a state of artificial animation for months. That’s because when Smith went to the hospital in February complaining of a headache, and later became unresponsive, she was about eight weeks pregnant. According to her family, doctors at Emory hospital, in Georgia, told the family that the state’s abortion ban required them to maintain the regimen that falsely animated their daughter’s corpse so that the fetus inside her could continue to grow.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/08/adriana-smith-atlanta-brain-dead-birth

08.07.2025

Opinion

Adriana Smith

Emory University hospital

Make no mistake: this Trump presidency will continue to attack abortion rights

Just because Trump is publicly distancing himself from abortion does not mean Republicans won’t enact a national ban

Moira Donegan
Tue 12 Nov 2024

Abortion rights initiatives were on the ballot in 10 states on Tuesday, and won in seven of them. One of the losers was prop 4, Florida’s abortion rights measure, which received a whopping 57% of the vote but failed to meet the state’s unusually high 60% threshold, meaning that the state’s six-week ban will remain in place. Asked about the Florida abortion rights proposition ahead of the election, Trump said that when he went to cast his ballot near Palm Beach, he would vote against it.

It has always been a little hard to believe that Donald Trump personally hates abortion, even if it is abundantly clear how little he thinks of women. Trump, after all, has claimed to have numerous conflicting positions on abortion rights throughout his life. And his brand of masculinity is boorish, vulgar, and above all, sexually entitled – far from the priggish, repressed moralism of more classical anti-abortion figures like Mike Pence.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/12/trump-presidency-abortion-restrictions

12.11.2024

Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act

USA – The Truth About Jane

They were heroes, and human. They could be any of us.

Moira Donegan
Aug 19, 2024

“My fear was that an outsider would paint us as superheroes or Amazon warriors, as extraordinary,” writes Laura Kaplan, one of the members of the service known as Jane, in a 2019 preface to “The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service,” her exhaustive history of the Chicago feminist group that performed secret, illegal abortions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “This is the opposite of the truth and certainly the wrong message to send to a younger generation.”

In the intervening years, Jane members have taken on an unusually active role in shaping the historical understanding of their work, and this is why. Hero worship has a distancing effect: it makes the object seem far away, alien, even semi-divine. It makes the revered people’s lives, their personalities, seem unlike your own. But Jane, Kaplan says, was not some exceptional or otherworldly group. “We were ordinary women,” she insists. “I hope that everyone who reads this history will see herself in us and think: that could be me.”

Continued: https://jessica.substack.com/p/jane-chicago-abortion-history

Unlike Joe Biden, Kamala Harris will be a genuine champion for abortion rights

It was hard to get the president to talk about abortion at all, but Harris seems to realize that abortion rights are a winning issue

Moira Donegan
Thu 25 Jul 2024

When he was still the nominee, Joe Biden’s preferred euphemism for abortion was “Roe”. He would talk about “upholding” Roe v Wade even after June 2022, when the US supreme court struck it down. Reproductive rights advocates bristled at this, pointing out how many people had been denied abortions under Roe, and how flimsy the decision’s protection of reproductive rights had been on personal-autonomy or sex-equality grounds.

Frankly, it was hard to get the president to talk about abortion at all. He seemed to avoid even the word “abortion”. When he did talk about the procedure – and the bans on it that Republicans have unleashed across the country – he preferred to focus on women who had been denied emergency abortions for wanted pregnancies in the midst of tragic health complications.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/25/kamala-harris-abortion-rights-biden

25.07.2024

The supreme court abortion ruling hides conservative justices’ partisan agenda

One day soon, this case will come back, and the supreme court will allow states to ban emergency abortions

Moira Donegan
Fri 28 Jun 2024

The supreme court is a messy institution. Its six conservative justices are mired in infighting over both the pace of their shared ideological project of remaking American law and life according to rightwing preferences, and over their preferred methodological course for doing so. Their squabbling is not helped by the fact that two of them, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, keep embarrassing the court with gauche public scandals, which draw attention to the court’s legitimacy crises like a vulgar flag waving above One First Street. For their part, the liberals are exhausted, impotent and at times apparently publicly despairing. Their dissents have sometimes taken on tones of exasperation and peeved sarcasm, as if they’re turning to the country and asking: “Can you believe this?” Their most senior member, Sonia Sotomayor, recently told an interviewer that over the past several terms, since the court’s conservative supermajority was sealed under the Trump administration, she has sometimes gone into her chambers after the announcement of major decisions and wept. She says she anticipates having to do so again: in one recent dissent, she warned ominously about the future of gay marriage rights.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/28/supreme-court-abortion-ruling-conservative-justices

