USA – What Would It Mean to Defend All Abortions?

Democrats love to avoid it, and Republicans love to lie about it. But later-abortion care has never been more important.

Amy Littlefield
May 13, 2025

Ayana, 28 years old and 28 weeks pregnant, eases herself onto the procedure table at Partners in Abortion Care in College Park, Maryland. She is a Black woman with the tiny bearing and erect posture of a bird. Above her head, a flock of pink and blue butterflies decorates the ceiling. In a few minutes, a doctor will perform an injection to the fetal heart to end her pregnancy.

Ayana had spent months in turmoil over this abortion. As she chased after her two older kids while lugging her 1-year-old on family outings to the arcade and the movies, she tried to imagine hauling two car seats instead of one. While she changed her baby’s diapers, she thought about what a newborn would subtract from him. The family was already stretched thin.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/defending-all-abortions/

She was tracking post-Roe abortions. The government just pulled her funding.

Diana Greene Foster, who was behind the landmark Turnaway Study, wanted to study the health and economic impacts of the loss of abortion access.

Shefali Luthra, The 19^th
April 9, 2025

Diana Greene Foster is responsible for landmark research on the effects of abortion access — a massive 10-year study that tracked thousands of people who had an abortion or were denied one. But funding for a follow-up to her seminal Turnaway Study has just been cut as part of a wave of canceled health policy research.

Foster received a MacArthur “genius grant” for the Turnaway Study. That piece of research, which examined the impact of restrictions even before the fall of Roe v. Wade, helped shape public understanding of how abortion access can affect people’s health and economic well-being by finding that people who were denied abortions were more likely to experience years of poverty compared to those who could terminate their unplanned pregnancies.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2025/04/abortion-government-funding-diana-greene-foster/

09.04.2025

Commentary

Research

ational Institutes of Health

Diana Greene Foster

funding cuts for abortion research

Abortion Bans Are Making It Impossible for Advocates to Help Abuse Victims

“To have to say to someone, ‘You live in a state where you’re more likely to be criminalized than the person who’s abusing you’—it’s devastating,” If/When/How’s Sara Ainsworth told Jezebel.

By Kylie Cheung
March 26, 2025

In 2007, Erica DuBois learned she was pregnant just two months after becoming cancer-free. And then the abuse began, she recalled to Jezebel. Her partner would invoke religion to justify physically harming her: “He talked about the beatings and violence like a test—if the baby survived, then it was God’s will,” DuBois said. She eventually gave birth to a healthy baby girl, but as a result of these sustained beatings, her first pregnancy was the only one that didn’t end in a miscarriage. She sometimes tried to take birth control pills, but when her abuser found them, he punished her. This violence would only escalate when she inevitably became pregnant.

Continued: https://www.jezebel.com/abortion-bans-are-making-it-impossible-for-advocates-to-help-abuse-victims

USA – Why do abortion “exceptions” rarely include mental health?

"It's one stigma on top of another: abortion is stigmatized, mental health is stigmatized," one expert told Salon

By NICOLE KARLIS, Salon
JULY 19, 2024

As more states move toward more restrictive gestational limits on when a person can have an abortion or not, medical “exceptions” have become the norm. While they often create more confusion than clarity, frequently missing from exceptions are those for mental health. More often than not, the exceptions are focused on physical health only.

According to KFF, 14 states have near-total abortion bans. Many more have restrictions with gestational limits in effect. While exceptions vary, only one state, Alabama, explicitly includes mental health conditions as a legal exception. However, in this case, the exception specifically requires a psychiatrist to diagnose the pregnant person with a “serious mental illness” and document that the person will engage in behavior that could result in their death or the death of the fetus due to their mental health condition.

Continued: https://www.salon.com/2024/07/19/why-do-abortion-exceptions-rarely-include-mental-health/

USA – Post-Dobbs, Abortion Bans Have Given Abusers a New Power

"Abusers could now use new laws, or confusion about those laws, to harass and threaten their partners,” the National Domestic Violence Hotline writes in a new report about how abusive partners are using abortion bans to keep their victims trapped.

By Kylie Cheung, Jezebel
June 3, 2024

It’s been almost two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and a new survey from the National Domestic Violence Hotline offers a disturbing glimpse into how abortion bans—and rampant confusion about the language of these laws and who they punish—have given abusers more control than ever.

