All Women's Medical Pavilion

#abortion #rights How Texas Abortion Volunteers Are Adapting After S.B. 8 https://abortion-blog.com//how-texas-abortion-volunteers-/ In addition to helping pe...ople get to abortion appointments out of state, volunteer groups have been inundated with requests to deliver Plan B pills and pregnancy tests. Amanda Bennett was in the Texas legislature this past May, on the day that Senate Bill 8, a near-total ban on abortions, was passed by the state’s House of Representatives. Bennett, a twenty-nine-year-old pro-choice activist, had gone to the capitol to protest the legislation. She recalled the eerie calm that daythere wasn’t much debate over the law, which prohibits abortions upon detection of fetal cardiac activity (starting as early as six weeks into a pregnancy) and does not make exceptions for survivors of rape or incest. Many observers assumed that the law would soon be struck down in court. It wasn’t anything like Wendy Davis’s filibuster, Bennett said, referring to the Texas state senator’s thirteen-hour attempt to block S.B. 5, an earlier antiabortion bill, in 2013. It just passed quietly. I honestly think even some of the Republicans thought it was purely symbolic. But, nearly four months later, the Supreme Court refused to strike down the ban, and getting an abortion in Texas, which was already extremely difficult, became almost impossible. Bennett is a member of the Bridge Collective, a small group of volunteers in Austin who drive people to their abortion appointments. She joined the organization in 2016, a couple of years after moving to the city, from Chicago, to study public policy at the University of Texas. Back then, she wanted to be a diplomat. But she developed an interest in abortion rights after talking to a college friend who had volunteered as an abortion-clinic escortsomeone who helps patients enter and exit the facilities, which are often mobbed by protesters. From talking to her, I realized that it was just luck that I’d always had access to birth control, and that my birth control had never failed, Bennett recalled. At first, she worked part time for Fund Texas Choice, a group that helps people pay for travel costs, such as bus or plane fare, to get to abortion clinics both inside and outside the state. She quickly realized, however, that she wanted to do something more hands-on, so she signed up to be a driver with the Bridge Collective. The number of abortion clinics in Texas has been on the decline for a long time, owing to targeted restrictions on abortion providers, or so-called trap laws, which impose hard-to-meet standards that often result in clinics having to shut down. (These range from building specificationshallway widths or operating-room dimensionsto requirements regarding locations and relationships with nearby hospitals, which can be especially difficult for rural providers to fulfill.) In the past several years, Texas went from having more than forty surgical abortion clinics to a total of nineteen. The Bridge Collective serves people within a hundred-mile radius of Austin, where some of the remaining clinics are clustered. But even Austin locals need help getting to their appointments. If you’re getting sedation, you can’t drive yourself, Bennett explained, adding that all the appointments are during the workday, and Austin has terrible public transportation. Bennett’s driver training was on a weekend, and the volunteers included men, women, and nonbinary people. In their regular lives, they were social workers, small-business owners, food-service workers, students, and retirees. (Bennett works at a digital-security company and has flexible hours, leaving her time to volunteer.) The trainees learned about the different types of appointments that they might be taking their passengers to: the ultrasound and consultation, which is required by Texas law before a patient is able to get an abortion; the medication abortion, which usually means going to the clinic, where a doctor will administer the first pill, and then stopping at a pharmacy afterward to pick up an additional prescription; and the in-clinic procedure, a surgical abortion that can sometimes take two days. They were also coached on matters of empathy. Everyone having an abortion is thinking about the experience differently, Bennett said. Some people might talk about their ‘baby.’ Others talk about their ‘pregnancy.’ Drivers are taught to mirror their passengers’ language. After the training, Bennett started driving. Once a month, she would get into her Ford hatchback and ferry someone to an abortion appointment. The passengers were surprisingly diverse: middle-aged moms from the Austin area; young people from Central Texas; soldiers from a military base in nearby Killeen, who are unable to get the procedure on the base owing to restrictions in the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for most abortions. Sometimes people, when they do this, imagine, I’m going to be helping young women, Bennett said. But, really, people of all reproductive ages have abortions. The conversations in the car vary. With some people, it’s like an Uber drive, Bennett saidthere’s a brief exchange, and then they ride in silence. For others, it’s the opposite. I might be the first nonjudgmental person they get to talk to outside the clinic, she explained. Bennett has heard tales from her passengers of rape, medical troubles, failed relationships, and child rearing. (Two-thirds of patients who seek an abortion already have children.) She also hears about her passengers’ dreams and goals. Some people talk about finally making a decision for themselves, she said, or prioritizing themselves for a change. Money is almost always an issue. Abortions cost a minimum of five hundred dollars, and, in Texas, insurance doesn’t cover the procedure. Many people fail to get abortions because they can’t come up with the money. The response to that is, ‘Well, a kid is way more expensive than an abortion,’ Bennett said. But that doesn’t make five hundred dollars materialize when you need it. Her passengers sometimes ask her to stop at an A.T.M., and often seem anxious because they’re short on cash. In 2019, Bennett became one of the Bridge Collective’s core members, meaning that she started training and coördinating other drivers. This past August, there was a flurry of activity, as patients scrambled to get to clinics before S.B. 8 went into effect, on September 1st. Since then, the Bridge Collective’s core members have been scrambling to figure out their next chapter. Bennett said that calls for rides haven’t entirely stopped, but being an abortion driver now is much more complicated: it used to mean taking a short trip around the Austin area, but now it can entail taking someone to and from the airport, or driving six hours to Oklahoma, and then staying at a hotel overnight. In addition, the Bridge Collective has received hundreds of requests for Plan B pills and pregnancy tests. Its members have begun delivering these items and other safe-sex supplies to people in the Austin area, and the group plans to expand the service to college campuses and other cities throughout Texas. We’re just exhausted, Bennett said. But we’re going to keep helping people. Because people need help. Bennett has also been fielding calls from well-meaning blue-state residents who are looking to provide aid in Texas. She suggests that they look closer to home. They’ll say things like, ‘I wish I could do the kind of work that you do, but I live in New York.’ It’s, like, people in New York still need help getting abortions! Can you walk into a pharmacy and get abortion pills? Even in New York, the answer is no, which means that abortion drivers are in demand. Source: https://www.newyorker.com//how-texas-abortion-volunteers-a

#abortion #rights These 5 Cases Could Finish Off Abortion Rights for Good After ‘Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health’ https://abortion-blog.com//these-5-cases-coul...d-finish-off/ The legal fights in Texas and Mississippi aren’t the only major abortion cases in the pipeline right now. We’re tracking them all. For court watchers and abortion rights enthusiasts, it has been a long couple of weeks. First, the Supreme Court allowed a six-week abortion ban with bounty hunter-style enforcement to take effect in Texas. Then the Supreme Court announced a hearing date for the much anticipated Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which will decide the fate of Mississippi’s 15-week ban and Roe v. Wade itself. To say it has been a whirlwind is an understatement. But the legal fights in Texas and Mississippi aren’t the only major abortion cases in the pipeline right now. There are a number of potentially critical lawsuits making their way through the lower courtsand one at the Supreme Courtand we’re here to track them all. Here are five cases we’ve got our eye on right now. Cameron v. EMW Women’s Surgical Center You may know Daniel Cameron as the man who declined to recommend homicide charges for the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor. But, as Susan Rinkunas reported for Rewire News Group, Kentucky’s Republican attorney general is also the reason why the Supreme Court will hear an abortion-related case this monththe first abortion-related case in this new term under its 6-3 conservative supermajority. The Sixth Circuit initially blocked the law; Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, who is pro-choice, then decided to drop the case altogether. But that didn’t stop Cameron from intervening, hoping to bring the case all the way up to the Supreme Court. The case is about a law banning the most common abortion procedure used after 15 weeks of pregnancy, known as dilation and evacuation (D&E). If the Supreme Court sides with Attorney General Cameron, then he will get to pursue his goal, which is to overturn the underlying decision striking down the abortion ban, the ACLU’s Alexa Kolbi-Molinas told Rewire News Group. If Cameron is able to intervene and the law gets upheld, it could effectively ban abortion after 15 weeks in a state that has just two clinics and multiple restrictions, including a 24-hour waiting period and bans on insurance coverage of the procedure. Both clinics are in downtown Louisville, which means access is limited for people in other areas of the state.The plaintiff in the case is EMW Women’s Surgical Center, the state’s only independent abortion clinic and the only one that provides care after 14 weeks of pregnancy. Current status: Oral arguments will be heard today Reproductive Health Services v. Parsons In 2019, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson signed one of the country’s most restrictive abortion bills into law. It is structured like a Russian nesting doll: It includes bans within bans, so that as soon as one is struck down, another is ready to go. HB 126 includes gestational bans at eight, 14, 18, and 20 weeks, as well as reason bans, which prohibit performing an abortion if the reason given for the abortion is based on sex, race, or fetal diagnosis. The law also makes it harder for patients to obtain abortion care out of state because it requires them to comply with Missouri’s informed consent standard, and it forces young people to notify their parents of their abortion decision. And it includes a trigger provision that would immediately ban abortion if Roe v. Wade were overturned. The gestational and reason bans were struck down as unconstitutional in the district court and the Eighth Circuit, but the other provisions remain in effect, further limiting access in the state. Current status: The Eighth Circuit, which already struck down the reason and gestational bans, decided to rehear the case on its own, without an appeal from the partieswhich is incredibly unusual. Why? Because they felt like it? Who even knows anymore. For more on how that September 21 hearing went, Rewire News Group’s senior editor for law and policy, Imani Gandy, live-tweeted the whole thing. SisterSong v. Kemp This case is about Georgia’s six-week ban, which, like Texas’ six-week ban and every other six-week ban, is a pre-viability abortion ban and is thereforesay it with usunconstitutional. In 2019, the Center for Reproductive Rights sued Georgia on behalf of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective as well as a number of other providers and advocates in the state. In July 2020, the district court granted a permanent injunction striking down the law. The state then appealed that decision up to the 11th Circuit. If you had asked us two months ago what was going to happen, we’d have said a six-week ban will never survive. But with Texas’ six-week ban getting the stamp of approval from the Supreme Court, (then getting blocked by the district court then getting reinstated by the Fifth Circuitit’s been a long few weeks) the floodgates have opened for lower courts to let similar laws go into effect. And last month the 11th Circuit issued a stay on SisterSong v. Kemp until after the Supreme Court rules in the Mississippi case, by which point those floodgates will likely be wide open. Current status: After the 11th Circuit heard the case on September 24, it decided to wait to make a decision until after the Supreme Court issues its Jackson Women’s Health decision next year. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and Greenville Women’s Clinic v. Wilson In February, South Carolina lawmakers passed one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country: a six-week ban that, like Texas SB 8, doesn’t allow for an exception in the case of rape or incest. In March, a federal district court granted a preliminary injunction against the law just as an emergency order blocking the law was set to expire. Current status: The case is on the docket at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals which, we’d feel a lot less itchy about if the Supreme Court hadn’t given abortion access the kiss of death by approving Texas’ six-week ban in September. Isaacson v. Brnovich In April, Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona signed SB 1457, a law that includes a reason ban prohibiting abortions in cases of fetal diagnosis or anomaly, and a personhood amendment that classifies fetuses, embyos, and fertilized eggs as people under Arizona law. In August, the ACLU of Arizona announced it would join the Center for Reproductive Rights to represent two Arizona physicians, the Arizona Medical Association, National Council of Jewish Women Arizona, and the Arizona National Organization of Women in challenging the law. Current status: The district court held a hearing on September 22. On September 28 a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against the reason ban but allowed the personhood amendment to go into effect. The Arizona attorney general has filed an appeal to the Ninth Circuit. Source: https://rewirenewsgroup.com//these-5-cases-could-finish-o/

#abortion #rights Where Americans stand on abortion restrictions as a new Supreme Court term opens https://abortion-blog.com//where-americans-stand-on-abort/ ...Supporters of reproductive choice take part in the nationwide Women’s March, held after Texas rolled out a near-total ban on abortion procedures and access to abortion-inducing medications, in Brownsville, Texas, U.S. October 2, 2021. REUTERS/Veronica Cardenas The type of anti-abortion law enacted by the state of Texas last month is deeply unpopular with Americans, according to a new poll from the PBS NewsHour, NPR and Marist. The novel legal strategy empowers private citizens to file civil suits against anyone who aids a person getting an abortion, rather than rely on a state agency to bar the medical procedure. It’s one of several restrictive abortion laws that are making their way through the courts. Two of them, from Kentucky and Mississippi, will be considered by the Supreme Court this term, which begins Monday. Breaking down the numbers abortion lawsuits horiz Graphic by Megan McGrew 74 percent of Americans said they oppose a law that allows private citizens to sue abortion providers or others who provide any assistance. This majority holds across party lines: 90 percent of Democrats, 57 percent of Republicans and 74 percent of independents don’t support such a law. 18 percent of Americans support the rule, including 33 percent of Republicans, 18 percent of independents and 7 percent of Democrats. Women are more likely than men to oppose the law (79 percent vs. 68 percent), and the same is true of people younger than 45 compared to those 45 and older (77 percent versus 71 percent). lawsuits bar horiz Graphic by Megan McGrew Barbara Carvalho, director of the Marist Poll, said that attitudes toward abortion have stayed relatively consistent. There is a very significant consensus among Americans. Our debate generally tends to be at the extremes, so it tends to get framed as an all or nothing. And I think that there’s a consensus among Americans that abortion should be legal, but with significant restrictions, she said. This consistency holds when it comes to enforcing abortion restrictions, she added. While this particular question has not been asked before, previous polling had similar results when it came to enforcing or criminalizing abortion, she said. Poll respondent Joan Garnand, a Tennessee Republican, said she is completely opposed to abortion, and does not like this type of law because it could encourage opportunists to file lawsuits (those who sue and win can collect $10,000, and their legal fees can be reimbursed). She said she would support a law where the biological father or family could sue because they are directly connected to the terminated pregnancy. Eric Johnson, a Republican who lives in New York, said he generally supports all anti-abortion laws, but he found the citizen enforcement component of Texas’ law too extreme. He added that abortions can’t simply be illegal, but that there need to be better options for people, like financial incentives, birth control access and a better foster care system. Where Americans stand on abortion Texas is far from the first state to attempt to make abortion illegal after six weeks, the earliest point at which cardiac activity may be detected and before some people even know they are pregnant. In this poll, about one in three Americans support a law that outlaws abortions once there is cardiac activity sometime after six to eight weeks while 58 percent are opposed. Those numbers are virtually unchanged since June of 2019, the last time a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll asked the same question. Gallup, which has been tracking views on abortion since 1975, published a poll in May that found 32 percent of Americans think abortion should be legal under any circumstance, 48 percent think it should be legal under certain circumstances and 19 percent think it should be illegal in all circumstances. According to a Pew Research Center poll from the same month, 59 percent of U.S. adults think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and 39 percent think it should be illegal in all or most cases. Carvalho said that it is important to note that while the majority of Americans are against banning abortion between six to eight weeks, a portion of them may be against it because they do not think abortion should be legal at all. What’s next The Supreme Court begins a new term on Monday with a more conservative bench, and the future of abortion rights on the line. The justices will hear arguments later this month in Cameron v. EMW Women’s Surgical Center, regarding a Kentucky law requiring that a fetus die in utero before a procedure known as dilation and evacuation can be performed during the second trimester. The court is not ruling on the law’s constitutionality, but examining a specific question: Whether the Kentucky attorney general can bring the case to the Supreme Court when no other state actors will defend the law. Law experts and abortion rights advocates say that decision could set the tone for future cases. It will give some indication about whether and to what extent the court is willing to basically overlook normal rules of procedure and ordinary processes in its eagerness to rule against abortion rights, said Leah Litman, a constitutional law professor at the University of Michigan and podcast host of the Supreme Court-themed podcast Strict Scrutiny.[The court’s] authority comes from the public’s willingness to accept its decisions and the public’s belief that the court is legitimate. On Dec. 1, the court plans to hear arguments in its biggest abortion case of the term, over a Mississippi law than bans nearly all abortions after 15 weeks a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which prevents states from imposing an undue burden on someone seeking an abortion. Litman said Roe v. Wade could be overturned, but the high court could also allow states to ban abortions before viability without saying it overruled the landmark decision. That would be extremely destabilizing to the law and open the floodgates for a bunch of abortion restrictions that are definitely not allowed now. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, abortion would be instantly illegal in a dozen states and greatly restricted in several others. The Texas law has already effectively ended abortions in that state and so far the Supreme Court has refused to block the law, due to its unique enforcement mechanism. In the meantime, a federal judge will decide whether to halt the Texas abortion ban after the Biden administration argued in court on Friday that it violates women’s constitutional rights. Abortion providers in the state say damage has already been done people have been forced to go to other states for find medical care, and even if the law is knocked down, physicians may be hesitant to resume their services. Legislators in other states, like Florida and Missouri, have said they plan to introduce similar abortion bans with civil enforcement. The practical effect of these laws will be to prohibit abortions, even though the Supreme Court hasn’t said and won’t necessarily say Roe was overruled, Litman previously told the PBS NewsHour. Around the nation, thousands of people, many of whom were motivated by the Texas law, joined a Women’s March on Saturday to protest abortion restrictions and urge the Supreme Court to uphold Roe v. Wade. No matter where you live, no matter where you are, this moment is dark, Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson told a crowd at the Rally for Abortion Justice event in Washington, D.C. Litman said it’s hard to know if support for legal abortion will influence justices on the current bench, given its more conservative makeup. But how the court rules on such cases could affect public confidence. [The court’s] authority comes from the public’s willingness to accept its decisions and the public’s belief that the court is legitimate. And if that’s no longer the case, the court’s institutional authority is at risk, she said. Source: https://www.pbs.org//most-americans-oppose-abortion-laws-t

