What happens in the US could have global implications for abortion

What could Project 2025 mean for abortion rights around the world?

Dr Anu Kumar
27 August 2024

It has been two years since the US Supreme Court blew up federal protection for abortion, handing states the power to enact abortion bans and realising the decades-long fever-dream of anti-rights actors.

Though a minority in the US, these extremists are loud and determined and won’t stop at our borders. Their plans for the future are outlined in Project 2025, which is already being implemented in the US and abroad through anti-abortion and anti-LGBTIQ+ initiatives and would be fully executed if radical conservative forces reclaim the White House.

Continued: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/us-elections-project-2025-global-abortion-rights/

USA – One of the Most Conservative State Supreme Courts in the Country Just Rebuked Dobbs

By Mary Ziegler
Aug 05, 2024

The Utah Supreme Court, a body with a clear conservative majority, surprised many observers last week when it handed down a ruling blocking enforcement of the state’s new abortion ban, which criminalizes virtually all abortions from the moment of fertilization. The law, which was set to go into effect in 2022, was blocked by a trial court while the litigation continued, a decision affirmed by the state Supreme Court last week. The Utah decision is not just a reminder that conservative judges faced with the prospect of retention elections may be afraid to gut abortion rights; it also spotlights the chaos and confusion produced by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision undoing a right to choose abortion—and problems with using history and tradition as the only guide to identifying our most cherished rights.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/08/utah-rebukes-supreme-court-abortion-dobbs.html

05.08.2024

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

history and tradition

Mary Ziegler

Rahimi v. United States

U.S. Supreme Court

Inside the Supreme Court’s negotiations and compromise on Idaho’s abortion ban

By Joan Biskupic, CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst
Mon July 29, 2024

The Supreme Court began the year poised to build on its 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade and to deliver a new blow to abortion access.

In January, the court took the extraordinary step of letting Idaho enforce its ban on abortion with an exception only to prevent the death of a pregnant woman, despite an ongoing challenge from the Biden administration arguing that it intruded on federal protections for emergency room care.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/29/politics/supreme-court-idaho-abortion-emtala-biskupic/index.html

USA – ‘A battle to the death’: The next abortion cases en route to the Supreme Court

The cases moving through federal courts could further roll back abortion access, even if Biden wins in November.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
July 1, 2024

The Supreme Court’s decision to sidestep key legal questions in its abortion decisions this term sets up another showdown as early as next year.

And the next wave of lawsuits around the procedure — including challenges targeting the ability of patients to cross state lines for abortions, the regulation of abortion pills, and minors’ ability to get an abortion without parental consent — is already moving toward the high court.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/01/next-supreme-court-abortion-cases-00166134

Supreme Court decision allows pregnant people in Idaho to access emergency abortion care — for now

By Jen Christensen, CNN
Thu June 27, 2024

Pregnant people in Idaho should be able to access abortion in a medical emergency in Idaho, at least for now.

The Supreme Court formally dismissed an appeal over Idaho’s strict abortion ban on Thursday, blocking enforcement of the state’s law where it conflicts with federal law. With Thursday’s decision, the state would not be allowed to deny an emergency abortion to a pregnant person whose health is in danger, at least while the case makes its way through the courts.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/26/health/emtala-emergency-care-scotus/index.html

USA – The Supreme Court’s Abortion Pill Ruling Should Satisfy Nobody

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK AND MARK JOSEPH STERN
JUNE 13, 2024

On Thursday, the Supreme Court did the bare minimum necessary to operate like an actual court of law, unanimously throwing out an absurd and dangerous lawsuit against medication abortion. The justices do not deserve extra credit for refusing to embrace this deeply unserious litigation, and they should earn no gold stars for maintaining the legal status quo on abortion pills. They merely acted as minimally responsible adults in a room of sugared-up preschoolers, shutting down the lower courts’ lawless rampage over all known rules of standing in desperate pursuit of an anti-abortion agenda. It is chilling to the bone that activist lawyers and judges were able to wreak as much havoc as they did before SCOTUS put them in timeout.

