How Overruling Roe is Already Risking Women’s Lives

Sian Norris
25 August 2022

It’s two months since the US Supreme Court ended the nationwide right to abortion, and the horror stories are already piling up. Worse is yet to come, reports Sian Norris

It’s now two months since the US Supreme Court decided on Dobbs v Jackson’s Women’s Health Organisation – a case on abortion rights that ultimately overruled Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision that allowed for nationwide access to safe and legal terminations. The Dobbs decision was written by the conservative Justice Samuel Alito, and allows for abortion laws to be made at a state, rather than federal level.

Within the first two months, nine states have implemented bans on abortion – some, like Missouri, within 24 hours. It, along with Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, and South Dakota have outlawed abortion in all cases, including when the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest.

Continued: https://bylinetimes.com/2022/08/25/how-overruling-roe-is-already-risking-womens-lives/

25.08.2022

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Centre for Reproductive Rights

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

USA – The Reason Anti-Abortion Activists Just Won’t Stop

Instead of claiming victory in Dobbs, they’re insisting on fighting for fetal personhood.

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK
AUG 22, 2022

Call it what you will, but there is no enduring benefit to having a media and political ecosystem that is primarily made of impenetrable “bubbles” of reality, distinct worlds in which “epistemic closure” means never having to encounter a single idea that challenges your preexisting beliefs. And yet, we are about to see it tested in an ominous natural experiment. Abortion is a subject in which certain aspirations about what reality might be are pitted directly against what is actually happening on the ground. Forced-birth proponents—who won huge at the Supreme Court when Dobbs v. Jackson came down in June—are perennially being described in terms of the “dog who caught the car.” The November midterms will tell us whether their reality is ascendant in America, or just their judicial and state legislative power.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/08/why-anti-abortion-activists-want-fetal-personhood.html

Conservatives have pushed infant safe haven laws as an alternative to abortion. But few American women use them

By Isabelle Chapman and Daniel A. Medina
Tue August 9, 2022

As many American women reckon with the sudden loss of their constitutional right to abortion, conservatives have floated an alternative they say makes abortion less necessary: safe haven laws.

The laws, which allow mothers to anonymously abandon infants at hospitals and other designated sites shortly after giving birth, have been in place in all 50 states since 2008.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/09/us/infant-safe-haven-law-abortion-invs/index.html

How the Supreme Court recalibrated the abortion debate in just 3 words

By Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN
Sun July 17, 2022

It's not just that US Supreme Court majorities upheld Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban and overturned Roe v. Wade. The opinion also skewed the crux of the conversation going forward -- with just three words.

"Unborn human being" is the term Associate Justice Samuel Alito adopted from the Mississippi statute, thereby replacing the key phrase in the landmark 1973 Roe ruling that spelled out a constitutional right to abortion: "potential life."

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/17/us/abortion-religion-dobbs-roe/index.html

Doctors weren’t considered in Dobbs, but now they’re on abortion’s legal front lines

July 3, 2022
Selena Simmons-Duffin

Historically, doctors have played a big role in abortion's legality. Back in the 1860s, physicians with the newly-formed American Medical Association worked to outlaw abortion in the U.S.

A century later, they were doing the opposite.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/07/03/1109483662/doctors-werent-considered-in-dobbs-but-now-theyre-on-abortions-legal-front-lines

How California Plans to Serve the Nation and Safeguard Abortion

From working to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution and become a "sanctuary" for access, California is becoming a blueprint for other states

Jun 10, 2022
Xenia Ellenbogen

It’s inevitable that Roe v. Wade will be overturned, throwing abortion access and rights into further chaos in this country. Thanks to Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion, whether the Supreme Court overturns Roe in its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization seems to be a matter of when, not if.

When Roe falls, the number of people of reproductive age whose nearest provider would be California would be up to 1.4 million—or a staggering increase of nearly 3,000 percent, the Guttmacher Institute estimates. Since the leak, California lawmakers have been moving to protect abortion access.

https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2022/06/10/how-california-plans-to-serve-the-nation-and-safeguard-abortion/

We’re the Women Who Chose Adoption Over Abortion. Ask Us Why Abortion Rights Matter

6/2/2022
by JULIA FRANKS

The pee test came up positive. There they were, two lines, side by side, rose and ghostly.

It was the 1980s, and I was a full-time college student. I’d just been dumped by a guy I was convinced I loved and I was trying to figure out what the rest of my life was going to look like. I was frozen with indecision, attracted to every kind of career. So many could-be lives beckoned and called to me that I found it impossible to decide on just one. Even choosing a single academic major meant a dozen other fields I’d never master, a whole array of breath-taking magical lives I’d never get to live.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2022/06/02/adoption-abortion/

What Alito Gets Wrong About the History of Abortion in America

Abortion in early pregnancy was not only commonplace but widely regarded as morally acceptable.

Opinion by LESLIE J. REAGAN
06/02/2022

If it were possible to eavesdrop on conversations among women and some doctors in early America, you might overhear the phrase “bringing on the menses.” If a woman didn’t menstruate when expected, she was considered to be sick and action was required to bring her back to health. Women who had “a common cold” — a euphemism for “obstructed” menses — used a variety of methods, teas and concoctions to bring “their menses back.”

In other words, returning menstruation to its normal cycle was within the purview of a woman’s own self-health care and was not regulated by the state until after “quickening” — the moment during a pregnancy when a woman could feel a fetus kick and recognized a life “stirring” within her. Quickening occurred between the fourth and sixth month of pregnancy. Only after quickening was an induced miscarriage, an abortion, considered immoral and banned by law.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/02/alitos-anti-roe-argument-wrong-00036174

USA – Abortion Doesn’t Fuck Up Our Mental Health. Losing the Right to It Will.

"Forced parenthood only leads to continued cycles of trauma, as well as intergenerational trauma."

BY ROSEMARY DONAHUE
May 31, 2022

On Monday, May 2, a draft of a Supreme Court majority opinion vote written by Justice Samuel Alito to strike down Roe v. Wade was leaked. It hit the internet like a lightning bolt; though the law that preserves federal legal abortion hasn't officially been overturned yet, many have spent the last three weeks poring over the document's language, and its potential implications have brought the nation to yet another emotional boiling point.

In the draft, which aims to kick the issue of abortion back down to the state level, Alito writes, "Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences." But what, exactly, are these supposed consequences, and who has been suffering them? Anti-choice supporters often point to the supposed emotional harm caused by abortion, citing regret, depression, or even suicide as possible outcomes in its aftermath. While it's true abortion can be both an emotional topic and decision, this short-sighted argument isn't a valid cause to remove the choice from those who seek out this life-saving care.

Continued: https://www.allure.com/story/abortion-suicide-mental-health-link

There’s a Glaring Weakness in Justice Alito’s Case Against Roe v. Wade

BY KATE SHAW AND STEVEN MAZIE
MAY 27, 2022

It has been more than three weeks since the bombshell leak of a draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—the pending Supreme Court case that could end abortion rights in America as we know them. Justice Samuel Alito’s draft pronounces Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision recognizing a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy, “egregiously wrong from the start.”

Laced with contempt for a right that has stood for 49 years, the Dobbs draft overrules Roe along with the 1992 follow-on decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The weaknesses of the draft are many: a shockingly narrow view of constitutional rights; an insistence that killing “an unborn human being” poses a “critical moral question” with no acknowledgement that commandeering wombs might raise an ethical quandary, too; reasoning that, despite dubious disclaimers, puts other rights—including contraception, sexual intimacy, and marriage equality—at risk.

Continued: https://time.com/6182093/roe-v-wade-alito-abortion-reliance-interests/