#abortion #rights What Teens Need to Know About Texas SB 8 and Accessing Abortion https://abortion-blog.com//what-teens-need-to-know-about-/ If you’re under 1...8, it’s possible to access abortion in Texas, but thanks to the harmful laws and legal chaos, it’s extremely difficult. UPDATE, October 8: SB 8 was temporarily blocked Wednesday night as part of the Department of Justice lawsuit. Attorneys for Texas have filed an appeal with the Fifth Circuit, asking for an emergency stay of the district judge’s order. It’s been about a month since the Supreme Court more or less put its stamp of approval on Texas SB 8, which bans all abortions after six weeks with no exception for rape or incest, and only allows abortions to be performed after the six-week mark in the case of medical emergency. To make matters worse, anyone who helps someone get an abortionfrom the abortion provider, to the person who drives them to their appointmentcan be sued for a minimum of $10,000 by absolutely anyone in the country. By allowing SB 8 to go into effect, the Supreme Court has set a precedent that any state in the country can pass a similar ban, and while their decision didn’t technically overturn Roe v. Wade, a six-week ban is about as close to an outright abortion ban as you can get. What does this all mean? Especially for young people? We’re here to break that down. First of all, abortion is still legal in the state of Texas, and in neighboring states like Oklahoma. In fact, it’s still legal in the whole country. That’s the good news. The bad news is abortion is now incredibly difficult to access in Texas, and that’s especially true for young people, who already faced significant hurdles even before SB 8 went into effect. Statistics show that in Texas, there are 24 births for every 1,000 women between age 15 and 19, and the state has the highest average of repeat teen births. Teen pregnancy and birth present many challenges and are often associated with poor educational and health outcomes. To be clear, teen pregnancy is not the problem; the problem is barriers to education and care. Language around teen pregnancy and parenting too often is stigmatizing and centered on prevention, but young people, like pregnant people of any age, can be great parents if that’s what they choose and if given the support they need. They should be given resources to make the parenting decisions that are best for them. Texas is doing the opposite. For starters, in order to have an abortion right now in Texas you have to catch your pregnancy really early; six weeks pregnant is typically two weeks after your missed period. That gives you, at the absolute maximum, a two-week window to get an abortion. But statistically speaking, young people detect their pregnancies later, and this makes sense. It takes a while to understand your cycle, and no matter what age you are, there are so many things that can make your period latechanges in diet, sleep, stress, or environment can all delay a period or make it start early. Texas is one of 37 states that require young people to either involve a parent or obtain a judicial bypass to access abortion, which means that young people who can’t get a parent to approve their abortion have to go to court. That delays the abortion even more. Now let’s make one thing clear: Young people are entirely capable of making their abortion decisions however they are most comfortable, whether that involves a parent or not. And statistics show that in states without parental involvement laws, the majority of young people involve a parent regardless, and almost all young people involve a trusted adult in their abortion decision. But for young people who can’t involve a parent, parental involvement laws only present further challenges; these are often young people in foster care, or whose parents have been deported or incarcerated, or who live in abusive households. And for these minors, the delays caused by the judicial bypass process will make it nearly impossible to get an abortion in Texas before that two-week window has passed. As if that’s not bad enough, Texas also enforces a 24-hour mandatory waiting period for all abortions, adding another day’s delay. The TLDR: If you’re under 18, it’s possible to access abortion in Texas, but thanks to a bunch of harmful laws it’s really really hard. What to do if you need an abortion in Texas Put in a call to Jane’s Due Process, a Texas-based nonprofit that works with young people to help them access abortion and other reproductive health care, including by providing support for minors going through the judicial bypass process. They have a 24/7 hotline that you can call or text: 866-999-5263. Jane’s Due Process can also help you find contraceptive services, so if that’s something you want to consider to help protect you against unplanned or unwanted pregnancy, they’ve got you covered. SB 8 is so devastating for minors because, on top of the complicated and time-consuming process of getting a judicial bypass, SB 8 would make it nearly impossible to get a bypass and get an abortion in a six-week time frame. I found out I was pregnant as early as I possibly could and I still had the abortion past six weeks, said Veronika Granado, a youth advocacy fellow with Jane’s Due Process. You might be eligible to access a medication abortion, which you can find more information about here. If you have questions about the risks of self-managed abortion, you can contact the Repro Legal Helpline online or at 844-868-2812, or the Miscarriage + Abortion Hotline, which is a free service. Consider your traveling options. Traveling out of state is challenging for many reasons. For young people, the possibility of missing school, finding and paying for transportation, and finding somewhere to stay all complicate the option of traveling to a neighboring state with fewer abortion restrictions. Not to mention the complications added by a global pandemic. But if you can consider traveling, here’s what you need to know: New Mexico has almost no abortion restrictions, including no parental consent law. Oklahoma has a whole host of abortion restictions, including parental consent, a ban on telemedicine for medication abortion, and a mandatory ultrasound and waiting period. And while they don’t have an abortion ban now, lawmakers recently passed a six-week ban that will go into effect in November unless it is blocked by the courts. Arkansas also has a number of abortion restrictions including a ban at 22 weeks’ gestation, a mandatory waiting period and mandated counseling, as well as a parental consent law. Louisiana has a ban at 22 weeks’ gestation, mandatory counseling, a waiting period and ultrasound law, and a ban on telemedicine among other harmful restrictions. If traveling further is an option, there are many states you can fly to where abortion is more accessible. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul recently announced that pregnant people from Texas would be welcomed in her state with open arms; states like Maine and California allow young people to have access to abortion without parental consent. How to pay for your abortion. Check out the National Network of Abortion Funds; they have funds in every state that can help cover the costs of your abortion, including travel and lodging. You can also call your local clinic and ask them about any funding sources they might be able to connect you with, and the National Abortion Federation has a hotline that can help with abortion referrals and financial assistance. More questions? AbortionIsLegal.org has got you. Find resources for paying for abortion, medication abortion options, and locating a clinic at their website. Finally: Take a deep breath. Things are really scary right now, but there are a lot of people on your side: advocates working tireless to fight these laws and to help pregnant people access abortion care, and abortion providers in neighboring states ready to welcome patients to their clinics. Source: https://rewirenewsgroup.com//what-teens-need-to-know-abou/

#abortion #rights Texas abortion provider resumes services after judge blocks near-total ban https://abortion-blog.com//texas-abortion-provider-resume/ Amy Ha...gstrom Miller, chief executive of Whole Woman’s Health, told reporters that since the law went into effect on Sept. 1, the provider with four clinics in Texas had put patients on a waiting list if their pregnancies had advanced beyond the legal limit. So those folks were able to come in and we did provide them with abortion care today, Hagstrom Miller said during a call on with reporters. She did not say which clinics had resumed services or how many abortions they had provided. U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman in Austin on Wednesday blocked here the state from enforcing the law while litigation over its legality continues. The Republican-backed measure empowers private citizens to enforce the ban, and Texas immediately appealed the ruling to the conservative-leaning Fifth Circuit Appeals Court. The law has become a flashpoint in a national battle over abortion rights as Republican lawmakers in other states try to pass similar legislation here. In December, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a Mississippi case testing Roe v. Wade, its landmark 1973 decision that established the nationwide right to abortion access. Drexel University law professor David Cohen said Texas clinics that resume their previous abortion services while the law is blocked will be in a very precarious position. A clause in the law says providers can still be sued if the law goes back into effect after being struck down by a court. Cohen said that even if Pitman’s injunction against the law were upheld by the Supreme Court on appeal, it could still be dissolved by a subsequent decision overturning Roe v. Wade, because that decision was the basis for Pitman’s ruling. Hagstrom Miller said the retroactive clause was concerning for many medical professionals. Any abortion you provide, even with an injunction, could be seen as criminal a year from now, six months from now and you could be held accountable for every one of those. It’s pretty daunting to think about that, she said. Anti-abortion advocates said that if Pitman’s ruling is reversed on appeal, they will sue providers who have resumed abortion services. As this case develops, if there’s an opportunity for lawsuits or for enforcement in the future, that’s something that the pro-life movement is very interested in, said John Seago, legislative director for anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life. Other Texas abortion providers acknowledged they were worried about the state’s vow to appeal the injunction to a conservative-leaning appeals court. Given the state’s appeal, our health centers may not have the days or even weeks it could take to navigate new patients through Texas’s onerous abortion restrictions, the leaders of Planned Parenthood South Texas, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast and Planned Parenthood Greater Texas said in a joint statement. Molly Duane, an attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents several Texas clinics fighting the law, said abortion providers were in a difficult situation. There are independent providers across the state that are working to reopen full services and are doing so wary of the fact that the Fifth Circuit may take away this injunction at any moment, she said. Source: https://www.reuters.com//texas-abortion-provider-resumes-s

#abortion #rights A Judge Blocked Texas’s 6-Week Abortion Ban, But It’s Uncertain If Abortions Will Resume https://abortion-blog.com//a-judge-blocked-texass-6-...week-/ This Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right, Judge Robert Pitman wrote. WASHINGTON The status of abortion access in Texas was once again thrown into uncertainty Wednesday night after a federal judge issued an order halting enforcement of what he described as the state’s flagrantly unconstitutional 6-week abortion ban. The immediate effect of US District Judge Robert Pitman’s 113-page ruling and whether it will mean that providers can, or will, resume performing abortions is uncertain. Just over an hour after Pitman issued his order, Texas filed notice that it would petition the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to intervene; the state is expected to ask the appeals court to put Pitman’s order on hold as quickly as possible, which would leave the law, SB 8, in place. Pitman’s ruling came less than a week after he heard arguments on the Justice Department request for an injunction blocking the law. He refused to grant Texas’s request to pause his decision to allow state officials time to appeal, writing that Texas had forfeited the right to any such accommodation by pursuing an unprecedented and aggressive scheme to deprive its citizens of a significant and well-established constitutional right. From the moment S.B. 8 went into effect, women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution, Pitman wrote. That other courts may find a way to avoid this conclusion is theirs to decide; this Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right. Abortion providers released statements praising Pitman’s ruling but suggesting they were not sure yet if they could begin scheduling abortions that SB 8 had made illegal. The law includes a section that says doctors who perform abortions or other people who assist a pregnant person based on a court decision that is reversed later on cannot rely on that original order as a defense if they’re sued. Planned Parenthood affiliates in Texas released a joint statement saying that, While the Department of Justice’s swift action and the court’s order seek to restore Texans’ options to access abortion in their own state, we understand Texas will immediately appeal[.] Our patients and providers need the courts to allow care to resume. SB 8 has been in effect since Sept. 1. It bans nearly all abortions after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, which typically occurs around the sixth week of a pregnancy. Pitman’s order bars any state actor from taking steps that would permit enforcement of the law, which deputizes private citizens to sue doctors suspected of performing abortions or other individuals suspected of helping a pregnant person obtain the procedure. The judge made clear that his order prohibits any state court judge or clerk from accepting, processing, or taking any other action on the civil lawsuits that private individuals could bring under SB 8. He wrote that the court would have the power to issue a direct injunction that bars private individuals from bringing these types of suits, since they would be acting on behalf of the state, but he would not do so at this stage; he noted that his order blocking state courts from accepting such a case would restrict their ability to act. A person’s right under the Constitution to choose to obtain an abortion prior to fetal viability is well established. With full knowledge that depriving its citizens of this right by direct state action would be flagrantly unconstitutional, the State contrived an unprecedented and transparent statutory scheme, Pitman wrote. Pitman ordered Texas to notify all state judges and state court employees affected by his decision and to publish his ruling on all public state court websites with a visible, easy-to-understand instruction to the public that S.B. 8 lawsuits will not be accepted. Addressing Texas’s argument that siding with the Justice Department would open the floodgates to federal challenges to state laws, Pitman wrote that this case represented an exceptional situation where the constitutional rights of individuals were being violated and Texas had designed SB 8 to bar them from taking the state to court to protect those rights on their own. Pitman rejected Texas’s contention that a court couldn’t issue an injunction against the state since the law was enforced via lawsuits filed by private individuals. He criticized the state for trying to use the unusual enforcement structure as both a sword to carry out an early-term abortion ban that courts would almost certainly strike down if the state tried to enforce it on its own and a shield against legal challenges. The judge wrote that his order would send a message to other states that they could not attempt something similar to what Texas had tried to do, whether it was intended to serve a conservative or liberal political agenda he alluded to commentary by pundits about whether SB 8 could serve as a model for Democrat-led states to find a way to restrict gun rights. The American legal system cannot abide a situation where constitutional rights are only as good as the states allow, the judge wrote. SB 8 took effect at midnight on Sept. 1 after abortion providers failed to convince the US Supreme Court and a federal appeals court to stop that from happening while they pursued a constitutional challenge. Healthcare providers across the state immediately announced that they would comply with the law and stop performing abortions in cases where fetal cardiac activity could be detected, usually at the sixth week of pregnancy; providers have said 85 to 90% of abortions in the state take place after week 6. Pregnancy terms are counted from the first day of a person’s most recent period, so six weeks is typically two weeks after a missed period, which is when many people first realize they’re pregnant. Early-term state abortion bans are often referred to as heartbeat laws but that term is misleading, since a fetus’s heart valves haven’t formed at that point; an ultrasound at that stage is detecting electrical activity. Pitman wrote in a footnote that the term heartbeat was medically inaccurate. With the abortion providers’ case held up in the 5th Circuit, the Justice Department filed its own constitutional challenge to the law on Sept. 9. Unlike other early-term state abortion bans swiftly struck down by federal courts, the Texas law is unique in that it delegates enforcement to private citizens. Instead of authorizing a prosecutor to press charges or interfering with a clinic’s ability to get a license and operate, the law empowers individuals to file a civil lawsuit against a doctor they suspect of performing an abortion that’s now illegal in the state, or anyone who aids or abets that abortion a category so broad that it could apply to a person or group that helped pay for the procedure, provided transportation to a clinic, or accompanied a patient. The law created financial incentives for people to sue and placed few limits on who could bring a case; one of the only bright-line rules is that a pregnant person who receives an abortion cannot be sued. A plaintiff who wins can collect $10,000 or more in damages per abortion, as well as their legal costs. If a judge dismisses a case, the defendant cannot recoup their legal costs, so there’s no penalty for bringing a meritless case and pulling abortion providers and anyone else into court. The law doesn’t require a plaintiff to have any connection to the patient. That unusual structure opened the door for Texas to argue that Pitman didn’t have jurisdiction to consider a sweeping constitutional challenge to the law brought by the Justice Department, or anyone else for that matter that is, until someone actually brought a lawsuit, any case was based on speculation about what might happen, and there was no one the court could enter a judgment against in the meantime. During arguments last week, Pitman offered signs that he was skeptical of Texas’s position that there was no way for a court to review the constitutionality of the law, and called out the state for attempting to find a work-around when so many other states had been knocked out of court for trying to adopt early-term abortion bans that ran afoul of Supreme Court precedent. If Texas was confident a six-week ban was constitutional, he asked at the time, why did the state go to such great lengths to avoid directly enforcing it? For decades, Supreme Court precedent has held that state abortion bans before a fetus is viable typically at around week 24 of a pregnancy are unconstitutional. The justices are poised to revisit that issue in another case already on the court’s docket for the term that started this week, involving a challenge to Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. As the Justice Department’s case presses on, the abortion providers are waiting to find out if the Supreme Court will consider their latest petition for the justices to intervene. On the eve of SB 8 taking effect, the 5th Circuit had put that case also before Pitman on hold after Pitman rebuffed an early effort by the defendants named in that case to have the case dismissed. The law took effect after a majority of the justices declined to disturb the 5th Circuit’s handling of the case. A 5th Circuit panel later explained that there was a good chance the abortion providers would lose on the question of whether they could sue at all, and the case is now waiting for the appeals court to make a definite ruling on that. The abortion providers on Sept. 23 asked the justices to skip that next step before the 5th Circuit and take up the question as soon as possible of whether anyone could sue. The justices have yet to take any action on the question. Source: https://www.buzzfeednews.com//judge-block-texas-abortion-l

