‘Grace Under Pressure’: A Look Back on the Late Cecile Richards

The late Cecile Richards transformed Planned Parenthood as its longtime president—while steadfastly defending the organization against antiabortion attacks.

May 3, 2025
by Ellen Chesler

In fall 2015, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards was called to appear before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. For months, antiabortion activists had circulated deceptively edited videos with the bogus claim that Planned Parenthood was unlawfully profiting from the sale of fetal tissue. Republicans in control of the chamber seized on this implausible accusation as an excuse to defund the organization that for decades had steadfastly provided family planning services and healthcare of the highest quality as a trusted government contractor.

Antiabortion protesters packed the hearing room, alongside Planned Parenthood supporters and a large platoon of newspaper reporters and TV correspondents, including, of course, those of Fox News. Retaining her composure throughout, Richards calmly parried rapid-fire questions and endured constant interruptions from Republicans (including one, in particular, who displayed little interest in the facts)—just looking to score points with their base. For everyone else, however, she provided a compelling lesson about the humane and often lifesaving services Planned Parenthood provides, including cancer screenings, birth control and, yes, abortion.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2025/05/03/remembering-cecile-richards-planned-parenthood-abortion-women-politics/

03.05.2025

fetal tissue disposal

Hillary Clinton

Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood v. Casey

Now Is the Time for Kamala Harris to Flip the Script and Win Big on Abortion

The Democrats have a chance to become the party that wants to grant you the freedom to terminate a pregnancy and the freedom to raise the children you want.

Amy Littlefield
Aug 21, 2024

Something unexpected happened to me while I was watching the Democratic National Convention on Monday night. I was sitting in my pajamas listening to Hillary Clinton’s speech when I started sobbing. Did Hillary Clinton just make me cry? I thought, horrified, afraid I might be having a sudden-onset midlife crisis. This was the woman I had protested in college over her support for the Iraq War. In 2016, I was a Bernie girl, and today, in 2024, I’m so outraged over Democrats’ support for the Israeli war on Gaza that I expected to watch the entire convention with my jaw clenched. But then Clinton invoked the legacy of Shirley Chishom. “In 1972, a fearless Black congresswoman named Shirley Chisholm, she ran for president, and her determination let me and millions of others dream bigger,” Clinton said. “Not just because of who she was, but because of who she fought for: working parents, poor children, the last, the least, and the lost.” Suddenly, I could see a portal between Chisholm’s “unbought and unbossed” feminism and this moment, and it dawned on me that the fall of Roe v. Wade had cracked that portal open.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/kamala-harris-abortion-reproductive-justice/

21.08.2024

Commentary

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Planned Parenthood v. Casey

Behind the Scenes at the Dismantling of Roe v. Wade

By Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak
Dec. 15, 2023

On Feb. 10 last year, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. showed his eight colleagues how he intended to uproot the constitutional right to abortion.

At 11:16 a.m., his clerk circulated a 98-page draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. After a justice shares an opinion inside the court, other members scrutinize it. Those in the majority can request revisions, sometimes as the price of their votes, sweating sentences or even words.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/us/supreme-court-dobbs-roe-abortion.html

How Sandra Day O’Connor upheld abortion rights on the Supreme Court

Cassie Buchman
DEC 1, 2023

(NewsNation) — Thirty years before the overturn of Roe v. Wade, Sandra Day O’Connor, who died Friday at the age of 93, was instrumental in keeping abortion legal at the federal level during her tenure.

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, deciding that abortion was federally protected in a 7-2 vote. The New Yorker writes that there was immediate backlash from the Christian right, with many leaders seeking to reverse the ruling.

Continued: https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/supreme-court/how-sandra-day-oconnor-upheld-abortion-rights-on-the-supreme-court/

01.12.2023

News

Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health

Planned Parenthood v. Casey

Roe v. Wade

Ronald Reagan

Sandra Day O'Connor

Webster v. Reproductive Services

USA – Abortion concerns once delayed a major religious freedom law. Now, they’re back in the spotlight

Do religious exercise rights protect access to abortion? Courts have been asked to decide

By Kelsey Dallask
Nov 25, 2023

On Sept. 18, 1992, the Senate Judiciary Committee and dozens of invited guests gathered to consider, among other things, the link between religious freedom and abortion.

