Abortion remains a criminal offence in the UK because of the left’s timidity. We must learn from that – and fast

Tuesday’s vote in parliament was a missed opportunity – and proof that progressives are allowing the right to shape the key debates

Stella Creasy
Wed 18 Jun 2025

Around the world, the antis are joining forces. Whether anti-abortion, anti-transgender, anti-immigrant, anti-human rights or just anti anyone who doesn’t look like them, they are collaborating; amplifying one another and sharing their political and cultural successes. Their rhetoric now dominates our discussions, and increasingly our ballot boxes. In response, some argue caution or even capitulation – as if we can stop the public being dragged to the extremes if we speak in hushed tones or water down our ambitions for social justice. As we witness the consequences of this, it is time to speak up for those values that drive us to show that another future is possible.

On Tuesday, parliament had the opportunity to set abortion in England and Wales on the same modern, regulated footing as it is in Northern Ireland: as a human right. Instead, a vote on this was explicitly blocked by the providers of this service and their supporters, telling MPs to back another amendment, to get a single exemption from prosecution for women “over the line” instead. That is what happened. In contrast, my proposed amendment would have gone further, offering “protection to all those involved in ensuring that women can access safe and legal abortions”.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/18/abortion-criminal-offence-uk-parliament-progressives


Three Years Post-Roe: The Escalating Campaign to Make Abortion Inaccessible Nationwide

Three years after Dobbs, the antiabortion movement is escalating efforts to block access to medication abortion, criminalize interstate travel, and impose a nationwide ban—threatening reproductive freedom across all 50 states.

June 2, 2025
by Kelly Baden, Ms. Magazine

It has been three years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, unleashing legal chaos and confusion for patients and providers across the United States. But even though abortion is banned in many U.S. states, the antiabortion movement is only intensifying its campaign to restrict abortion access nationwide. Overturning Roe is just the beginning; since then, the movement has pursued a range of strategies to make abortion completely inaccessible no matter where you live.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2025/06/02/three-years-dobbs-roe-abortion-overturn-medication-abortion-pills-travel-state-nationwide-ban/


USA – The Data We Don’t Collect Is Killing Women

Without a national system to track the consequences of abortion bans, preventable deaths are disappearing into the void—by design.

4/24/2025
by Sydney Saubestre

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, at least 10 women have died as a direct result of their inability to access healthcare. But this number is only a guess, because there’s no single place that records and tracks these tragedies. And that’s not just an oversight—it’s a choice.

As a data expert who used to work with survivors of sexual violence, I have seen how failures to measure a problem make it easier for those in power to keep harming people without accountability. Data is power, and the legislators—mostly men—driving these decisions don’t want us to see the true impact. We owe it to the women and others affected to make that impact visible.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2025/04/24/data-abortion-ban-death-women-maternal-mortality-morbidity/


The Christian right has set the US on the road to Gilead. Without a fight, other nations may follow

Organisations that pumped money into overturning Roe v Wade are making inroads in Europe. Women’s rights are truly at risk

Deborah Frances-White
Sat 5 Apr 2025

With Donald Trump as president, there is now a heavy strain of Christian nationalism driving the US political agenda. From draconian abortion policies to ending birthright citizenship, some of Trump’s first executive orders sound startlingly like something out of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopian novel turned TV show set in Gilead, a fundamentalist, fascist version of the US where women have no rights. But it is urgent we understand that what is happening in the US could happen here. This road to Atwood’s Gilead is charting a course straight through the UK and Europe, and we may well be sleepwalking on to it.

In November 2024 I debated with the American conservative lawyer Erin Hawley at the Oxford Union. The motion was “This house regrets the overturning of Roe v Wade”, the US supreme court’s landmark decision that once protected the right to have an abortion at the federal level. Hawley is vice-president of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an “anti-LGBTQ+ hate group”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, founded by the US Christian right. She is also a high profile lawyer and supported the state of Mississippi on the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that overturned Roe.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/05/christian-right-us-gilead-roe-v-wade-europe-women-rights-abortion


Above and Beyond Restoring Roe

Abortion rights aren’t enough. The best reproductive care outcomes result from meeting basic needs.

By Jade Prévost-Manuel
Mar 5, 2025

Taylor Young has never wanted to be a mom. From the time the now 27-year-old began dating, she experienced persistent anxiety around the thought of getting pregnant in Ohio, a Republican-controlled state where Young felt her right to abortion was tenuous.

In 2018, she discovered the childfree subreddit, an online forum on Reddit for people who do not have children and do not want them. In that forum, she learned about bilateral salpingectomy, a procedure that removes both fallopian tubes and permanently prevents pregnancy.