#abortion #rights The Supreme Court Sneak Attack on Abortion Access in Kentucky https://abortion-blog.com//the-supreme-court-sneak-attack/ The Supreme Court w...ill weigh in on a relatively wonky issue, but abortion advocates say the stakes are still incredibly high for the people in Kentucky. You may know Daniel Cameron as the man who declined to recommend homicide charges for the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor. But Kentucky’s Republican attorney general is also the reason why the Supreme Court will hear an abortion-related case this month, the first abortion-related case in this new term under its 6-3 conservative supermajority. That’s right, the high court has two abortion cases on its docket so far, not just the high-profile Mississippi one in which the state flat-out asked the Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Kentucky case, Cameron v. EMW Women’s Surgical Center, has gotten less attention because the stakes in the Mississippi case are so high and because of the legal chaos in Texas. Moreover, the Court is weighing in on a relatively wonky issue here: whether Cameron can intervene to defend a law after both a district court and an appeals court found it unconstitutional, and after the state’s Democratic administration declined to appeal that decision. The justices are not considering the merits of the anti-abortion law itself. But don’t let anyone tell you this case is unimportant procedural stuff. Even though the legal question doesn’t have to do with abortion, the stakes here are still incredibly high, especially for people in Kentucky, said Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, who will argue the case on October 12. The law Cameron wants to defend is a ban on the most common abortion procedure used after 15 weeks of pregnancy, known as dilation and evacuation (D&E). If the Supreme Court sides with Attorney General Cameron, then he will get to pursue his goal, which is to overturn the underlying decision striking down the abortion ban, Kolbi-Molinas told Rewire News Group. If Cameron is able to intervene and the law gets upheld, it could effectively ban abortion after 15 weeks in a state that has just two clinics and multiple restrictions, including a 24-hour waiting period and bans on insurance coverage of the procedure. Both clinics are in downtown Louisville, which means access is limited for people in other areas of the state. The plaintiff in the case is EMW Women’s Surgical Center, the state’s only independent abortion clinic and the only one that provides care after 14 weeks of pregnancy. Kentucky’s other clinic, a Planned Parenthood health center, was granted a license in January 2020 and offers care through 13 weeks and 6 days, so the D&E ban would not affect it. The Ohio Policy Evaluation Network (OPEN) estimated that EMW provided nearly 90 percent of abortions in the state between March and December 2020, since the clinic provides care more days per week and later in pregnancy. EMW has been the state’s only clinic for long stretches of time, and it gets targeted by protesters both for that reason and because of its setup, said Meg Sasse Stern, who has been a volunteer clinic escort for more than 20 years. EMW is on a main thoroughfare with no on-site parking for patients, so they have to park elsewhere and walk through the front door, often through a gauntlet of protesters who may try to block their path, grab them, or hand them anti-abortion pamphlets or baby booties, Stern said. An anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center right next door offers free parking to EMW patients in an effort to get them inside. In 2017, EMW was the site of the first clinic blockade in almost 15 years, orchestrated by the extremist anti-abortion group Operation Save America. Staff are routinely harassed with threats of harm and hate mail, and, in April 2020, a bomb threat, according to OPEN.I cannot ignore the vast difference in treatment received by these anti-abortion protesters and the way that our police department treats protesters that are demanding police stop killing Black and brown people. -Meg Sasse Stern, volunteer clinic escort By contrast, Planned Parenthood’s health center has a parking lot and a privacy fence around the property, Stern said. The protesters do not have the same kind of access to the patients [at Planned Parenthood], said Stern, who is also the support fund director for Kentucky Health Justice Network, a reproductive justice nonprofit that pairs abortion patients with a case manager and helps them pay for their procedure, transportation, lodging, childcare, and other expenses. They see EMW as low-hanging fruit. Ona Marshall, who co-owns EMW with her husband Dr. Ernest Marshall, said protesters and state lawmakers are always targeting their clinic, but I think in general, they just want to abolish abortion and access to abortion, so they go through the series of laws to see what they’ll be able to do. In May, the Louisville Metro Council voted to create a safety zone around the clinic entrance, and the 10-foot buffer zone was implemented in mid-September. Marshall said advocates pushed for the safety zone because of the lack of enforcement of various city ordinances regulating things like harassment, noise, and sidewalk access. She also noted that these same ordinances were enforced against social justice protests after Breonna Taylor’s death, and the Louisville Metro Police Department is now under a pattern and practice investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. LMPD arrested the state’s only Black woman lawmaker, state Rep. Attica Scott, during a September 2020 protest. Anti-abortion protesters are ignored and just treated differently than other protesters, Marshall said. Stern agreed that the difference is obvious: I cannot ignore the vast difference in treatment received by these anti-abortion protesters and the way that our police department treats protesters that are demanding police stop killing Black and brown people. Both Marshall and Stern are skeptical that the safety zone around EMW will be enforced due to anti-abortion sentiments in the police department. During an August 2020 Metro Council meeting about the proposed safety zone, former council member David Yates, now a Democratic state senator, said he received text messages from police officers asking, who’s going to enforce this lol. In February, an off-duty officer parked his LMPD cruiser in front of the clinic and protested for about two hours with a pray to end abortion sandwich-board sign over his uniform and his gun visible, Stern said. The department placed the officer on administrative leave while investigating the incident, but he was ultimately not disciplined because LMPD hadn’t been consistently enforcing its protesting policies. LMPD said it would require strict compliance going forward. Stern said the behavior that LMPD tolerates outside the clinic is a public safety risk. The environment that exists down there just welcomes this kind of extreme behavior where we get these national extremists, she said, adding that John Brockhoeft, a convicted clinic arsonist who attended the January 6 insurrection, is a regular at EMW. Like Stern, Marshall is worried that violent protesters feel empowered. During the last five years, we have experienced a significant and sustained increase in the types of anti-abortion harassment, and those are the types of harassment that have led to tragic outcomes in other cities, so it is something to really pay attention to, she said. But not a lot of people are paying attention to either the protesters or the Supreme Court case. In general in Kentucky, and probably in other states, I don’t think there’s a high level of knowledge about this case, Marshall said. And with many people checked out, Cameron is pursuing this piece of his concerted strategy to push abortion access entirely out of reach without much fanfare, Kolbi-Molinas of the ACLU said. When the Supreme Court announced it would take Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi’s direct challenge to Roe, this Kentucky case got somewhat overshadowed. Not wrongfully, not malice or anything like thatbut the legal question isn’t about abortion, Kolbi-Molinas said. But remember: There is more than one case on the Supreme Court’s docket this term that implicates abortion access. Source: https://rewirenewsgroup.com//the-supreme-court-sneak-atta/

#abortion #rights Op-Ed: What it’s like operating a Texas abortion clinic under the state’s new ban https://abortion-blog.com//op-ed-what-its-like-operating-/... It’s been nearly a month since our country’s cruelest abortion ban went into effect. As of midnight Sept. 1, most Texans seeking abortion care have been left powerless and afraid. Providing abortion care in Texas was difficult before, but now we are living in a dystopian nightmare. Let me share what it was like on the night of Aug. 31 at Whole Woman’s Health of Fort Worth. In the hours leading up to midnight, the waiting room was filled with patients hoping to get an abortion before Senate Bill 8 went into effect. Staffers and doctors had been working since 7:30 a.m., and they were still there providing abortions until 11:56 p.m. Outside, the antiabortion protesters kept us under tight surveillance all day long. Come nightfall, they shined flashlights into patients’ cars, the clinic and the parking lot. Inside the clinic, there was love, support, bravery, integrity and deep commitment to human rights. We held out hope that the Supreme Court would bar the law from going into effect. But that justice never came. Today, it is illegal to provide abortions after about six weeks in Texas. Whole Woman’s Health and Whole Woman’s Health Alliance clinics are still open and providing abortions, but every day we turn away most people who need abortion care. We provide abortions for the few we can help those who are lucky enough to make it in under the narrow limit. Six weeks pregnant means just two weeks past your missed period. As for those who are denied care? They are stunned, numb, frozen. This law goes against everything we believe in. It prevents doctors from treating patients and turns Texans’ care over to self-appointed vigilantes who are encouraged by a bounty reward system. We’d prefer to defy this unjust ban, but SB 8 is far too terrifying. Our staffers are being surveilled constantly from the protesters on our sidewalks to the threatening phone calls we get every day. People who are eager to sue us send fake patients into our clinics to see if we will break the law. Our nurses, medical assistants, and counselors are alert, afraid, anxious, worried, and in fear. Many of our physicians have opted out of providing care while SB 8 is in effect. It is just too risky for them. It is a horror tale. SB 8 puts incredible power into the hands of people who have terrorized us and our patients for decades. And lawmakers in other states are already following in Texas’ footsteps. The Florida Legislature recently introduced a copycat bill, hoping to severely limit abortion access the same way as Texas. There is no saying where this will stop. SB 8 comes on top of layers of restrictions on people’s access to abortion in Texas. For the last two decades, Texas politicians have imposed forced ultrasounds, a ban on using Medicaid or insurance, two-visit requirements, a mandated 24-hour waiting period, operational regulatory schemes, a ban on a standard abortion method, gestational limits, ambulatory surgical centers facility standards, etc. As if this wasn’t enough, just over a week ago a ban on medication abortion after 49 days was signed into law, and it’s set to go into effect Dec. 2. With each restriction, more people are unable to get the abortion care they need. People of color and young people are the most affected. These laws haven’t improved health outcomes, made pregnancies safer or prevented unplanned pregnancy. In fact, the maternal mortality rate in Texas is on par with the rates in developing countries. I founded Whole Woman’s Health in 2003 in Texas because I believe all people no matter where they live deserve access to quality abortion care that is delivered with respect and dignity. We take on the shame and stigma that has been created by those who oppose abortion and defend this constitutionally protected right against political interference and intimidation. I now operate four clinics in Texas and five more across the South and the Midwest where compassionate care is needed most. Over the last 18 years, the hurdles to operate abortion clinics in Texas have become mountains. We fought against insidious attacks like SB 8 before. In fact, we won our 2016 case, Whole Woman’s Health vs. Hellerstedt, at the Supreme Court. But clinics can’t fix all these problems alone. If clinics close because SB 8 is enforced long enough to drain all our resources, the damage will be done even if it is eventually struck down. So, why should all Americans care? Because what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas. Texas is a barometer for abortion care in this country Roe vs. Wade was also a Texas case. The truth about Texas? SB 8 does not reflect Texas values or the feelings and beliefs of most Texans. Yet the powerful few have weaponized abortion stigma into laws like SB 8. And let’s be clear there are no safe haven states for people who need abortions, only states with fewer barriers. Even in states such as California or New York, with state law protections for abortion, many who need care can’t travel the distance to the nearest clinic, or can’t afford the cost of their care, or can’t take time from work or find child care for their kids. Millions of people men and women have benefited from access to abortion in this country. Abortion bans like SB 8 rob us of our ability to make decisions about our lives and futures, to support our families, to pursue our dreams, to remain safe and whole, to be healthy. The people of Texas are suffering every day this law stays in effect. Source: https://www.latimes.com//texas-abortion-clinic-state-new-b

#abortion #rights This Group Helped Dream Up Texas’ Vigilante Abortion Ban https://abortion-blog.com//this-group-helped-dream-up-tex/ Alliance Defending Freed...om is the incubation center for this type of legal approach to dismantling protections around LGBTQ and reproductive rights. The far right has long played a game of bureaucratic whack-a-mole as part of its efforts to roll back civil rights gains. This includes flooding legislative offices with calls from constituents on mailing lists, flooding the lower courts with experimental lawsuits filed by former Blackstone fellows, and refusing to give up when laws are repealed as unconstitutional. Their determination to weasel through loopholes resembles the pedantic genius of a 7-year-old who doesn’t want to go to bed yetwhat if I play the rules this way? How about that way? The endurance is formidable. Alliance Defending Freedom is the incubation center for this type of legal approach to dismantling protections around LGBTQ and reproductive rights. Founded in 1994, ADF funnels young Christian law students through their Blackstone Legal Fellowship and teaches its particular strategy for dismantling LGBTQ protections and pro-choice laws, a strategy that’s been used to great success in cases like Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado. ADF connections show up in every branch of the federal government, thanks to years of slow work to gain footholds over the last 30 years. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri both have close ties to ADF through Blackstone. Because ADF affiliates show up in nearly every big case like this, when the Texas near-total abortion ban passed into law I immediately went to look up the man who masterminded its particularly appalling strategy for undermining Roe v. Wade, and sure enoughthere was ADF on his list of former income sources, revealed in the financial disclosures he had to submit when he was nominated for a position in the Trump administration. Now, this tells us nothing about where the idea for SB 8 came from in particular, though we learned a bit more about that in the last few weeks. But it does tell us who exactly is supporting the people creating these novel legal approaches. Texas SB 8 is set up to evade the privacy protections that Roe v. Wade is based upon in part by deputizing citizens to enforce its prohibition on abortion once cardiac activitity is detected. The law employs gossip and experiential observation to allow a civil suit to be levied against anyone who is known to have performed or aided an abortion in violation of SB 8. The fun part about this bill is that the government doesn’t have to pay for these lawsuitsthe minimum $10,000 bounty and associated court fees have to be paid by the defendant if they lose the suit. SB 8 sets up scenarios where similar cases could be filed in every county in Texas against a single abortion provider, by multiple plaintiffs, and the provider would have to pay to defend themself in all those cases. This is interesting, because it appears to be an attempt to avoid situations like the North Carolina bathroom law from a few years back, which posed the problem of: If lawmakers are making it illegal for trans people to use the bathroom consistent with their gender, how the hell will they enforce it? With cops performing genitalia checks at restroom doors to ensure that everyone is using the room with stalls that matches their assigned sex? Tennessee lawmakers are facing a similar logistical nightmare with their new bathroom laws targeting trans access to facilities. The use of surveillance and the invasion of medical privacy to criminalize medical autonomy around gender and reproduction is so contrary to basic American values that it’s difficult to imagine these attempts working long-term. It’s a running issue of enforcement logistics when any of the trans-kids-in-sports bills get brought to a state house floor. How can you enforce such a requirement without essentially groping children on the soccer field? What is necessary to prove that someone meets such a regulation, and how will it be enforced? Who will be checking up on it and making sure that the law is followed? Such questions ended up getting the North Carolina bathroom bill defanged, and eventually aged out of effect. The reality is, though, that this new Texas lawdespite attempts to use civil court proceedings to sidestep logistical challenges around enforcementis still quite vulnerable to these same lines of challenge. What’s to prevent every abortion rights supporter with means from filing a lawsuit in every county in Texas against, say, the attorney general of Texas, accusing him of aiding and abbeting an abortion? A lawsuit might prove those allegations to be false and the attorney filing the lawsuit might find themselves subject to financial sanction, but the resulting flooding of an already oversaturated legal system that’s fallen even further behind thanks to COVID-19 would be a nightmare of bureaucratic logistics. These cases would almost certainly be thrown out as a waste of the court’s timebut what if not all of them were? What if the volume was so overwhelming that the legislature would have to step in and amend the law, defanging its ridiculous scope? The fact that such a strategy might actually work is testament to the failure of the pro-abortion left to strategize on the same level as the right by trying everything that might stick. The pragmatism of blunt strategic force seems to be working. Ultimately, ADF and similar right-wing groups are succeeding with their strategy of overwhelming our civil systems as a substitute for having the will of the people on their side. Their strategyswamping state legislatures with increasingly draconian copycat legislation, and flooding federal courts with bogus religious liberties cases attacking civil rights gainsis rapidly rewriting civil rights law and undoing decades of progressive progress. Similar bills will be brought to the floor in other states next year, for certain. But the thing is: When pedantry is the game, both sides can play. Source: https://rewirenewsgroup.com//this-group-helped-dream-up-/

