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/

A Woman Died After Being Told It Would Be a “Crime” to Intervene in Her Miscarriage at a Texas Hospital

Josseli Barnica is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped.

by Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana
Oct. 30, 2024

Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.

The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/josseli-barnica-death-miscarriage-texas-abortion-ban

Trump’s abortion flip-flops: Lessons from Ireland on why reasons-based access to abortion doesn’t work

September 16, 2024
Seána Glennon, Postdoctoral Fellow, Constitutional Law, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

Donald Trump has flip-flopped on the issue of abortion for decades, from declaring himself “very pro-choice” in the 1990s and “pro-life” in 2011 to hinting this year that he’d support a national abortion ban.

Abortion is a topic of huge importance in American politics this year: it could decide the United States presidential election, and the way states regulate abortion access will have life-or-death consequences for women.

…American legislators should look to Ireland to understand the real-life consequences of a ban on abortion, the chilling effect on health-care professionals of an exception only in cases of a threat to the life of the pregnant woman, and the significant problems with attempting to legislate abortion access only for certain reasons, like rape and incest.

Continued: https://theconversation.com/trumps-abortion-flip-flops-lessons-from-ireland-on-why-reasons-based-access-to-abortion-doesnt-work-238934

16.09.2024

Ireland – Ivana Bacik: How abortion campaign went from ‘desperately lonely’ to ‘tremendously positive’

On a political level, there was very little to cling to as an abortion activist in the 80s and 90s, she says, and religion of course played a large part in that.

May 27, 2023

LABOUR LEADER IVANA Bacik spoke to The Journal about how the route to abortion rights went from being a “desperately lonely” movement on the periphery of society to becoming a mainstream political issue.

The subject of access to abortion stills holds the public’s attention today with a recent review finding that issues such as geographic location, the three-day waiting period and other obstacles still impede women’s access to abortion services.

Continued: https://www.thejournal.ie/ivana-bacik-interview-abortion-rights-ireland-6077186-May2023/

Five years after Ireland’s historic abortion referendum, access to care is still ‘patchy’

By Niamh Kennedy and Emily Blumenthal, CNN
Thu May 25, 2023

In 2018, the Irish public voted overwhelmingly to repeal the country’s Eighth Amendment, overturning one of the strictest abortion bans in the European Union. There were scenes of jubilation as the referendum result was announced, with many in Ireland seeing it as a historic step that would give women control over their own bodies.

But five years on, although abortion is free and legally available in Ireland up to 12 weeks of pregnancy – after that allowed only in exceptional circumstances, if there is a risk to the mother’s life or the fetus is not expected to survive – the abortion system is still far from where campaigners and charities would like it to be.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/25/europe/ireland-abortion-referendum-5-years-intl-cmd/index.html

Abortion—The Real Irish Lessons

Road to Repeal: 50 Years of Struggle in Ireland for Contraception and Abortion (new book)

by Tomás Mac Sheoin
Feb 01, 2023

In August 2022, Fintan O’Toole, a journalist with the Irish Times, published an article in the New York Review of Books giving his interpretation of the lessons to be learned from the Irish experience with abortion. O’Toole first outlined the history: in 1981, right-wing groups, buttressed by American support—including financial support—formed the Pro-Life Amendment Campaign, which persuaded the Irish government to propose a referendum to include a ban on abortion in the Irish Constitution. The ban was passed in 1983, becoming the constitution’s eighth amendment.

O’Toole outlines three problems with legal bans on abortion. First, they simply do not stop abortions: in 1985, 3,888 women traveled from Ireland to England to terminate their pregnancies; in 2001, that number was 6,673.

Continued: https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/abortion-the-real-irish-lessons/

01.02.2023

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Ireland – Protesters call for removal of barriers to abortion

Saturday, 29 Oct 2022
By Colman O'Sullivan

Around a thousand people have marched in Dublin to mark the tenth anniversary of the death of Savita Halappanavar and to call for changes to abortion laws.

Speaking at the Garden of Remembrance before the march set off, Orla O'Connor of the National Women's Council called for an end to the three-day waiting period before a woman can get an abortion and the abolition of the 12-week limit.

Continued: https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2022/1029/1332157-abortion/

Savita Halappanavar should not have had to die for reproductive rights to change

Ireland owes Savita Halappanavar a great debt and a great deal of gratitude for making this country safer for other women, writes Liz Dunphy.

FRI, 28 OCT, 2022
LIZ DUNPHY

Wax dripped like tears from flickering candles which burned brightly around a photo of Savita Halappanavar at a vigil for her in Cork in the days after her death.

The people cried too. Women and men, teenagers, parents holding their young children in their arms and by the hand, knowing that Savita could have been them, their daughter, their mother, their sister, their friend.

Continued: https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-40993598.html

28.10.2022

Liz Dunphy

Savita Halappanavar

Simon Harris

Ireland changed when Savita Halappanavar died – it must continue to change

On the ten year anniversary of the death of Savita Halappanavar, Lynn Enright reflects on how she galvanized a nation and how there is more to be done.

by Lynn Enright
27th Oct 2022

Whenever and wherever abortion is illegal, there are horror stories. Stories so grim and so gruesome they make you weep. A tale of a suicidal child forced to carry the foetus of the man who raped her; news reports of a young woman rooting through blood-soaked rubbish before reporting her housemate, who took illegal abortion pills alone, to police. In 2012, came a story so bleak that it changed a nation.

Savita Halappanavar was 31 in October 2012 and she was 17 weeks’ pregnant; it was to be the first baby for her and her husband, Praveen. If you’re carrying a longed-for baby, the 17-week mark is a nice stage of pregnancy. The morning sickness is usually gone and it is around then that you’ll feel the first flutters of movement, a tiny kick here and there.

Continued: https://www.image.ie/agenda/ireland-changed-when-savita-halappanavar-died-it-must-continue-to-change-606207

27.10.2022

Five maternity hospitals will not provide abortions until next year

Ellen Coyne
October 24 2022

Five of the country’s maternity hospitals will not be providing abortion services until next year at the earliest, amid conscientious objection from individual obstetricians and a lack of resources.

Another two maternity hospitals are still in talks with the HSE to try to roll out termination of pregnancy services next year, three years after free access to abortion was first legalised in Ireland.

Continued: https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/health/five-maternity-hospitals-will-not-provide-abortions-until-next-year-42089657.html

24.10.2022