And this bad joke of a case isn’t even over: A lower court has already teed up a do-over that could once again jeopardize access to reproductive care in all 50 states. Don’t call this decision a victory. It is at best a reprieve—an election-year performance of Supreme Court unanimity and sobriety that masks the damage the conservative supermajority has already inflicted, as well as the threats to reproductive freedom that lie ahead.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/06/supreme-court-abortion-pill-ruling-2024-comstock-threat.html

13.06.2024

FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

U.S. Supreme Court unanimously strikes down legal challenge to abortion pill mifepristone

The ruling preserves access to the mail-order medication nationwide.

By Devin Dwyer
June 13, 2024

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ruled a group of doctors lacked legal standing to challenge the Food and Drug Administration's regulation of the abortion pill mifepristone, preserving access to the medication nationwide.

The unanimous opinion was authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

The case put abortion access back in the spotlight for the court for the first time since its conservative majority voted to overrule Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/supreme-court-unanimously-strikes-legal-challenge-abortion-pill/story?id=110439079

13.06.2024

abortion pills

Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

Food and Drug Administration

Katie Daniel

mifepristone

Roe v. Wade

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America

U.S. Supreme Court

SCOTUS v. Pregnant Patients: Idaho’s Abortion Fight Could Blow Up a “Revolutionary” Health Care Law

“My reaction can be summed up as ‘appalled,’” says health policy guru Sara Rosenbaum.

NINA MARTIN, Mother Jones
Apr 27, 2024

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in what could end up being its most consequential abortion decision since Dobbs. In a case pitting Idaho’s extreme abortion ban against a federal law known as EMTALA—that since 1986 has required hospitals to provide emergency care—conservative justices seemed to embrace the idea that states can deny crisis medical treatment to pregnant patients, even if doing so means those patients suffer catastrophic, life-altering injuries. “My reaction can be summed up as ‘appalled,’” says Sara Rosenbaum, emerita professor at George Washington University who is one of the country’s foremost experts in health policy issues affecting women and families. “Will [the court] really say it is fine [to enforce] a law that costs women their organs as long as they don’t die?”

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/scotus-v-pregnant-patients-idahos-abortion-fight-could-blow-up-a-revolutionary-health-care-law/

27.04.2024

Interviews/Podcasts

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act

USA – The Reactionary Justices Won’t Stop Until Abortions Are Illegal Everywhere

Oral arguments in Idaho case make clear that further, even more radical attacks on reproductive freedom are coming.

JEET HEER
April 26, 2024

The five right-wing Supreme Court justices who overturned the constitutional right to abortion in the 2022 decision Dobbs v. Jackson built their argument on lies, one of which was a promise (pinkie swear!) that, despite the apparent radicalism of extinguishing Roe v. Wade, the court would henceforth respect precedent, leave abortion to the political arena, and not touch other decisions recognizing social and sexual rights. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito told a story that went something like this: Roe was such a bad decision that it was an outlier, a rare precedent that—like the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that enshrined racial segregation—was so egregious the court had to cast it aside. Roe was bad because it took abortion, properly a decision best left to the democratic contestation in the state and federal legislatures, and imposed a national consensus that had no popular legitimacy. According to Scalia, “The Court short-circuited the democratic process by closing to it the large number of Americans who dissented in any respect from Roe.”

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/supreme-court-abortion-idaho/

26.04.2024

Commentary

Clarence Thomas

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act

USA – The Lie at the Heart of the Latest Supreme Court Abortion Case

‘Life of the mother’ exceptions are nothing more than a politically expedient lie designed to distract from the violence inherent in the maintenance of abortion bans.

4/22/2024
by TESS GRAHAM

Idaho will attempt to defend its extreme abortion ban at the Supreme Court this Wednesday. Like many other abortion bans in the United States, the Idaho law contains a so-called life exception, which purports to allow an abortion when “necessary to prevent the death” of the pregnant person. But do these exceptions actually preserve the lives of patients in practice? As Mayron Hollis, Amanda Zurawski, the family of Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, and countless other women can attest, the answer is no. And the truth is, they’re not designed to.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2024/04/22/abortion-exception-life-health-of-mother-death/