#abortion #rights ‘The Entire Conversation Needs To Change’: Reproductive Justice Leaders On The Fight For Abortion Access https://abortion-blog.com//the-entir...e-conversation-needs-/ The recent Texas law is part of an onslaught years in the makingyet few heeded the warning. In Sept. 1, Senate Bill 8 went into effect, banning abortions in the state of Texas after about six weeks of pregnancy with nearly no exceptions, becoming the most restrictive abortion law in the nation. The Supreme Court, with its conservative majority, failed to block the law, so even with a Democrat in the White House and a Democrat-led Congress, millions of women and transgender and non-binary people had their rights stripped away from them like a thief in the night. But for those who have been paying attention to the changing Court and as state-level lawmakers have consistently worked to restrict abortion access, especially over this past year, the news from Texas comes as little surprise. It was an onslaught years in the making, yet few heeded the warning. Reproductive justice leaders on the front lines have long been sounding the alarm about conservatives consolidating power at the state level, leading to this year’s widespread attacks on abortion access and voting rights. Now, with the midterms fast approaching, we can’t afford to lose voters to burnout and disillusionment. Instead, we have to listen to the leaders who’ve been working around the clock to ensure people have safe and destigmatized access to healthcare. We have to have a new, robust, mainstream conversation about reproductive justiceabout where we are failing and where we can still succeed. We have to ground people in the true stakes of this fight and make clear who will be most affected by these restrictive policies. Regardless of the outcome of any one election, we must always be out in the streets, participating in and advocating for the future we want. To do so, ELLE.com brought together four Black and Latinx women who’ve all had a front row seat to the national struggle for abortion careand have been directly impacted themselves. Below, these healthcare consultants, advocates, and practitioners discuss the devastating effects of this Texas law and what we can do now to change course. What was your initial response when the Supreme Court failed to stop this Texas law? reproductive justice leaders COURTESY Angela Doyinsola Aina, MPH, co-founder and executive director of the Black Mamas Matter Alliance: At the root of this racist, heteropatriarchal law is white supremacy. SB 8 not only prohibits most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy but also empowers individuals to sue anyone who aids or abets a person accessing an abortion, including doctors, staff, drivers, and other community members. We know that Black mamas, their families, and communities will face the most dire consequences as a result of these types of laws that restrict their fundamental rights to comprehensive reproductive and maternal healthcare. All of a sudden, your friends and family are debating the morality of abortion on your timeline or in your group chats, sometimes not knowing they too know someone who has had an abortion. reproductive justice leaders COURTESY Ana Lucia Carmelo, MPH, healthcare consultant, public health advocate, and proud Peruvian immigrant: We know that abortions continue to happen even when they are not legal, and these type of bans disproportionately impact the underserved. It can be easy to feel hopeless, and events like this are especially triggering for people who have had abortions. All of a sudden, your friends and family are debating the morality of abortion on your timeline or in your group chats, sometimes not knowing they too know someone who has had an abortion. That being said, I always think about the quote by Mariame Kaba, Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair. After allowing myself time to get informed and feel my feelings, I looked for ways to get involved: donating to Texas abortion funds, amplifying messages from activists and community organizers on the ground in Texas, and vocalizing my support for abortion access. abortion rights rally BARCROFT MEDIAGETTY IMAGES What personal or professional experiences have shaped the way you approach this work? reproductive justice leaders COURTESY Cynthia Adriana Gutierrez, first-generation Nicaraguan Salvadoran and reproductive justice organizer: My personal experience of having an abortion at 22 years old has been at the forefront of how I approach this work. At the time of my abortion, I left an abusive relationship, was experiencing housing insecurity, lacked a steady income to support myself, and was living with a substance use disorder. Then, I learned I was pregnant. It was all too much to bear, and having an abortion was the best decision for me. I have no regrets and no shame around it. Being an abortion storyteller with We Testify, an organization meant to foster the leadership of people who had abortions, has transformed my work. reproductive justice leaders COURTESY Chanel Porchia, founder of Ancient Song Doula Services: The stories of my grandmother having multiple miscarriages before having my mother, my sister having a child as a teenager and seeing how she was treated within her care, my own reproductive health experiences from my early 20s, into motherhood, and now into perimenopause. How was I made to feel in every instance of my care? Was it centered in informed consent? Did my grandmother have room to not feel shame when talking about her reproductive struggles? These questions were and continue to be foundational [for me] in centering the voices of others in their reproductive health choices. reproductive rights rally PETE MAROVICHGETTY IMAGESADVERTISEMENT CONTINUE READING BELOWhttps://d9e43064650e50b0be1c34272d9e7fb8.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html The way we discuss reproductive rights and abortion access has long been debated. In what ways are we still failing to intentionally talk about this topic? reproductive justice leaders COURTESY Ana Lucia Carmelo, MPH, healthcare consultant, public health advocate, and proud Peruvian immigrant: A major failure that comes to mind is the need to find a perfect victim. Folks really emphasized the fact that the Texas law would impact rape and incest victims, especially children. But why does support and empathy have to be conditional? I understand that part of it is to get folks who would not otherwise support abortions to see the worst case scenario of the law, but ultimately that perpetuates the stigma around abortions and makes folks continuously have to justify why they chose to have one. If we only agree with abortion in these worst case scenarios, we are saying that people only deserve bodily autonomy, empathy, and access to abortions once their bodies have been violated. We cannot be content with the bare minimum of legality without critically considering what care, empathy, and access look like for people who get an abortion. If we only agree with abortion in these worst case scenarios, we are saying that people only deserve bodily autonomy, empathy, and access to abortions once their bodies have been violated. reproductive justice leaders COURTESY Cynthia Adriana Gutierrez, first-generation Nicaraguan Salvadoran and reproductive justice organizer: When it comes to speaking on reproductive justicethe human rights framework centering people of color in ensuring we all are able to decide if, when, and how to grow families free from violence and coercionand abortion access, we must always prioritize people with lived experiences. We are the experts of our own lives and are the most qualified to shut down false narratives. I hope the Court listens to us. It’s shameful that BIPOC women who have abortions are not prioritized in the national conversation. There needs to be a more intentional attempt to include the voices of abortion storytellers with disabilities, parents, those who are undocumented, and queer, trans, and gender non-conforming folks. RELATED STORYThe Whitewashing of Reproductive Justice How do you see Black and Latina women specifically being erased from this national conversation yet again? reproductive justice leaders COURTESY Chanel Porchia, founder of Ancient Song Doula Services: Through the intentional silencing of our voices due to a lack of uplifting community-based organizations that directly work with those most impacted. When policymakers, organizations, and others don’t center those most impacted, we already know that the agenda was never set in our favor, but rather continues to center privilege and access through the white gaze. Organizations like SisterWeb, Ancient Song, Mamatoto Village, Birthmark Doulas, Kindred Space LA and more have been working tirelessly to center their communities, and that directly comes from listening and meeting people where they are, not where we think they should be. Black women and our Latinx sisters are no longer asking to be heard, and out of necessity, we are now formulating our own standards of care. reproductive justice leaders COURTESY Angela Doyinsola Aina, MPH, co-founder and executive director of the Black Mamas Matter Alliance: Black and Latinx women have long been ignored, along with their reproductive rights advocacy work. The fact that there’s a long history of reproductive coercion, obstetric violence, and denial of quality care experienced by Black and Latinx women in the U.S. is a further injustice. Black women and our Latinx sisters are no longer asking to be heard, and out of necessity, we are now formulating our own standards of care. That is what the Black Mamas Matter Alliance is about. We have created a space and network that centers Black mamas’ rights to advocate, drive research, build power, and shift culture for Black maternal health, rights, and justice. abortion rally SAUL LOEBGETTY IMAGES With SB 8 in place, and the upcoming Supreme Court case that directly threatens Roe, many are discussing what a post-Roe America might look like. At a time when abortion is already so inaccessible, what’s your perspective on this? reproductive justice leaders COURTESY Ana Lucia Carmelo, MPH, healthcare consultant, public health advocate, and proud Peruvian immigrant: A lot of people currently live in places where Roe v. Wade exists merely in statute; an abortion is not an attainable reality for them due to costs, lack of nearby facilities, or poor quality care. The possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned is concerning, especially for BIPOC, but legalizing abortion is only one piece of what it would mean to make abortion accessible and destigmatized. Putting meaning behind phrases like abortion is healthcare or my body, my choice rests on complete access to affordable, dignified, and empathic reproductive healthcare. There is so much about how healthcare works in this country that is related to who we are, what we look like, and where we live. In my own experience getting an abortion at Planned Parenthood, it became clear to me just how impersonal abortion care can be, even in a progressive city like New York: the metal detectors upon entering, the lack of Spanish translators, the shuttling back and forth between rooms with no explanation, the open concept recovery rooms with no privacy, the constant mispronunciation of my name. A hyper-focus on protecting Roe v. Wade without considering the consistent access and quality issues that exist disregards the lived experience of so many people who have had an abortion. We need to protect the right to abortion, yes, but we also need to ensure that abortions are humanized, dignified, and accessible to any person that wants one. What is the most important or impactful thing we can do to shift the tide of abortion access? What or who needs to change? reproductive justice leaders COURTESY Chanel Porchia, founder of Ancient Song Doula Services: The entire conversation needs to change to understand that reproductive healthcare access in the United States is an embarrassment, to say the least, and needs to be addressed on a systemic level. When we continue to separate the full spectrum of care that individuals need at certain points in their reproductive life, of course it is Black, brown, and Indigenous peoples who feel the burden. Black, brown, and Indigenous birthing people and those seeking reproductive health services access deserve to be seen, heard, and loved. reproductive justice leaders COURTESY Ana Lucia Carmelo, MPH, healthcare consultant, public health advocate, and proud Peruvian immigrant: Collectively, I believe the single most important or impactful thing we can do to shift the tide of abortion access is to pass universal healthcare. Radically reimagining healthcare is such an important aspect of access. We have examples where a different world is possible: free COVID-19 vaccines for everyone, for instance. This is on policymakers, but we have seen that they have no impetus to make progress without pressure from us. Reproductive healthcare access in the United States is an embarrassment, to say the least, and needs to be addressed on a systemic level. reproductive justice leaders COURTESY Cynthia Adriana Gutierrez, first-generation Nicaraguan Salvadoran and reproductive justice organizer: There are so many ways you can get involved, such as driving people to their appointments, making sure they have gas money, helping out with childcare or translations, and offering your home to folks who are traveling for multi-day procedures. And of course, continue donating to Texas abortion funds: La Frontera Fund, Lilith Fund, Texas Equal Access Fund, West Fund. You can donate to all of them at once here. Source: https://www.elle.com//abortion-access-texas-reproductive/

#abortion #rights These Texas women got abortions from a California doctor after the state’s ban. Here are their stories https://abortion-blog.com//these-texas...-women-got-abortion/ OKLAHOMA CITY Ianthe Davis ended her bartending shift at 4 a.m. one recent morning in Dallas. An hour later, a friend picked her up and drove her three hours up Interstate 35 to this capital city so she could get an abortion a procedure that became almost impossible to obtain in her home state of Texas after a new law went into effect this month. At a clinic in Oklahoma City, Davis was treated by another woman who was far from home, Dr. Rebecca Taub. The obstetrician and gynecologist travels once a month from her home in the East Bay to the small clinic, where she performs dozens of abortions over the course of two days. After the procedure, Davis and her friend turned around and drove home. As a bartender, Davis said, If I don’t work, I don’t make money. A Texas woman, an Oklahoma clinic and a California doctor: The scene offered a snapshot of the landscape under the Texas law that bans nearly all abortions after an embryonic heartbeat is detected usually around six weeks and makes no exceptions for rape, sexual abuse or incest. The new law also enables private citizens to sue anyone who either performs an abortion or aids and abets one and collect $10,000 plus their legal fees if they win the case. The law has narrow exceptions to protect the life of the mother or if continuing a pregnancy would cause substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function. Ianthe Davis, 27, who traveled three hours from Dallas, lies still during an ultrasound at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City. Davis was six weeks pregnant and unable to get an abortion in her home state, so she was forced to drive to Oklahoma. Ianthe Davis, 27, who traveled three hours from Dallas, lies still during an ultrasound at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City. Davis was six weeks pregnant and unable to get an abortion in her home state, so she was forced to drive to Oklahoma.Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle The Chronicle spoke to several women on a recent weekend who traveled from Texas to a one-story, mustard-brick building in suburban Oklahoma City called the Trust Women clinic, where Taub has been working. Clinic officials said they have seen a roughly 50% increase in patients overall since the new legislation took effect, including 110 women from Texas over the past seven days. That is as many as visited the clinic during all of August. The length of Davis’ journey is not unusual. Before the ban, the average woman of childbearing age in Texas lived 17 miles from the nearest abortion provider, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights. Now, the average driving distance is 247 miles. The Texans most affected by the new law will be women of color, who constitute 70% of those who received abortions in 2019, according to Guttmacher. Abortion access is so limited in Dallas, the nation’s ninth-largest city, that Davis contacted a clinic there before the law took effect this month but was turned away. They said they wouldn’t be able to perform the procedure, she said. Demand for the clinic was so strong that she would have been 14 weeks pregnant by the time an appointment was available. The new law confused Davis. She feared telling many people about her situation because if you do, you might get charged or something like that. I know there are $10,000 rewards for people who supply information about women obtaining abortions, she said. She had heard of clinics in Arkansas and New Mexico that were seeing patients, but Trust Women was closer. When she arrived in Oklahoma City, she was just a few days over six weeks pregnant. Dr. Rebecca Taub performs a surgical abortion at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City. Taub, an OB-GYN specializing in family planning, travels once a month to the clinic in Oklahoma to perform both surgical and medical abortions. Dr. Rebecca Taub performs a surgical abortion at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City. Taub, an OB-GYN specializing in family planning, travels once a month to the clinic in Oklahoma to perform both surgical and medical abortions.Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle Davis said she understands placing limits on abortion. Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that provided women the right to have an abortion, permits the procedure until about 24 weeks, when the fetus can survive outside the womb. I do understand putting a limit, I get that part, said Davis, 27. Most people don’t find out because it’s like, soon as hell. And then there are people who were raped. Davis had a supportive family and a friend willing to drive her to a clinic. But she said she knows other Texas women who, because they can’t afford to travel out of state, are trying scientifically dubious methods of pregnancy termination that are popular online, like taking large amounts of vitamin C. But that just didn’t sound that effective to me, she said. So I made the drive. She worried about the extreme measures that others confronting unwanted pregnancies might attempt. It’s probably gonna get bad, Davis said. I mean, I heard one girl tried to drink bleach. The U.S. Justice Department sued the state of Texas to try to block the abortion law, saying it violates women’s constitutional rights by creating an undue burden on those who want to have an abortion. A hearing is scheduled for Oct. 1 in Texas. Until then, a steady stream of women like Davis will continue coming to the Trust Women clinic, where they will be greeted by doctors like Taub. Left: A poster on the wall of the locker room in the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City. Trust Women is one of the few clinics in Oklahoma to perform abortions. It is difficult for the clinic to find local doctors who will perform the procedure, so several physicians from other states make monthly trips there. Right: A stack of ultrasound images sits on a desk at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City. Left: A poster on the wall of the locker room in the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City. Trust Women is one of the few clinics in Oklahoma to perform abortions. It is difficult for the clinic to find local doctors who will perform the procedure, so several physicians from other states make monthly trips there. Right: A stack of ultrasound images sits on a desk at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City.Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle The 35-year-old East Bay obstetrician and gynecologist, clad in blue surgical scrubs, performs roughly two dozen abortions a day when she is in town because it is difficult for the clinic to recruit local doctors, a common situation in states where the procedure is culturally shunned and women are required to scale many hurdles to obtain one. To Taub, this is a form of activism. After seeing out-of-state patients and calls to the Oklahoma City clinic swell after the Texas law passed two-thirds of the calls to the clinic inquiring about services are now from the neighboring state she wants to do more. On this day, the waiting room was full of women seeking services they couldn’t find close to home. The clinic’s halls and waiting rooms were full of affirming messages, including posters saying, We Love You! Everyone Loves Someone Who Had an Abortion and Prove Them Wrong. There’s an urgency to the work that people who work with the clinic follow because they’re activists and they believe in this work, Taub said. Since the Texas law took effect, her work has definitely taken on a new urgency. The people who work at the clinic see the urgency in the faces of women like Daffnay McCoy. She, too, had an appointment for an abortion scheduled in Dallas. But she said that when the law took effect, clinic providers there explained that things had changed: They could give her a sonogram, they said, but wouldn’t perform an abortion. After traveling three hours from Dallas, Daffany McCoy, 28, rests in the recovery room after getting a surgical abortion at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City. After traveling three hours from Dallas, Daffany McCoy, 28, rests in the recovery room after getting a surgical abortion at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City.Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle It kind of kind of freaked me out. McCoy said. I got hysterical and started panicking. I was hallucinating like I was going crazy. She said she has suffered from depression in the past and was worried that not being able to secure an abortion was about to bring me back to that dark place. McCoy was already so stressed by her job in the payroll department for a Texas company, she said, that she had been suffering minor seizures. She has two children and felt she wouldn’t be able to adequately care for another. She said she is no longer with the father of her two children who also impregnated her most recently though he drove her to the clinic along with their children. McCoy said she wouldn’t have known she was even pregnant if she hadn’t gone to the hospital because she was ill. But at that time, I was already past six weeks, she said. Thank-you notes are posted on the wall at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City, one of the few clinics in Oklahoma to perform abortions. It is difficult for the clinic to find local doctors who will perform abortions, so several physicians make trips there from out of state. Thank-you notes are posted on the wall at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City, one of the few clinics in Oklahoma to perform abortions. It is difficult for the clinic to find local doctors who will perform abortions, so several physicians make trips there from out of state.Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle Once she arrived in Oklahoma City, wearing a T-shirt that said Fierce and Fabulous, she said she summoned an inner strength. She wished people who wrote the Texas law or those who criticize women for having abortions would be more empathetic toward women with unwanted pregnancies. You don’t know how this life came about. You don’t know if someone has been raped. Or if someone is going through an illness or a mental(ly unstable) state of mind. You just never know, she said. So to be on the safe side. I just feel as though no one should be obligated to make decisions for another individual. It just doesn’t make sense. Judith said she felt the same way. The 33-year-old nurse’s assistant, who asked that her last name not be used because she does not want her family to know about her abortion, was five weeks along when she learned she was pregnant too far along to find a clinic that could accommodate her before the onset of the law’s time limits. She left her home in Houston at 6:30 a.m. so she could arrive at the Oklahoma City clinic in time for her surgical procedure. She completed the 6-hour drive alone, but said it wasn’t bad. I prayed. And I listened to my gospel music. It was worth it, she said, because she didn’t feel healthy enough to have another child. She has diabetes, and her partner has kidney problems that will soon require dialysis. Plus, she already has four children. We both are sickly people. We’re just not well, Judith said. If anything happens to us, who’s gonna take care of our baby? Courtney, who also asked to be identified only by her first name, drove three hours to the clinic from a small town near Dallas. She was eight weeks pregnant. After traveling more than three hours from Grandview, Texas, Courtney, 20, waits to obtain a medication abortion at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City. Of visiting abortion clinics in Texas, she said "All of them said they wouldn't do it because the heartbeat bill passed and saying that it was too risky. It was extremely stressful. The reason I'm actually getting an abortion is that I'm worried about what it would do for my mental health and my physical health and my relationship with the rest of my family. I recently found out I have seizures. When I got pregnant it started happening more and more. I'm scared that being pregnant while having seizures would end my life." After traveling more than three hours from Grandview, Texas, Courtney, 20, waits to obtain a medication abortion at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City. Of visiting abortion clinics in Texas, she said All of them said they wouldn’t do it because the heartbeat bill passed and saying that it was too risky. It was extremely stressful. The reason I’m actually getting an abortion is that I’m worried about what it would do for my mental health and my physical health and my relationship with the rest of my family. I recently found out I have seizures. When I got pregnant it started happening more and more. I’m scared that being pregnant while having seizures would end my life.Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle The 20-year-old’s reasons for seeking an abortion were both personal and medical. She feared that if her devoutly Catholic family learned she was pregnant and unmarried, they would isolate me from the rest of the family. So going to term with this is not an option for me. She also has a medical condition that causes seizures, which had increased since she became pregnant. And so with that I’m scared that being pregnant while having seizures could end my life, she said. She tried to find a clinic in Texas, but all of them said that they wouldn’t do it because of the heartbeat bill, she said. Adding to her stress was a clutch of anti-abortion demonstrators beyond the 6-foot-high wooden picket stockade fence that surrounds the Oklahoma City clinic. As she walked inside, she said she heard them say, You’re committing murder. You’re sinning. If you need money, or a prayer, we can help. Your baby can be put up for adoption. I’m sitting there having to bite my tongue. Literally having to bite my tongue to keep from speaking, she said. My arms are shaking, my hands are shaking, not even able to ignore them, because my emotions were being stirred up. Trust Women clinic officials are expecting the flood of Texas women driving north to grow. They’re considering expanding their hours and adding staff, and are trying to recruit more doctors like Taub even if they have to pay to fly them into town. On Nov. 1, a similar fetal heartbeat bill is scheduled to take effect in Oklahoma. Abortion rights organizations are attempting to block it. Since the Texas ruling, Taub said some of her California colleagues have asked her about traveling to clinics like she does. But she has more immediate concerns about her patients once they leave Oklahoma and drive home to Texas. There are so many unknowns in how this law can and will be enforced that I am concerned that pharmacists in Texas may not fill prescriptions that they know come from an abortion clinic, even though they are not the medications that are going to enact the abortion, Taub said, referring to ibuprofen and anti-nausea medication she prescribes. Her advice to patients before they head back to Texas: I told them that they had to fill their prescriptions in Oklahoma. Volunteer Jennifer Goodner helps patient Judith, 33, in a wheelchair after a surgical abortion at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City. Judith had to travel more than six hours from Houston to get the procedure. Judith suffers from Type 1 diabetes and her partner, with whom she shares four kids, suffers from kidney failure. " I am sick. Why would I want to bring kids into this world? I know that if I'm gone no one can mother them like I do," she said. Volunteer Jennifer Goodner helps patient Judith, 33, in a wheelchair after a surgical abortion at the Trust Women clinic in Oklahoma City. Judith had to travel more than six hours from Houston to get the procedure. Judith suffers from Type 1 diabetes and her partner, with whom she shares four kids, suffers from kidney failure. I am sick. Why would I want to bring kids into this world? I know that if I’m gone no one can mother them like I do, she said.Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com//texas-abortion-ban-oklahoma-c