Continued: https://www.yesmagazine.org/body-politics/2025/03/05/progress-2025-beyond-roe


Listen up, Trumpists – your idea of abortion’s history is all wrong

Mary Fissell’s fascinating book, Abortion: A History, whirls readers from Cicero’s Rome to 16th-century ‘witches’ to modern-day Ireland

Ella Whelan
01 March 2025

“A beautiful thing to watch”: that’s the phrase Donald Trump used to describe the slew of anti-abortion bills passed by American states in 2022, after “Roe v Wade”, a 50-year-old legal judgement in favour of abortion rights, was overturned by the US Supreme Court. While Trump’s personal views on abortion are unknown – over the decades, they’ve swayed with the breeze of whatever has made him popular – his recent words, not to mention the views of his vice-president JD Vance and their evangelical supporters, are the sort you hear described as “from the dark ages”. Abortion-rights activists, in fact, tend to make this kind of distinction: the “pro-choice” movement is progressive and future-oriented, and the “pro-life” (or “anti-choice”) crowd are stuck in the past.

But, according to a new book by the American historian Mary Fissell, the Trumpists’ view of abortion – “heartbeat bills”, no mercy for rape victims, a focus on the “unborn” – isn’t even an accurate representation of the past (whether that past is idolised or despised). In Abortion: A History, she charts a different timeline.

Continued: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/review-mary-fissell-abortion-history/


Not just liberty, Roe v. Wade legitimised extinguishing the American woman’s right to life

In a country where 20 percent pregnant women face violence, and several are prone to life-altering injuries and health conditions, pregnancy must be examined as an inherently violent circumstance, posing fatal consequences to women, globally, everyday. In the post-Roe U.S., we must collectively acknowledge that this is not a simple contest between the foetus’s right to life and women’s right to liberty and privacy. It is the woman’s survival that is on the line.

Hannah Zobair
28 Feb 2025

WOMEN often describe giving birth as “a scene from a horror movie.” Accounts of mistreatment during childbirth in the United States recall harrowing stories of doctors shoving their hands up the uterus of the mother, leaving her bruised, bloodied, and with severe post-traumatic stress disorder that follows her long after the birth. The choice to have a baby can often be a fatal one, always necessitating exposure to a certain amount of danger.

In the United States, a conservative movement to recognise the fundamental right to life of foetuses, and their corresponding right to not be aborted, has evolved over decades. Conservative proponents have put forth an assertive, moral view - the State cannot perpetuate the killing of babies.

Continued: https://theleaflet.in/women-and-children/not-just-liberty-roe-v-wade-legitimised-extinguishing-the-american-womans-right-to-life


Abortion access in Canada ahead of a federal election

rabble radio
Podcast: 30 minutes
January 24, 2025

In 2022, when Roe v. Wade was overturned in the United States, it sent shockwaves through Canada as we questioned how this decision might impact us. For many, it sparked a new sense of concern that similar actions could be taken here, prompting a closer examination of the work needed to strengthen and expand reproductive rights and access in Canada.

This week, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. While he promises to usher in a “golden age,” in the five days he’s been in power, he’s already made extremely harmful decisions concerning health care, gender identity, citizenship, the environment and much more.

Continued: https://rabble.ca/podcast/abortion-access-in-canada-ahead-of-a-federal-election/


The Hidden Majority: Indian Americans Support Abortion Rights—So Why Aren’t We Speaking Out?

Indian Americans widely support abortion rights, yet remain largely silent. It’s time to turn private beliefs into public advocacy and protect women’s autonomy.

1/21/2025
by Jaime Patel

On Jan. 22, we mark the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that affirmed a woman’s constitutional right to abortion. Yet, nearly two years after its reversal, reproductive rights remain under relentless attack—making this anniversary a sobering reminder of what’s at stake.

Indian Americans have built a reputation as one of the most successful and influential immigrant communities in the United States, celebrated for our dedication to education, hard work and family values. Yet, when it comes to reproductive rights, our community has largely remained silent, even as these rights come under increasing attack across the country. This silence, quite frankly, is no longer acceptable.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2025/01/21/indian-american-support-abortion/


Abortions are up in the US. It’s a complicated picture as women turn to pills, travel

Even with abortion bans in place in most Republican-controlled states, the number of people obtaining them has grown slightly

Geoff Mulvihill and Kevin S. Vineys, Associated Press
Dec 28, 2024

Abortion has become slightly more common despite bans or deep restrictions in most Republican-controlled states, and the legal and political fights over its future are not over yet.

It's now been two and a half years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and opened the door for states to implement bans.

The policies and their impact have been in flux ever since the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/abortions-us-complicated-picture-women-turn-pills-travel-117162421