28.06.2024

Opinion

Burwell v Hobby Lobby

Clarence Thomas

emergency abortions

EMTALA

Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Moira Donegan

Moyle v United States

Louisiana’s move to criminalize abortion pills is cruel and medically senseless

Louisiana, with one of the US’s worst maternal mortality rates, wants to make abortion medication a ‘controlled substance’

Moira Donegan
Wed 29 May 2024

This week, Louisiana moved to expand the criminalization of abortion further than any state has since before Roe v Wade was decided. On Thursday, the state legislature passed a bill that would reclassify mifepristone and misoprostol – the two drugs used in a majority of American abortions – as dangerous controlled substances.

Under both state and federal classifications, the category of controlled substances includes those medications known to cause mind-altering effects and create the potential for addictions, such as sedatives and opioids; abortion medications carry none of this potential for physical dependence, habit-forming or abuse. The move from Louisiana lawmakers runs counter to both established medical opinion and federal law.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/29/louisiana-abortion-pill-law

The US supreme court heard one of the most sadistic, extreme anti-abortion cases yet

Idaho’s law requires doctors to treat pregnant women’s health as disposable – and the loss of their lives as an acceptable risk

Moira Donegan
Thu 25 Apr 2024

The risk of stating plainly what Idaho argued at the US supreme court on Wednesday morning is that it is so sadistic and extreme that people might not believe you. Idaho has one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country. Prohibiting all abortions at any stage of gestation, with no exceptions for rape or incest, the Idaho law allows doctors to perform abortions in cases where the life – but not “merely” the health – of the pregnant woman is at risk.

In practice, this has wound up being a ban on abortions needed to save women’s lives: according to Idaho hospitals, six pregnant women experiencing medical emergencies have had to be airlifted across state lines to hospitals in states with life and health exemptions in the months since Idaho began enforcing its abortion ban. One way to describe this state of affairs is to say that Idaho’s abortion law has come into conflict with medical best practice. Another way to describe it is to say that the law has forced pregnant women to flee the state for their lives.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/25/supreme-court-idaho-anti-abortion-case

25.04.2024

Opinion

Anya Cook

Elizabeth Prelogar

Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act

Alabama is using the notion that embryos are people to surveil and harass women

Even before the court ruled in favor of this vulgar fiction, state authorities relied on the concept to intimidate and jail women

Moira Donegan
Mon 26 Feb 2024

Something that’s important to remember about last week’s ruling by the Alabama supreme court, which held that frozen embryos were persons under state law, is that the very absurdity of the claim is itself a demonstration of power. That a frozen embryo – a microscopic bit of biological information that can’t even be called tissue, a flick laden with the hopes of aspiring parents but fulfilling none of them – is equivalent in any way to a child is the sort of thing you can only say if no one has the power to laugh at you. The Alabama supreme court is the final court of review in that state. It cannot be appealed. For the foreseeable future, frozen cells in Alabama have the same legal status there as you or I do. Is this an absurd elevation of the status of an embryo, or an obscene degradation of human beings? The answer, of course, is both.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/26/alabama-ivf-frozen-embryos-surveillance

Abortion rights are Biden’s most powerful re-election issue. He should act like it

Abortion is a crucial issue in this election – and a powerful motivator for voters. Yet the president is still tiptoeing around it

Moira Donegan
Mon 29 Jan 2024

For years, the beltway set had a standard line of advice for Democratic candidates: stick to the economy. The idea was that white, male, blue-collar voters – those magical creatures, somewhere out there in the windswept lands of the upper midwest, who always qualify in the pundit imagination as “real Americans” – would be turned off by so-called culture-war issues.

These guys, we were told, didn’t want to hear about civil rights or social equality: they wanted to hear about economic growth. According to this advice, Democrats could be pro-choice, pro-racial justice, or pro-LGBTQ+ rights, but not openly, avowedly so. They had to play their progressive social positions in a minor key.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/29/why-is-the-biden-administration-still-afraid-to-talk-about-abortion

29.01.2024

Joe Biden

Kamala Harris

Moira Donegan