#abortion #rights Germans Are Posting Abortion Information Online to Protest Nazi-Era Law Doctors in Germany can face up to two years in prison for providing *a...ny* detailed information about abortion online. This law has limited abortion access across the country, and has been particularly harmful to people in rural communities. Read about how German reproductive rights advocates are standing up to this outdated law. https://abortion-blog.com//germans-are-posting-abortion-i/ Doctors in Germany offering any information about the procedure online face two years in prison or jail time. Jasmin Schreiber isn’t a doctor. Yet, you’ll find more information about abortion on her website than that of just about any medical professional in Germany. That isn’t because German doctors are particularly adverse to informing their patients about abortion, but rather because of Section 219a, a Nazi-era law that prohibits doctors from ‘advertising’ abortions. In practice, this means that doctors in Germany providing any information online about abortion beyond the fact that they offer themincluding cost, available methods, and procedurecan face two years in prison or a fine. Meanwhile, anti-abortion websites that promote the widely disproven silent scream theory and falsely claim that medication abortions leave the child to slowly starve in the womb are allowed to stay online. ADVERTISEMENThttps://8f4cbe7c40e8d3bba605f0443e7d0c86.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html Last week, it was this law that was cited by a court in Frankfurt while upholding a conviction against gynecologist Kristina Hänela face of the pro-choice movement in Germanyfor providing a PDF factsheet about abortion on her website. Citing the financial costs of potential fines, Hänel has since taken the factsheet down from her own site, but it can still be found here. The move sparked outrage online, with some including Schreiber (herself a popular German writer) and information rights campaign group FragDenStaat posting the information to their own sites in solidarity with Hänel. I went into action that same evening [of Hänel’s conviction] and published the link the next day, Schreiber wrote to Motherboard over email. My first reaction was not shock or similar, since I have been following the case from the beginning. I would have been very surprised if anything else had come out of it, as bitter as that sounds. The view that someone (cis women, but also trans men or non-binary people) would just ‘spontaneously’ or ‘just for the hell of it’ have an abortion if they were allowed access to this medical treatment and the associated information and therefore shielded from it ‘for safety’s sake’ is deeply patriarchal and authoritarian, she added. Experts that Motherboard spoke to said that regressive laws such as Section 219a continue to keep abortion stigmatized and out of sight, hamstringing medical professionals’ ability to inform their patients and, in the process, creating an information asymmetry capitalized on by conservative anti-abortion groups. Because of this, Germany faces an ever increasing shortage of doctors offering the procedure, causing long waiting times and leaving rural areas of the country critically underserved. They described the situation as a catastrophe. It is exactly this information asymmetry that Merle (who asked that Motherboard not use her real name) ran into when she unexpectedly found out she was pregnant in 2011. A 23-year-old emigrant from Eastern Europe living in Hessea state in central Germanyat the time, the idea of having an abortion was still something shrouded in stigma and shame, but she began looking for factual information about the procedure online anyways. What she found instead was pictures of bloody fetuses and other anti-abortion propaganda. All you read is that you are going to suffer horrible pains, a mental illness, you might even get cancer, Merle wrote to Motherboard over instant messages. This was stressful, because I still believed in the horrible pains and suffering so the anxiety was building up. There was no transparency at all and you can’t make an informed decision, she added. ADVERTISEMENT Despite the lack of credible information on the web, after consulting her gynecologist in person Merle was able to make an informed choice about her pregnancy and easily terminated it without any medical complications. Her story, however, is indicative of how Section 219a continues to harm those who are often already in a vulnerable position. Abortion is still technically illegal in Germany and is punishable with prison time up to three years or a fine. Authorities will not, however, prosecute any doctor or patient involved in an abortion if its because of sexual violence, or if the pregnancy is a threat to the patient’s life. Abortions for other reasons are permitted within the first trimester, but counseling from a state-approved organization and a three day waiting period are still mandatory. This legal criminalization of the procedure has filtered into the wider medical system, says Alicia Baier, a physician at Family Planning Center BALANCE in Berlin and cofounder of Doctors for Choice, and even doctors themselves can lack proper knowledge about abortions. In the past, gynecologists have even had to organize separate papaya workshops where interested medical students are taught the basics of vacuum aspiration (suction abortion) using papaya seeds. Abortion is [often] treated as an ethical topic for those studying medicine in German universities, Baier told Motherboard over the phone. [They often] only ever learn about the ethics of the procedure, but little to none of the actual medical aspects behind it. I’ve conducted a number of interviews with medical students regarding this subject, she continued. What I’ve often heard in them is that the first thing many medical students associate with abortion is religion class. One student I spoke to who was specializing in gynecology said that the only time he had come into contact with the topic in an institution was religion class in high school, where they were simply shown big images of fetuses. I’ll always remember that. While access to factual information is a long-standing issue in Germany, increasingly access to doctors who will even perform abortions is becoming one as well. Out of the 19,000 practicing gynecologists in Germany, public broadcaster Tagesschau reported, only 327 are officially registered as performing abortions. (The number is estimated to be higher, but some doctors intentionally don’t register for fear of harassment). In the conservative state of Bavaria there are only eight officially registered practices offering abortion servicesfive of which are in its capital, Munich. The result of this? A disaster, said Kersten Artus, a pro-abortion activist, journalist, and member of Pro-Choice. There is an acute emergency, Artus wrote in an email to Motherboard. Fewer and fewer doctors offer abortions, and entire cities and regions are without resident doctors to carry them out. And, because many hospitals now belong to the churches, it is even more difficult to have an abortion carried out. The consequences are long journeys and waiting times, which, given the legal situationlegal terminations are only possible up to the 12th week of pregnancyis a catastrophe. While laws such as Section 219a show that social conservatism is nothing new in Germany, the growing reach of the far-right into German politics has only further empowered fundementalist groups and conservative politicians to stifle change on both the federal and local levels. In some cities, local governments have even prohibited municipal clinics from performing abortions. With the number of doctors offering abortions having decreased by a factor of 40 percent between 2003 and 2018, even the removal of regressive regulations like Section 219aalthough necessaryprobably won’t be enough on its own. ADVERTISEMENT That’s why feminist groups like Stimmrecht Gegen Unrecht (Right To Vote Against Injustice) continue to emphasize that the issue needs to be looked at through an intersectional lens. Since abortion is not covered by insurance in Germany, partially because it is illegal, cost can also be a barrier, Stimmrecht Gegen Unrecht said. While one can apply for the state to cover the procedure if they earn below a certain amount, this process often requires complex paperwork that can be difficult for non-native German speakers. They also point out that transgender or non-binary people seeking an abortion can face extra hurdles and institutionalized transphobia within the medical system. Then there’s the social stigma surrounding the procedure. One woman who had an abortion in Southern Germany told Motherboard that the first gynecologist she visited vehemently tried to convince her not to terminate her pregnancy. He tried to talk me out of it, she wrote in an email to Motherboard. It was not his place and I wish I would have had the power to stand up for myself and told [sic] him to shut up. I actually remember exactly how he warned me that women who abort suffer from mental health problems later on and regret their decision (which is false). One of the friends I told tried to influence me as well and our relationship suffered greatly from it, she added. It’s this same stigma, said Leoni Vollmar, a member of Stimmrecht Gegen Unrecht, that causes misinformation to be normalized. The stigma around abortion in Germany goes hand-in-hand with more misinformation, she told Motherboard over Zoom. Restrictive regulations like 219a create an information imbalance. But, one thing we are seeing is that in pop culture abortion is starting to be associated with a positive connotation and an empowering connotation. This cultural sphere is incredibly important as well and a necessary movement if we want to get over this imbalance of misinformation. For now, the combination between social stigma, lack of factual information, and dwindling doctors willing to perform the operation continue to make an often difficult decision even more difficult. But the people Motherboard spoke to who had gone ahead with the procedure had a message for those who might be struggling: trust yourself. They know better than anyone what’s good for them, Merle wrote, and whatever decision they make, it’s the right one. Source: https://www.vice.com//germans-are-posting-abortion-informa

#abortion #reproductive #rights The Future of Abortion Access: Anti-choice advocates have fought so hard against the abortion pill because they know it’s a game... changer. https://abortion-blog.com//the-future-of-abortion-access-/ In July, as this country lurched in fits and starts to address the COVID-19 pandemic that had by then already claimed nearly 150,000 lives, a new possibility for abortion access bubbled up in a Maryland court. U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang took the first step in deregulating abortion pills. In response to a request from abortion providers and reproductive justice advocates, Judge Chuang ruled that the Trump administration could not enforce a restriction that prevents patients from accessing medication abortion without an in-person doctor’s visit, finding the requirement unduly burdened abortion rights in the middle of a pandemic. The decision sent immediate shockwaves across the abortion rights landscape. Abortion rights advocates, who had spent the last 20 years arguing medication abortion was exceptionally safe and overregulated, applauded the decision as a commonsense approach to abortion care generally, let alone in a pandemic. Activists in the 19 states where anti-choice lawmakers had years earlier banned the use of telehealth for medication abortion were quick to point out that Chuang’s decision would do nothing to ease the crisis of access in their states. And because of the unique place abortion rights hold in this country’s political landscape, both camps were correct. The decision promised to change both everything and nothing, at all once. Mifepristone was first developed in France in 1980, but it took two over two decades and at least one trip to the Supreme Court to even get it approved for use in abortions in this country. Under George H.W. Bush’s presidency, the Food and Drug Administration first banned importing mifepristone to this country for use in abortions. Once it was finally approved, anti-choice advocates in Washington, D.C., layered regulatory burden after regulatory burden on use of the pills. Anti-choice lawmakers in states across the country followed up by banning the use of telemedicine to distribute the pills. Anti-choice advocates have fought so hard against the abortion pill because they know it’s a game changer. As if to underscore just how much the anti-choice forces understand what’s at stake in the fight over regulating abortion medications, the Trump administration appealed Judge Chuang’s decision to the Supreme Court not once, but twice. In January the conservative justices on the Court voted to reinstate the in-person requirements. The Biden-Harris administration could lift them again. But meanwhile states like Ohio have doubled down on efforts to restrict access to medication abortion, showing that even as this country faces nearly 500,000 COVID-19 deaths, anti-choice conservatives will prioritize attacking abortion access over literally anything else. This has left patients in an increasingly untenable ping-pong match. Abortion remains legal in this country but increasingly out of reach and defined by the happenstance of a ZIP code. In the backdrop of this legal and legislative fight over medication abortion, a new future for abortion care is taking hold, one in which patients increasingly manage their abortions entirely on their own. To be clear, abortion via herbs has existed as long as people were able to get pregnant. And even a medication abortion done with physician supervision involves the patient managing some aspects of that abortion on their own. But as the legal and political threats to abortion care reach a fevered pitch in this country, more and more people are choosing to terminate pregnancies on their own, without the supervision of a medical professional. The COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated this reality. Self-managed abortion is the future of abortion access; neither courts nor legislatures can fully block it. Patients are taking care into their own hands. That future is not without legal risk, though. While only five states have laws that explicitly make it a crime to self-terminate a pregnancy, that hasn’t stopped some prosecutors from trying to use other statuteslike child endangerment and fetal harm law to jail patients for ending their own pregnancies. Predictably, it is patients of color and low-income patients, who already face heightened surveillance and scrutiny by both health-care providers and law enforcement, bearing the brunt of those prosecutions. Medically, self-terminating a pregnancy via pills remains extremely safe. The legal risks, however, are potentially much greater. That’s why, for our first special edition of 2021, Rewire News Group is diving into medication abortion and self-managed care as the future of abortion access. From COVID-19 to the courts, the legal right to abortion has never been more tenuous. But thanks to the internet and the ingenuity of advocates, abortion pills have never been easier to access. Abortion is good medicine, and self-managed abortion is the future of access in what’s shaping up to be a post-Roe world. Source: https://rewirenewsgroup.com//editors-note-the-future-of-a/