The focus of the hearing was the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a bill designed to restore religious exercise protections that recently had been severely limited by the Supreme Court.

Continued: https://www.deseret.com/2023/11/25/23960097/abortion-religious-freedom-restoration-act

Do No Harm: Texas Court Rules in Favor of Women Harmed by Abortion Ban’s Inadequate Protection for Medical Emergencies

15 AUG 2023
JOANNA L. GROSSMAN

Earlier this year, the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit, Zurawski v. State of Texas, on behalf of several women who needed emergent abortion care when their planned, wanted pregnancies went south either because the pregnancy became non-viable or its continuation threatened the woman’s life or health. In each case, the woman needed abortion care to preserve her life, health, or fertility; yet, in each case, she was turned away by doctors and hospitals because she wasn’t sick enough to make the abortion lawful. The lawsuit arises out of the Texas abortion ban that took effect in August 2022, which prohibits abortions unless a narrow, poorly defined medical emergency exception applies. The lawsuit asked the court to clarify that the exception must be broad enough to allow doctors to use their good-faith judgment about when an abortion is necessary to protect the woman’s life, health, or fertility.

Continued: https://verdict.justia.com/2023/08/15/do-no-harm-texas-court-rules-in-favor-of-women-harmed-by-abortion-bans-inadequate-protection-for-medical-emergencies

Abortion in America: How access and attitudes have changed through the centuries

by: Eliza Siegel, Stacker
Jul 28, 2023

The Postal Service can legally deliver abortion medications in the U.S.—including to states with abortion restrictions or bans—according to a Justice Department decision posted online late Jan. 3. The Postal Service requested that the Justice Department provide guidance on this issue a week after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority voted to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in June 2022. That ruling, which sparked intense debate across the U.S., led to abortion restrictions and bans in many states.

In its decision, the Justice Department ruled that sending, delivering, and receiving abortion drugs by mail is not in violation of the 1873 Comstock Act —which aimed to prevent morally “corrupt” items from being delivered by mail—because there is no way to determine that the intent of the recipient is to commit an unlawful act. There are also no federal restrictions on the drugs in question.

Continued: https://www.ksnt.com/news/abortion-in-america-how-access-and-attitudes-have-changed-through-the-centuries/

In the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ruled states should decide the legality of abortion, voters at the state level have been doing just that: 4 essential reads

June 12, 2023
Lorna Grisby, Senior Politics & Society Editor

When the Supreme Court ruled on June 24, 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that states – some of which have been chipping away at women’s access to abortion for years – should decide the legality of abortion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the court’s majority opinion that “women are not without electoral or political power.”

In one fell swoop, the court’s 6-3 ruling that abortion is not a federal constitutional right overturned Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, and 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey – two decisions that provided federal protections for abortion.

Continued: https://theconversation.com/in-the-year-since-the-supreme-court-overturned-roe-v-wade-and-ruled-states-should-decide-the-legality-of-abortion-voters-at-the-state-level-have-been-doing-just-that-4-essential-reads-207299

USA – Unequal Justice: Did Five Supreme Court Justices Lie About Abortion?

In their auditions for the highest court in the land, each of them was at least materially misleading.

BY BILL BLUM
FEBRUARY 20, 2023

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, issued last year, overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), and dismantled the federal constitutional right to abortion. One of the lingering questions in the aftermath of Dobbs is whether any of the five justices who voted to take that drastic step lied about their views on abortion during their respective confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

A strong argument can be made that each of them either lied or made materially misleading statements.

Continued: https://progressive.org/latest/unequal-justice-supreme-court-justices-abortion-lie-blum-20223/

Are Blue States Ready To Relax Their Bans On Later Abortions?

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
JAN. 30, 2023

You hear people say the term “third rail” all the time in politics, usually in reference to an issue that is too volatile — too charged — to touch. For decades, abortion later in pregnancy has been one of those issues. As recently as four years ago, a proposal to loosen restrictions on third-trimester abortions went down in flames in Virginia after Republicans accused Democratic lawmakers of advocating for infanticide — an attack that was misleading but effective.

But the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has changed the current running through the abortion debate. And now Democratic legislators may have new opportunities to try and expand abortion rights — including abortions in the late second and early third trimester of pregnancy.

Continued: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-blue-states-ready-to-relax-their-bans-on-later-abortions/