Between October and December 2023, the Hotline conducted a survey on its website and anonymously collected domestic violence victims’ experiences with acts of reproductive coercion, or acts to control their victims’ reproductive decision-making, such as tampering with their birth control or blocking their access to abortion. The survey received 3,431 responses.

Continued: https://www.jezebel.com/post-dobbs-abortion-bans-have-given-abusers-a-new-power

USA – Abortion influences everything

By inhibiting drug development, economic growth, and military recruitment, as well as driving doctors away from the places they’re needed most, bans almost certainly harm you — yes, you.

By Keren Landman, MD
Mar 20, 2024

Last year in Texas, federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that, based on his read of some very bad science, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) needed to withdraw its approval of the safe and widely used abortion drug mifepristone. He claimed that the FDA hadn’t adequately considered its safety (it had) and that the lack of restrictions on the drug (there were plenty) had led to many deaths and severe adverse events (demonstrably false).

… Restricting abortion means removing women’s control over not only their bodies, but also their futures — and giving that control to someone else. In a nation where sex education and contraception access are already spotty and about half of all pregnancies are unplanned, that act is a population-level assault on women’s autonomy. The result is a psychic wound even to those who aren’t seeking abortions.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/even-better/24106111/abortion-mifepristone-kacsmaryk-fda-economic-military-readiness-mortality-mental-health-poverty

USA – Researchers call for more abortion studies to be retracted

The criticism of four older studies alleging abortion causes mental illness follows high-profile retractions of studies claiming the abortion pill is dangerous.

BY: SOFIA RESNICK
FEBRUARY 27, 2024

Health and science experts published a commentary in the British Medical Journal on Tuesday calling for the retraction of four older abortion-related studies that, despite documented flaws, have influenced major anti-abortion decisions over the past 20 years, including the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned federal abortion rights.

The commentary comes the same month academic publisher Sage Journals retracted studies calling into question the long-established safety record of the abortion drug mifepristone, which were produced by anti-abortion activists shortly before they sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over the same drug.

Continued: https://kentuckylantern.com/2024/02/27/researchers-call-for-more-abortion-studies-to-be-retracted/

Abortions Later in Pregnancy in a Post-Dobbs Era

Ivette Gomez, Alina Salganicoff, and Laurie Sobel - KFF
Published: Feb 21, 2024

Abortions occurring at or after 21 weeks gestational age are rare. They are often difficult to obtain, as they are only available in a handful of states, performed by a small subset of abortion providers and are typically costly and time-intensive. Yet, these abortions receive a disproportionate share of attention in the news, policy and the law.

…This brief explains why individuals may seek abortions later in pregnancy, how often these procedures occur, and the various laws which regulate access to abortions later in pregnancy across the country.

Continued: https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/issue-brief/abortions-later-in-pregnancy-in-a-post-dobbs-era/

21.02.2024

Research

abortions after 20 weeks

Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health

American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists

USA – The Least Understood Impact of Abortion Bans

BY MICHELLE OBERMAN
FEB 01, 2024

For the vast majority of Americans who support legal abortion in cases of rape, there is a visceral horror evoked by the news that, in the months since the Supreme Court, in Dobbs, ended the constitutional right to an abortion, rape has led to an estimated 65,000 pregnancies in states where abortion is banned. Part of the horror reflects a gut sense that it would be particularly hard, and therefore cruel, to force someone to continue a pregnancy under those circumstances.

But how does it feel to be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy under “ordinary” circumstances? Forced pregnancy has become commonplace, yet there is almost no research documenting the mental health impact of abortion bans.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/02/abortion-bans-forced-pregnancy-mental-health.html

01.02.2024

Commentary

abortion denial and mental health

abortion for mental health

These Are The Abortion Stories You Don’t Hear After Roe v. Wade

Why telling all kinds of abortion stories — particularly the mundane — is important in helping achieve reproductive justice.

BY DANIELLE CAMPOAMOR
DECEMBER 28, 2023

In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, countless stories of people being denied access to abortion care emerged, the majority focusing on instances of fatal fetal abnormality, rape, incest or catastrophic pregnancy complications.

From a woman in Texas being admitted to the ICU and nearly dying, to a 10-year-old girl in Ohio forced to cross state lines to access care after she was raped, to a mother who says she was told to wait in a hospital parking lot until she was closer to death before doctors would treat her, these stories saturated headlines across the country, and for good reason — people with the capacity to get pregnant losing the Constitutional right to bodily autonomy is, it turns out, deadly.

Continued: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/these-are-the-abortion-stories-you-dont-hear-after-roe-v-wade