#abortion #rights Abortion rights hotspots in 2021 as Argentina grants approval https://abortion-blog.com//abortion-rights-hotspots-in-20/ Argentina became th...e first major Latin American country to legalize abortion. What other nations are in the spotlight for change in 2021? Jan 27 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) Argentina became the first major country in Latin America to legalize abortion on Wednesday, allowing the procedure through the 14th week of pregnancy and bucking the traditionally strong influence of the Catholic Church in the region. [nL1N2JA0D9] The coronavirus pandemic has impacted abortions around the world, with lockdowns complicating access in some places, while other countries made it easier to get at-home medical abortions. But despite stay-at-home orders, the world’s legislatures, courts and politicians have continued to make key decisions to expand or roll back rights. In October, 33 countries including the United States, Egypt and Brazil, signed a declaration that critics say was aimed at restricting access to abortion. Previously in Argentina women were only allowed to abort in cases of rape or serious risk to the mother. Here are some of the hotspots for abortion rights in 2021: 1. Poland A court ruling last October in staunchly-Catholic Poland banned abortions in most circumstances and led to huge protests. Calls to an abortion support hotline in the country have increased more than five-fold since the ruling. The verdict restricting access to abortion went into effect in January, three months after it sparked nationwide protests. Under the ruling, abortions are now only permitted in cases of rape and incest, and when the mother’s life or health is endangered, pushing Poland further from the European mainstream. 2. South Korea A 2019 constitutional court ruling struck down a decades-long ban on abortion. That forced the government to propose new legislation in October that would allow abortion up to 14 weeks and in some cases up to 24 weeks. The proposal has yet to be voted on and implemented. 3. United States Outgoing President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett a devout Catholic favored by conservatives was confirmed in October. Rights advocates worry her appointment could tip the bench towards overturning a landmark 1973 ruling that said women had a right to abortion. A case involving access to medical abortion drugs is currently before the court. 4. Slovakia Last October, the country’s parliament narrowly rejected a bill that would have made it harder to get an abortion. But at least one lawmaker reportedly said she will try again in six months. 5. Thailand Thailand’s Constitutional Court ruled in February that existing laws criminalizing abortion were unconstitutional. Thai lawmakers in January voted in favour of allowing abortion up to 12 weeks of pregnancy while retaining penalties for later terminations, a move that pro-choice activists said fell short of protecting the rights of the mother. Under the amendment, an abortion after 12 weeks would be allowed only in certain conditions and would otherwise be punishable by up to six months in prison, or a fine of up to 10,000 baht ($334) or both. 6. Mexico Legalization proposals have been presented in several state Congress including in Michoacan and Chiapas, with rights activists hoping they will follow Mexico City and Oaxaca which allow abortion up to 12 weeks. Amnesty requests under a new law for women imprisoned for abortion have not yet been granted. Large protests over abortion and other women’s rights issues are expected to continue. 7. Philippines In the Philippines where abortion is illegal and carries a jail term of up to six years women’s rights groups have drafted a bill to decriminalize abortion, and are looking for a lawmaker to sponsor it. Past decriminalization efforts have been opposed by the powerful Catholic church. 8. El Salvador The Central American country, which has a strict outright ban on abortion even in cases of rape will likely continue to face pressure from international organizations. In 2020, a United Nations expert group said three women put in prison under the law were detained unfairly. More than a dozen women have been jailed for abortion-related crimes. Source: https://news.trust.org/item/20201230133353-lmsat/

#abortion #rights The Dead Son in My Womb Had More Rights Than I Did https://abortion-blog.com//the-dead-son-in-my-womb-had-mo/ My son’s name was Giovanni. He... had onesies, diapers, a nursery, and stuffies all waiting for him. His sisters drew pictures to decorate his room and sang songs to my belly. His father kissed us all goodbye every time he left. We were the ideal family: 2.5 children, four dogs, and a modest home that featured build-it-yourself furniture. Gio was loved. Everything was perfect. I was literally singing and smiling as I walked into the bathroom that morning. We had just seen Daddy off to work, the kids and I were prepping to bake a cake, the windows were open, the playlist was fuego. Perfect. Perfect went out the window when I saw the blood. Hours later, doctors confirmed what we already knew. Our son was gone. They were so sorry. It was nothing I had done. They told us we could take a few moments to ourselves and someone would come back to address any questions we had. Those few moments would become the only time I was able to grieve for my son disconnected from the political process. The politics of abortion didn’t apply to usor so we thought. We were about to learn exactly how much abortion laws apply to wanted pregnancies. The doctors told us I would need help passing the products of conceptionmedical speak for my son’s bodysince I was so far along, but that they could not help me there. I needed an abortion and that was, essentially, against the law. Yes, the hospital had a labor and delivery department. Yes, there were doctors available who knew what I needed and how to do it. Yes, the medical professionals and I agreed on what the best course of action was for my health. But no, they could not help. The word abortion means the premature exit of the products of conceptionwhy or how they exit makes no difference. It’s an abortion in the eyes of medicine and the law. My son had died, and I needed help to remove his body before it made sick. A medical professional had to look me in the eye and explain that they could not do their job because policymakers said no; because that job was to provide an abortion. There’s never a good time for your child to die, but this was an added layer of complication I wasn’t ready for. Hospital staff laid out my options: I could find an OB-GYN to take me as a new patient, confirm my son was dead, and then schedule the procedure to remove his body. Or I could go home and wait for his decay to make me sick enough to require emergency intervention, and then I could come back. (Since I had no fever or signs of sepsis, I was not considered an emergency case.) The doctors couldn’t just wheel me to another room to have the medical procedure that I needed because my son’s corpse had more say over my body than I did. I couldn’t just schedule the procedure for a later point with whichever doctor was available. There was red tape I needed to cut through. We were naive and ill-prepared for what we would be up against. We truly thought it would be easy. Doctors helpand I needed heartbreaking help. My condition was dangerousphysically, psychologically, and emotionally. We believed that any OB-GYN who took our insurance would tell us to come right in. How could it not be easy? Who wouldn’t want to help us? We were not ready for what happened next. The first place I called hung up on me. Another place turned us away and locked the office doors behind us. More than one person called me a monster who would go to hell for wanting an abortion so late. I didn’t want an abortion. I wanted my son, but he was gone. I needed an abortion.None of what happened to me was necessary. There were so many points where passionateor even just medically accuratepolicies would have changed everything. None of what happened to me was necessary. There were so many points where compassionateor even just medically accuratepolicies would have changed everything. I wanted to live and be a mother to my other kids. I wanted to grieve for my baby. I wanted to cry in my partner’s arms over all of the dreams that stopped along with our son’s heartbeat. I wanted to hold my babies while they mourned the baby brother they were so excited for. I didn’t ask or expect to be stuck in the splash zone of the abortion issue. Giovanni wasn’t supposed to be an abortion. But I was stuck. I was repeatedly denied medical care that I needed for my own health. My son’s body had a right to rot inside of me. My right to be alive and healthy didn’t matter. My right to my body didn’t matter. My living children’s right to have a mother didn’t matter. I wish I could tell you we found a loving and compassionate provider, but we didn’t. It took a long time to find help, and when we finally found someone willing to talk to us, they wouldn’t perform an abortion. I was forced to labor and deliver my son vaginally because it’s policy. They didn’t care that none of my previous children had been vaginal deliveries. They ignored my medical history. I labored without pain management. There are some things even abortion storytellers won’t share readily; the finer details of our medical abuse and humiliation are mine. I’ll just say that I honestly don’t know how long labor went. However long it was, I was in pain the entire time due to a misplaced epidural. When I complained, they called me a liar who demonstrated drug-seeking behavior. Pain and fever have a way of pulling at your mind like taffy. Hours passed in screams and sobs. I was able to push his little body out, but the placenta would not budge, no matter how many contraction-inducing meds or manual attempts they tried. Well after my son had died and we had endured harassment, embarrassment, shaming, psychological trauma, unspeakable heartbreak, and hours spent in painful and medically traumatic vaginal labor, I found myself walking (yes, walking: turns out I wasn’t drug-seekingthe epidural truly had no affect) into an operating room to get the medical procedure that the initial team of doctors wanted to do in the first damn place. I had been forced to wait so long that the surgery was more difficult and dangerous than it ever needed to be. Extra efforts needed to be taken to bring me back, but I have no idea what those efforts were or how extra things got. None of what happened to me was necessary. There were so many points where compassionateor even just medically accuratepolicies would have changed everything. Medical professionals knew what needed to be done. I consented. This story should have ended there; I should have been able to get an abortion, and we should have been able to grieve the death of our baby. But policy and legislation said no because my son’s dead body had rights. Those policies didn’t honor him or protect his body. They did the exact opposite by delaying his removal to the point that his body was no longer salvageable. Salvageable. I asked if anything could be donated, if any use or good could come from his passing, and a doctor had to tell me that he had been dead far too long, decomposition had already set in, and nothing would be salvageable. My son’s body wasn’t salvageable, but I was still forced to carry it around inside of me and then vaginally deliver it in order to protect its rights. Someone’s political agenda forced doctors to look at me and say, We want to help you, but our hands are tied. Conversations around abortion have been weaponized so much that we don’t even stop to think about what abortion really is. It’s just health care. I almost died because I was denied access to the safe and healthy abortion of my already-dead son. In the United States. In 2018. Why? How? Was this ever going to stop happening? We made our way through a sea of police as we left the hospital. Far-right pipe bomb terrorist Cesar Sayoc was being arrested 1.3 miles down the street. Giovanni Fazio was disposed of as medical waste. Source: https://rewirenewsgroup.com//the-dead-son-in-my-womb-had/

#abortion #rights The Reproductive Justice and Rights Movement Is Fighting Back https://abortion-blog.com//the-reproductive-justice-and-r/ President Trump is ...leaving office having appointed three Supreme Court justices, with abortion rights in the balance, and abortion access severely limited in some parts of the country. Yet the reproductive health justice movement has been mobilizing to fight back. There was a significant surge in state-level abortion restrictions starting in 2010 that has never really slowed down, so responding to these attacks on access in so many places is unfortunately the new normal, said Julie Gonen, policy director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights. And this past summer, the COVID-19 crisis created an opportunity for anti-abortion lawmakers to halt abortions as nonessential, providing a glimpse of what a post-Roe world will look like, said Julie Burkhart, founder and CEO of Trust Women, an advocacy organization that has clinics in Wichita and Oklahoma City. Some governors issued executive orders banning abortion statewide, including in Texas and Oklahoma. Trust Women’s clinics were overrun, with staff working 12- to 18-hour days. We saw a 400% increase in patients seeking abortion care, and we had people traveling from Houston all the way to Wichita to get an abortion, said Burkhart. The clinic closings due to the pandemic and the wave of extreme abortion bans in 2019 necessitated putting forward the basic message that abortion is still legal in all 50 states, said Ann Marie Benitez, senior director of government relations at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice. With all the misinformation, disinformation, fake clinics, and anti-abortion officials playing politics with people’s lives, we must ensure that folks in our communities understand that very crucial message abortion care is legal in the entire country. Despite more than 450 state-level restrictions put in place since January 2011, organizations and activists have adapted strategies to not only sustain the movement to keep abortion accessible and available, but make it stronger. Reproductive justice advocates have insisted on having a place at the table and pushed the broader movement to expand its vision beyond simply protecting the legal right to abortion, said Gonen. The voices of young people, people of color, and those who have had abortions have been better amplified. While we can’t stop advocating for better legislative and judicial protection of the right to access reproductive health care, we do better when we link arms with other movements, like those seeking to secure access to health care more generally and those, like NCLR, working to ensure equality for LGBTQ people. In addition to coalition-building and working to create a more inclusive movement, advocates have been amplifying the pro-choice religious community, promoting personal storytelling about abortion, and researching language around abortion care to create impactful messaging. There are also increased efforts to raise awareness about the nation’s 70-plus abortion funds, which are unified through the National Network of Abortion Funds. Cost and travel are major barriers to accessing abortion care, and abortion funds are an increasingly crucial resource for low-income women, especially in rural areas and in states with few or even one clinic. Abortion funds are mutual aid funds we literally use money donated from people who believe in the right to an abortion and want to support people who are being denied health care by the government, said Kamyon Conner, executive director of Texas Equal Access Fund, which provides funding to low-income women in northern Texas. COVID showed us that we are in a unique position to provide a direct link between abortion providers and women seeking abortion care. And this spring, when clinics were being closed in Texas, abortion providers were relying on us for support to assist people in need of abortion care. Not only do the funds help cover the cost of an abortion, they can help with transportation and child care. One of the beautiful things about abortion funds is how they have always been deeply creative and connected in developing solutions, said Steffani Bangel, executive director of the New Orleans Abortion Fund. We have, for years, learned from each other about the best ways to continue to facilitate access for our communities despite political and structural attacks on our rights. Advocacy organizations have been putting resources into polling and research to better understand views on abortion. After conducting research in 2019, NARAL Pro-Choice America now uses freedom to decide rather than right to choose in their materials. We found that language around freedom from political interference and freedom to make personal decisions resonated with people, said Kristin Ford, national communications director at NARAL. This messaging especially resonated with people who have personal conflicts with abortion but they feel uncomfortable with the government interfering in personal decisions. This language is more in line with what other political movements use it’s not about personal identity, such as saying you are pro-choice, but around your beliefs. We are seeing a shift, and the broader Democratic party and progressive movement has now coalesced around abortion rights as a nonnegotiable position. Abortion is increasingly seen as foundational right and that it’s impossible to talk about a living wage, etc., without being able to make your own decisions about parenthood and pregnancy. A national survey of Catholic voters in the 2020 election found that they are nearly twice as likely to vote for a candidate who supports access to abortion care than candidates who want to make it illegal. We were a part of the coalition that elected Biden, said Jamie Manson, president of Catholics for Choice. What we have seen in this election is that the religious left is the sleeping giant of the pro-choice movement, and we saw a resurgence of it this year. There is a lot of activism among Catholics on the ground, and we are trying to organize people and engage them to be part of the larger reproductive justice movement. We have a president and we have lawmakers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who are specifically appealing to their Catholic faith to support their ideas of social justice. That is something we want to leverage. We are also looking at the language that we use the word ‘choice’ is great for women who have choices, but not everyone does. Since 2012, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice has conducted annual polls of Latino/a voters and found a majority would support a loved one who decided to have an abortion despite some narratives in the media that depict the community as conservative on the issue. The Road to Reproductive Justice: Native Americans in New Mexico, a report by Forward Together, investigated stereotypes around Native Americans used by anti-choice legislators to falsely promote the narrative that most are against abortion due to cultural and religious beliefs. Instead, the report found that a large majority of Native Americans hold respectful and complex views on abortion and trust women to make their own decisions without government interference.We have been working to de-polarize the public’s point of view on abortion by promoting the message that abortion care is health care and that women be allowed to make the decision about having an abortion themselves, said Adriann Barboa, New Mexico policy director at Forward Together. We’ve done polling that shows people are more likely to agree to statements about women being left to decide about abortion care for themselves with their loved ones than ones about supporting abortion itself. [New Mexico] is one of the poorest states in the country, and people don’t have a lot of options in many parts of their life, so ‘my body, my choice’ doesn’t resonate. Nearly one in four women has an abortion, and advocates believe their stories should be told and out in the open. Abortion doesn’t occur in the abstract, and abortion restrictions affect real people, said Gonen. The more people tell their stories about their own abortions, about their experiences providing abortion care, about how their own families have been affected by government-imposed restrictions the more the issue is humanized and the more people will realize that forced pregnancy is reprehensible in a nation that claims to value freedom. Earlier this year, the Black Women’s Health Imperative put out its Black Women Vote: National Health Policy Agenda, a blueprint for the health and wellness of Black women, which they will continue to use to hold elected officials accountable for delivering on abortion rights and reproductive justice, said Kineta Sealey, policy counsel. We have worked really hard to reach women of color, especially those who may lack access to accurate information and those who reside in the South. It all comes back to education and facts. We have to keep our eyes on the ball on everything from calling for the FDA to lift restrictions on access to medical abortion to passing the EACH [Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance] Woman Act. And President-elect Joe Biden will face pressure to fulfill his campaign promise to overturn the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits public funding of abortions. Even though the majority of Americans believe in the legality of abortion rights in this country, there is a disconnect with some of those voters, said Burkhart. We still lack the ability to reach the middle in certain areas of the country that of Republicans and rural voters in particular. The political divide that we have between Democrats and Republicans most definitely contributes to this dynamic, as abortion rights are voted on, primarily, right down party lines, when in reality, the women having abortions are not just urban, liberal, Democratic voters. This is where some of the disconnect lies. The restrictions over the past decade have only ignited us, said Benitez. We know that the courts will not save us, Roe cannot save us; we must organize and mobilize our communities to hold our elected officials accountable to ensure access to safe, affordable abortion care for everyone. We have seen the disparities in health outcomes across the board, never more evident than now during this pandemic. Who better to lead the fight for equal access to reproductive health care than those hardest hit by the repercussions of that inequality? The lived experiences of women of color have been ignored for far too long. It is time we put women of color front and center and look to our communities to lead the fight for justice. Source: https://womensmediacenter.com//the-reproductive-justice-mo

#abortion #rights Biden is a pro-choice catholic. Will he expand reproductive health care? A large challenge for this new presidency will be that of repairing t...he harm of the last 4 years. Let's hold our leaders accountable to providing what should be basic healthcare. https://abortion-blog.com//biden-is-a-pro-choice-catholic/ When Joe Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20, he will become the most prominent pro-choice Catholic in the country. Although the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops opposes abortion and advocates for religous exceptions to birth control coverage, the majority of U.S. Catholics support access to comprehensive reproductive health care, including 56 percent of U.S. Catholics who believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Jamie Manson, president of Catholics for Choice, said she hopes these Catholics will have more of a voice under the incoming Biden-Harris administration. We see giving women access to reproductive health care as being pro-life, Manson said of Catholics for Choice, which was founded in 1973 by Catholics who believe that the faith tradition supports a person’s right to follow their conscience on matters of their own reproductive health. We love our faith but we don’t want to see our faith have disproportionate influence in policy, Manson said. We do not want to see it misused and become an instrument of harm, particularly to the most vulnerable and the poorest. This week, Biden tapped California attorney general Xavier Becerra, a Catholic, as the next secretary of health and human services. His record suggests that he sees the issue of reproductive rights through the lens of social justice, Manson said. Earlier this year, Becerra led a coalition of attorneys general in filing an amicus brief opposing a Mississippi abortion ban that he called unjust, unlawful, and unfair. After four years of Trump administration policies driven by fierce opposition to abortion rights, especially from Christian conservatives, Manson and other faith-based reproductive rights advocates are hoping that the incoming Biden-Harris administration will turn the tide. Advocates are looking to the president-elect to end policies that have curtailed access to reproductive health care, particularly for low-income Americans. Reproductive health care as a human right Since taking office, Donald Trump has taken many steps to rollback access to reproductive health care, often through agency rulemaking and executive orders. One of his first actions as president was to reinstate a policy that prohibits any nonprofit receiving U.S. global health funds from performing or mentioning abortion as a method of family planning. In 2019, the Trump administration applied that rule domestically, rewriting the Title X low-income family planning program to prohibit fund recipients from providing abortion referrals, even when patients request it. The new rule caused approximately one-quarter of all U.S. clinics that received Title X funding to leave the program, according to the pro-choice research institution the Guttmacher Institute. Guttmacher estimates that the changes reduced the Title X network’s capacity to provide women with contraceptive services by at least 46 percent. Reproductive rights advocates hope that Biden will reverse these policies and instead funnel more federal money into comprehensive reproductive health care services. Cherisse Scott, a former nondenominational minister and founder of SisterReach, a reproductive rights nonprofit based in Tennessee, hopes that Biden will replenish and invest federal dollars into making sure that young people have access to comprehensive sex education for K-12 and college students. One of the biblical scriptures we use to guide our commitment to comprehensive reproductive and sexual health education, is Hosea 4:6: ‘My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge,’ said Scott. Access to education and being empowered to inform if, when, and how you will engage in sex, parenting, or even celibacy is only achieved by an informed and unhindered understanding of our bodies. Advocates also hope that Biden will block a budget provision known as the Hyde Amendment. First approved by Congress in the 1970s, the amendment blocks the use of federal funds for abortion care, meaning individuals who get their coverage through Medicare, Medicaid, or the U.S. military aren’t able to access that health care. We don’t want to see that in the president’s budget, said Rev. Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum and an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). What we really want is for every person to make the decision for themselves as to if, when, and how they want to parent, Choimorrow said. The Trump administration has also offered faith-based exemptions to religious employers who don’t want to offer contraception in their employee insurance plans, as is mandated by the Affordable Care Act. Rabbi Hara Person, chief executive of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the leadership organization of Reform Judaism in the United States, said these carveouts were part of a broader trend of the Trump administration favoring certain religious viewpoints over others. The idea that religious liberty is about restricting people’s rights and allowing one religious perspective to control other people’s opinions is a complete misuse of what religious liberty is supposed to be about, Person said. When religious liberty is being used as a way to control other people, that’s religious liberty being used as a hammer. Reform Judaism considers abortion to be part of health care and health care to be a human right, she said. We’re all created equal, and we’re all created in the image of God, Person said. So nobody should have the right to say to another person, ‘You can’t make decisions for yourself.’ While there is much that the new administration can change in the way of health policy, rollbacks in the federal court system and state legislatures won’t be easily undone. Biden will be far from a cure-all, advocates say. Even if the Biden-Harris administration champions the most expansive view of reproductive rights and justice, so much, in terms of abortion, sex ed, and Medicaid expansion, happens on the state level, said Rev. Katey Zeh, CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. The RCRC is an interfaith organization of religious leaders for whom access to comprehensive reproductive health services, including abortion, is an expression of religious freedom, according to Zeh. The organization has its roots in a pre-Roe v. Wade clergy consultation service where Christian, Jewish, and Unitarian clergy helped people access safe and affordable abortion care. Even going back to pre-Trump, the state of reproductive health rights and justice wasn’t great, said Zeh. It’s certainly gotten worse, but it’s not like our aim is to return to where we were four years ago. Source: https://sojo.net//biden-pro-choice-catholic-will-he-expand

#abortion #rights In the Battle Over Abortion, Polish Feminists with Disabilities Are Claiming Their Rights https://abortion-blog.com//in-the-battle-over-abort...ion-po/ In a disturbing irony, Poland’s decision to remove the fetal defect grounds for abortion will have a disproportionately negative impact on the lives and well-being of women with disabilities. On Oct. 22, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled that Poland’s law permitting abortion on grounds of a severe and irreversible fetal defect or incurable illness that threatens the fetus’s life was unconstitutional. The decision triggered mass protests across Poland and uniting hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life in their concern over the increasing restrictions on women’s rights. This decision effectively bans access to safe and legal abortion for all pregnant persons, including women with disabilities. The Tribunal asserted that removing the fetal defect grounds for abortion would protect the rights of persons with disabilities. To be sure, the intersection of abortion rights and disability rights is complex, especially in an overwhelmingly ableist world. Some disability rights advocates are concerned that laws that expressly permit abortion on grounds of fetal impairment codify the notion that disabled lives are worth less than non-disabled lives. Reproductive rights advocates are concerned that reforming abortion laws to remove fetal impairment groundsor to expressly ban abortion in the case of a fetal impairment diagnosiswill result in less access to safe abortion and exacerbate related human rights consequences for those seeking to terminate their pregnancies, as we anticipate seeing in Poland as a result of this decision. Too often, however, the diverse voices and perspectives of women with disabilities are left out of these debates. Yet, as people who experience ableism, sexism and other forms of discrimination and need to access the full range of sexual and reproductive health care, including abortion, they are uniquely positioned to address this debate’s complexity and bring essential perspectives to this ongoing debate. Indeed, Polish feminists with disabilities have brought powerful dissent and insights to the ongoing protests and discussions about abortion in Polandboth on- and offline. In a recent webinar organized by our organizations, Artyku 6 and Women Enabled International (WEI), together with CREA and Penoprawna, Polish feminists with disabilities stressed that pitting reproductive rights against disability rights discounts the perspectives of women with disabilities and undermines the human rights approach to disability rights as encapsulated in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Furthermore, as WEI has documented, meaningful reproductive autonomy is a priority for women with disabilities all around the world, both as women and persons with disabilities, and access to abortion is an important part of that reproductive autonomyand more broadly of their inherent and inalienable right to dignity. But to exercise reproductive autonomy, people need both the legal right to make decisions about their bodies and lives and an enabling and non-stigmatizing environment in which to do so. Such an environment means that the full range of reproductive health care is fully accessible to all (including financially accessible) and that people can make reproductive health choices without stigma and fear. It also means that pregnant people can receive unbiased information about a fetal impairment diagnosis at all times, including free from bias about the value of the life of a person with a disability, and that the rights of persons with disabilities living in the world are fully respected, protected, and fulfilled. In a disturbing irony, Poland’s decision to remove the fetal defect grounds for abortion will have a disproportionately negative impact on the lives and well-being of women with disabilities. (Abortion and Disability: Towards an Intersectional Human Rights Approach / Women Enabled International) By removing one of the only remaining legal grounds for abortion in Poland while continually failing to ensure an environment that recognizes the dignity of persons with disabilities living in the country, the Constitutional Tribunal ruling fails on many levels to ensure reproductive autonomy or to meet Poland’s human rights obligations. And in a disturbing irony, its decision will have a disproportionately negative impact on the lives and well-being of women with disabilities. Why? Because women with disabilities typically are structurally hindered from accessing education and employment, resulting in lower incomes, so frequently cannot afford to travel abroad for abortion. Women with mobility-related disabilities face additional barriers, as the means of travel are often inaccessible. These inequalities are further exacerbated in the context of the current global pandemic. Put most powerfully by Artyku 6, the Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling violates human rights and any respect for the decisions and needs of women, including women with disabilities. Instead, it imposes a limited vision of life and femininity that is contingent on subordination and coercion of women and girls with disabilities. Poland has clear legal obligations under the UN CRPD to protect the rights of persons with disabilitiesincluding to protect the sexual and reproductive health and rights of women, girls, and pregnant persons with disabilities. To meet these international legal obligations, Poland must: Ensure that people with disabilities have access to a full range of sexual and reproductive health care (including abortion where needed). Abolish laws that restrict the legal capacity of persons with disabilities to make their own decisions. Support persons with disabilities to lead autonomous, dignified and independent lives, and ensure that persons with disabilities can access quality education, meaningful employment, and social life. Ensure that persons with disabilities and their families have access to the range of supports and services they may need. Foster a climate where people with disabilities can participate freely as equal and valued members of society. The clock is ticking. Source: https://msmagazine.com//abortion-poland-polish-feminists-/

#abortion #rights I Had to Leave Massachusetts for My Abortion. Not Anymore. https://abortion-blog.com//i-had-to-leave-massachusetts-f/ Massachusetts is a saf...er state for pregnant people than it was last week. I’ll take the win, but the moment doesn’t feel victorious. Three years ago, I sat at my kitchen table with the blinds drawn while my kids were at school, on a call with a professional abortion rights advocate. Ever the good student, I had a legal pad and a pen in front of me to take notes. I’d had a third-trimester abortion in Colorado the month prior. It had been a complicated procedure; I was probably still not well the day I made that call. But at that time in my life I was living off rage. From the moment my doctors in Boston told me they couldn’t help me themselvesbecause Massachusetts law banned abortion after 24 weeks except in cases of a fetal anomalyand that the best they could do was to ship me off like tainted goods to another state, I had been furious. I asked to speak to this advocate, looking for a way to change something. Your case wouldn’t have fit the legal definition of a fatal anomaly under Roe, she explained, slowly and clearly, so I would hear her. Hospitals have maybe three conditions their lawyers tell them will safely fit under ‘fatal.’ And anyway, there’s no hope of expanding later abortion access more generally in Massachusettstoo many blue Catholics in that legislature. We barely managed to get rid of two-parent consent for minors. She was rightin 2017. A year later, President Trump began escalating violent anti-abortion rhetoric at rallies and even the State of the Union. Brett Kavanaugh was appointed to the Supreme Court. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence appeared at the March for Life rally. And slowly but surely, with escalating attacks on abortion rights coming from the Trump administration, deep-blue Massachusetts had enough political cover to draft the original ROE Act. Even with all those blue Catholics in the state legislature. I testified to the Massachusetts Senate Judiciary Committee in 2019 on behalf of the ROE Act, three weeks after giving birth to a baby girl. She came to the statehouse with me, and a sympathetic staffer let me use an empty office to feed her while I waited to testify. Someone on the committee made nice noises about bravery and thanked me. I didn’t feel brave: I was angry. I was angrier still when a year passed and the bill stalled in committee, as the legislature hoped they could profit off merely drafting the legislation, then scrap it as unnecessary after a Biden win.I wonder, often, if my casually anti-choice acquaintances realize quite how completely Christian extremism will soon come to legislate their family’s most intimate choices. The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September and the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett weeks later finally shifted the political winds enough to put the bill back into play. The ROE Act, adapted into a section of the budget, passed for a second time last Thursday, overruling Gov. Charlie Baker’s proposed changes to the bill. Baker can, in theory, veto the measure after it is sent to him a second time, but both chambers have a veto-proof supermajority. The legislation does two things: increases access to abortion care for young people and expands access for those seeking care after 24 weeks of pregnancy. First, it lowers the age of consent from 18 to 16, ending judicial bypass for youth over the age of 16. Those younger than 16 will now be able to request judicial bypass via a televisit, rather than going before a judge in person. Second, the bill codifies the right granted under Roe v. Wade to an abortion after viability in the case of fatal fetal anomaly, and it expands that right to include a meaningful maternal health exception after 24 weeks. With the passage of this legislation, Massachusetts joins a small group of blue states that codified or expanded Roe during the Trump administration. I am supposed to be happy. And don’t get me wrong: I’ll take the win. But this moment doesn’t feel victorious. These new laws codifying and slightly expanding Roe in Massachusetts are a rearguard action in a battle we’ve already lost. In the end, the ROE Act was only possible because we have utterly lost the battle for a bold, comprehensive vision of reproductive health care in this country. I am not a professional advocate: I have a day job, three young children, a frontline spouse. But even I can feel the winds shifting in professional advocacy circles toward more focus on medication abortion, decriminalizing self-managed abortion, and bulwarking whatever states we can in whatever time we have left as the movement lays the groundwork for what comes next. And what comes next is that later abortion is fucked. One way or another, abortion after the first trimester is dead on arrival in the majority of the United States. People like me, who needed complex, surgical abortion care late in pregnancy? Forget about it. The absolute best-case scenario is that the scant handful of providers that help those later in pregnancy remain open, while blue states continue to codify Roe. The worst-case scenario is a fetal personhood ruling written by Justice Barrett. I wonder, often, if my casually anti-choice acquaintances realize quite how completely Christian extremism will soon come to legislate their family’s most intimate choices. This is what I will do: Celebrate the passage of the ROE Act. Take a break. Then fight the next retreating battle, and the next, and decide to hope for the day when it won’t be a retreat anymore. Am I still angry? Always. But Massachusetts is a safer state for pregnant people than it was last week, and that’s not nothing. Not nothing at all. Source: https://rewirenewsgroup.com//i-had-to-leave-massachusetts/

#abortion #rights Mass protests for reproductive rights erupt in Poland: Why Americans should learn from them https://abortion-blog.com//mass-protests-for-repr...oductive/ Poland is a reminder that when authoritarians take power, attacks on reproductive rights often follow Just as voters in America were taking part in a historic presidential election, the women of Poland were taking to the streets. Up to a million people daily have taken part in mass demonstrations against Poland’s near-total ban on abortion and the ultra-conservative regime that imposed it. The ban, approved by the country’s constitutional tribunal, outlaws abortions even in cases of serious fetal abnormalities. The response has been the largest mass protests since the Solidarity movement brought down the communist government in the 1980s.Advertisement: Led by a grassroots group called Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet (All-Polish Women’s Strike), the demonstrators have also taken aim against the government’s authoritarian and anti-democratic policies more broadly. Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party is conservative, patriarchal and closely tied to the Catholic church. It won a razor-thin victory in July on a platform rife with anti-LGBT and anti-Semitic sentiment and continues to pursue a strategy intended to motivate its conservative base. If any of this sounds familiar, it should. President-elect Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump was an enormous relief, but having a supporter of abortion rights in the White House should not make us complacent. With conservatives holding a majority on the Supreme Court and in state legislative chambers nationwide, Americans should be ready to agitate, organize and protest like our rights depend on it. First, the fight for reproductive rights is inextricable from the global effort to advance human rights. What’s happening in Poland is a reminder that when authoritarian regimes undermine democratic values, attacks on reproductive rights often follow. It is no accident that the countries that joined the Trump administration in repudiating the right to abortion at the United Nations were largely repressive governments with records of violating human rights. Freedom cannot exist without reproductive freedom.Advertisement: That is why abortion rights must be situated within a broader framework of human dignity, individual autonomy and civil rights. Polish demonstrators’ demands extend well beyond reproductive rights to LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, greater access to health care and more separation between church and state. Abortion access is fundamental not only to women’s ability to participate equally in society, but also to all people’s right to be themselves. Second, mass demonstrations work especially when they are organized from the ground up. In response to the All-Polish Women’s Strike, Poland’s ruling party has paused implementation of the ban and is calling for talks. Adam Mrozowicki, a sociologist at the University of Wrocaw, described the protests to the Guardian as decentralized, locally based, grassroots. And personally, in 20 years, I’ve never seen anything like these numbers. Harvard University’s Erica Chenoweth has found that catalyzing meaningful political change takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in protests, or about 11 million people in the U.S. This is not an insurmountable goal. Polling suggests that about 15 million to 26 million people in the United States participated in Black Lives Matter demonstrations over the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others. Finally, the Polish demonstrators belie the notion that the left should soften its stance on abortion or avoid talking about the issue of abortion altogether. The Polish demonstrators’ symbols and language are raw, unapologetic and confrontational. The primary symbol of the protest is a red lightning bolt, created by designer Ola Jasionowska, who says that it symbolizes watch out, beware, we won’t accept that women are being deprived of their basic rights. Among the protesters’ most widespread slogans has been Wypierdala, a vulgarity that translates roughly as Fuck off.Advertisement: As right-wing politicians here in the U.S. strengthen their hold on the Supreme Court and state capitals around the country, it is clear they have every intention of using that power to dictate women’s personal medical decisions and criminalize abortion care. It would behoove us to remember that this is not just some abstract policy making exercise, but rather, these policies dramatically affect the lives of real people trying to access reproductive health care. Poland’s mass demonstrations remind us of the power of protest, even in the most hostile political environment. Don’t put away your pink pussy hat yet. Winter is coming. Source: https://www.salon.com//mass-protests-for-reproductive-ri/

#abortion #rights Arkansas Could Give Amy Coney Barrett Her Big Abortion Moment (Updated) https://abortion-blog.com//arkansas-could-give-amy-coney-/ The "Unbo...rn Child Protection Act" was filed ahead of Arkansas' next legislative session meant to more directly challenge Roe v. Wade. UPDATE, December 23, 11:15 a.m.: On Tuesday night, a federal judge blocked four anti-abortion laws from taking effect in the state. Amy Coney Barrett has been a Supreme Court justice for less than two months, yet Arkansas lawmakers wasted no time introducing an anti-abortion bill aimed squarely at the Court, whose new conservative supermajority puts the future of abortion rights in serious jeopardy. Advocates have called the Unborn Child Protection Act, introduced in November ahead of Arkansas’ next legislative session, so egregiousparticularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic that continues to ravage the country with no federal relief bill in sight. Arkansas already has a law banning abortion should the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade; 20 other states have similiar laws in place. The same lawmaker who sponsored the state’s so-called trigger ban last year, Republican state Sen. Jason Rapert, introduced this latest bill that he said was meant to more directly challenge Roe. He did not return multiple requests for comment. SB 6 would ban all abortion unless a woman’s life was in danger, and like the trigger ban, it has language unusually directed to the nation’s high court. The State of Arkansas urgently pleads with the United States Supreme Court to do the right thing, as they did in one of their greatest cases, Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned a fifty-eight year-old precedent of the United States, and reverse, cancel, overturn, and annul Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the legislation reads. ACLU of Arkansas Executive Director Holly Dickson issued a statement calling Rapert’s bill cruel and blatantly unconstitutional. She urged state lawmakers to shelve the bill and focus on COVID-19 relief. Let’s be clear: if passed, this brazenly unconstitutional abortion ban will be struck down in court, and legislators who passed it will have achieved nothing but having wasted taxpayer dollars on an unlawful measure and diverted scarce resources from the urgent needs our communities face in the midst of an ongoing and devastating pandemic, Dickson said. Gloria Pedro, Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes’ regional manager of public policy and organizing for Arkansas and Oklahoma, said the bill is the equivalent of a demand letter to the Supreme Court, which is not how the Supreme Court works. And there’s already a trigger law passed, which is why this is so egregious. Patients can access abortion in Arkansas up to the 20th week postfertilization, or 22 weeks’ gestation. There are two clinics in the state, both in Little Rock, though only one provides procedural abortions.Reproductive rights groups conceded there are more anti-choice bills passed every legislative session than could possibly be challenged. Advocates for reproductive rights in Arkansas have had their hands full fighting back against anti-choice legislation over the last decade, with some bills landing in multiyear battles in federal court. Conservatives have long eagerly eyed the Eighth Circuit, a federal appellate court with jurisdiction over Arkansas, as a way to bring a challenge against Roe to the U.S Supreme Court. Back in 2015, Eighth Circuit appellate judges recommended the high court reevaluate its jurisprudence on abortion, and urged for more state discretion over reproductive decision-making. One such challenge began in 2017, after Arkansas legislators passed new laws to criminalize doctors who perform dilation and evacuation (the most common second-trimester abortion procedure) and require a patient inform the person who got them pregnant before they could get an abortion. The ACLU of Arkansas and the Center for Reproductive Rights sued over those laws and additional state restrictions, like requiring doctors to notify local law enforcement when patients under 17 years old seek to terminate a pregnancy. The laws were temporarily enjoined. This past August, a three-person Eighth Circuit panel ruled against the plaintiffs, citing Chief Justice John Roberts’ concurrence in the Supreme Court’s recent June Medical Services v. Russo decision. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law placing hospital admission requirements on abortion clinic providers was unconstitutional, echoing its 2016 position in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. But in his concurring opinion, Roberts argued that while he agreed with his four liberal colleagues that the Louisiana case was virtually identical to Whole Woman’s Health, he believed the undue burden standard used to decide that case was wrong, and should not involve weighing costs and benefits of an abortion restriction when judging its legality. We don’t agree that one justice’s opinion can change the precedent set by Whole Woman’s Health that clarified the undue burden standard requires this balancing standard, said Hillary Schneller, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, who asked the Eighth Circuit to review the decision en banc. (That means the case will be heard before the entire bench of judges, rather than a three-person panel.) Schneller said there’s always a chance a case like this could wind up at the Supreme Court, but for now they’re just waiting on the Eighth Circuit. That wait came to an end Tuesday afternoon when the Eighth Circuit summarily rejected the en banc request in a one-page order. Without further court intervention Arkansas’ restrictions could take effect as soon as December 22. Meanwhile, reproductive rights advocates have also been dealing with harassment related to the pandemic. Arkansas health officials earlier this year sent a cease-and-desist letter to Little Rock Family Planning Services, arguing their procedural abortions were elective and should wait until after the public health crisis ends. State officials also tried to force patients to get negative COVID-19 tests within 48 hours of getting an abortion, even though tests were in short supply. While advocates have successfully fended off some of the worst restrictions, reproductive rights groups concede there are more anti-choice bills passed every legislative session than could possibly be challenged. We can’t challenge every single restriction and those restrictions are continuing to stack on the books, Dickson said. They join together to create substantial obstacles and burdens for patients. There was a 30 percent decline in the Arkansas abortion rate between 2014 and 2017, and according to the state’s health department, 2,963 abortions took place in Arkansas in 2019. Pedro of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes noted that Arkansas has the fourth highest maternal mortality rate in the nation and one of the highest infant mortality rates. In 2016, Arkansas had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country, and public schools in the state still do not provide comprehensive sex education and primarily endorse abstinence-only instruction. It’s not just that these bills take away reproductive rights, which is crucial, but they’re also having a real tangible impact in our state, and things are getting worse, Pedro said. Pedro and Dickson say the most helpful thing would be for residents to pressure their state representatives to avoid wasting energy and resources on more anti-choice bills. Arkansas does not need to fly the trial balloon and be the trendsetter on setting regressive law, Dickson said. We have so many other things that we need our state to focus on. Source: https://rewirenewsgroup.com//arkansas-could-give-amy-con/

#abortion #reproductive #rights Eighth Circuit Clears Way for Abortion Restrictions https://abortion-blog.com//eighth-circuit-clears-way-for-/ While we’re di...sappointed with this order from the Eighth Circuit, we’re not backing downthis fight is nowhere near over, Ruth Harlow, senior staff attorney in the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, said Tuesday. To the state of Arkansas: We’ll see you back in court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit on Tuesday moved a series of abortion restrictions closer to taking effect in Arkansas. The court denied a motion to rehear by a panel or by the full court en banc arguments over its decision in August to vacate a district judge’s preliminary injunction against enforcing the new laws. The measures that won favor from the Eighth Circuit would ban the standard method of abortion provided after approximately 14 weeks of pregnancy in Arkansas. That moves abortion restrictions earlier in pregnancy than the precedent set by the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade and its progenywhich is up until the point of viability, now considered to be between 20 and 25 weeks. The new measures would also require clinics to notify a woman’s partner or other family members about an abortion, report a teenager’s abortion to local police and require extensive medical records from all women seeking abortion. The order means the new restrictions could go into effect as soon as Dec. 22, according to attorneys for the plaintiffs. But they signaled intentions to appeal the ruling. These Arkansas laws represent the worst motives of anti-abortion politicians: to shame, stigmatize, and humiliate abortion patients, and to make abortion care difficult if not impossible to access, Ruth Harlow, senior staff attorney in the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a written statement. While we’re disappointed with this order from the Eighth Circuit, we’re not backing downthis fight is nowhere near over. To the state of Arkansas: We’ll see you back in court. The lawsuit was filed by the ACLU, the ACLU of Arkansas, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers on behalf of Frederick W. Hopkins, M.D. Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge and Deputy Solicitor General Vincent Wagner defended the case. The office provided a statement in response to a request for comment: The attorney general applauds today’s decision denying en banc review. This is another win validating the pro-life laws in Arkansas. Rutledge is a Republican who backed the lawsuit Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed last week in the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to overturn votes of swing states where Vice President Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump. The high court declined to hear that case. These extreme bans and restrictions would push abortion care out of reach to many who need it and brazenly intrude on people’s most personal medical decisions, said Holly Dickson, executive director of the ACLU of Arkansas. While we’re disappointed the Eighth Circuit declined to rehear the case, this fight is not over. The people of Arkansas have a constitutional right to control their own lives and make their own medical decisions, and we’ll never stop fighting to protect it. If the case is appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, it will be one of many abortion bans passed by states around the country, some of which are more restrictive than the laws in Arkansas. Several states have laws now under injunction that would ban abortion after six weeks gestation, which is before many women know they’re pregnant. Georgia’s approximately six weeks ban allows for exceptions for rape if a woman reports it to police. Alabama has passed a law banning all abortion, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Attorneys and legislators defending those laws have expressed the goal of using them to overturn Roe v. Wade, now that the Supreme Court has a conservative majority with recent appointees by a Republican president. Source: https://www.law.com//eighth-circuit-clears-way-for-abort/

#abortion #reproductive #rights The climate crisis has created a secondary crisis of reproductive rights https://abortion-blog.com//the-climate-crisis-has-crea...ted/ A hurricane hits. The terror and stress caused by the imposing wind and rain affect nearly everybody’s mental health, but perhaps none more so than expectant mothers. Then that stress and the pollutants whipped up by the storm wreak havoc on their bodies, and their pregnancies. An environmental disaster like a hurricane or a bushfire also prevents women from accessing family planning services, which are needed more than ever when the environment becomes unstable: Jobs are fewer and farther between and money becomes tight, changing how women view the possibility of having children. It also inhibits access to prenatal care in a moment when pregnant women are most at risk. Reproductive justice is the right to reproductive health care, and the right to have children or not, the right to the healthiest possible pregnancy and birth, and the right to raise children in a safe and healthy environment, Linda Goler Blount, president and CEO of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, said at a Wilson Center event in July. These rights will be challenged by climate change, including increasing temperatures. A 2020 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that there was a statistically significant association between heat, ozone, or fine particulate matter and adverse pregnancy outcomes across the United States aka pollution and hotter temperatures are making babies and their mothers ill. And while pregnant women in the U.S. have suffered significant medical issues from climate change, the effects are that much worse in parts of the world where women are subject to severe poverty, and treated as second-class citizens. Here are a number of ways in which the climate crisis has compromised women’s reproductive rights around the world: Drought in Lesotho created a crisis of unwanted pregnancies. Drought from rising temperatures in Lesotho has made it difficult for people to support large families, with farming and therefore livelihoods greatly affected, the U.N. Population Fund reported in March. And with the drought has come a shortage of increasingly needed family planning services. Because climate change can disrupt a family’s finances and even force them to migrate, women may think about their lives and the size of their families in a different way than in more prosperous times. An increased desire for fewer children has caused women and girls to get unsafe abortions, causing them to be hospitalized from these procedures more than from any other cause, the U.N.’s 2019 Annual Joint Review found. In the rural Mokhotlong district, a mountainous area in the east of the country, the gap between women bearing children and how many children those women actually want is the biggest in Lesotho, according to the Demographic and Health Surveys Program, a U.S.-funded group. UNFPA reported that 25 percent of women are unable to meet their family planning needs in the district, as compared to 18 percent of the women in the country. Women in Mokhotlong have an average of 4.4 children, more than the average 3.2 nationwide, according to UNFPA, and they face a dearth of contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancies. In contrast, Europe has an unmet need of 9 percent, the World Health Organization reported. Mokhotlong’s teen pregnancy rate is the nation’s second highest, and a quarter of girls aged 15 to19 are estimated to have already began having children. In 2018, harvests of crops like maize and sorghum fell by as much as 93 percent from the year before, the U.N. reported. Food insecurity caused by the drought has caused families to struggle financially. Because of their reduced income, women have a higher need and desire for contraception than before. In these difficult times, it is not easy to look for a job or to get employed when you have many children, especially here in the village, Regina Mokoena, a health worker in the district, told UNFPA. Besides, educating children is also very demanding. On top of that, construction workers on a dam project in the district are thought to be responsible for an increase in teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting. There might be other factors, but construction workers are mainly responsible, said Realeboha Tlhabi, a nursing officer at the health center in the town of Mapholaneng in Mokhotlong. I have witnessed girls of 15 to 17 years marketing their bodies to the construction workers, Tlhabi told the center. When transferring patients to the district hospital at night and early mornings, I see young girls in miniskirts on the roadside and we all know why they are there and what they are doing. Between the drought and the problems it has created, women and girls have reportedly left their rural homes to urban areas or South Africa in search of work, mostly as domestic workers trading sex for money or food, said Jens Laerke, a spokesman from the U.N. humanitarian office. It makes particularly women and children, girls in particular, very vulnerable to sexual exploitation and abuse, he added. Warmer temperatures led to premature births in California. A 2017 study in the Environmental Research journal found a link between temperature and adverse birth outcomes namely, premature delivery. Researchers analyzed data from medical records from a large health maintenance organization in Northern California collected over 16 years (1995 to 2009). The study observed 14,466 women who had a preterm birth (20 to less than 37 gestational weeks). It found that for every 10-degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature in California, there was an average increase in preterm delivery of 8.6 percent. That percentage increased for Black women, who had an increase of 15 percent. Researchers concluded that others who were young; Black; Hispanic; had comorbidities like hypertension and diabetes; or drank alcohol and smoked were among the most vulnerable to premature delivery from higher temperatures in California. Black women have the highest risk of preterm delivery from heat, said Rupa Basu, the chief of the Air and Climate Epidemiology Section at the California Environmental Protection Agency, and one of the study’s co-authors. Australia’s fierce bushfire season threatened pregnant women. Smoke from Australia’s black summer megafires in the 2019-2020 bushfire season was connected to the deaths of more than 445 people, according to a government inquiry, and an estimated 4,000 people were admitted to the hospital due to smoke inhalation. Pregnant women in particular suffered serious effects. A physician in Victoria, Australia, linked global warming with Australia’s worsening bushfires and the harm caused to pregnant mothers and their children. This is the canary in the coal mine, Rebecca McGowan told Voice of America. We are starting to see literally the effects. It is not a sci-fi movie. This is happening in real life. We are starting to see the effects on the unborn, and we are starting to see these babies born now with major effects of climate change and we cannot deny it anymore. It is happening in front of us. A study of the effects of a 2014 fire at a Victoria coal mine that burned for more than a month found that pregnant women were more likely to develop gestational diabetes, Fay Johnston, an environmental health professor at the University of Tasmania’s Menzies Institute for Medical Research, told The Washington Post. Doctors in the worst-affected regions are still measuring the effects of the fires on pregnant women. Alarmingly, they have found that smoke particles blackened placentas to the point where many resembled those in women who are heavy smokers. Instead of being a healthy shade of pink, distressed organs are left gray and grainy, VOA reported. The damage led to premature birth and babies now known as bushfire babies had breathing problems, doctors found. Doctors warned that these newborns could endure health problems their whole lives. Researchers linked Hurricane Harvey in Texas to health problems among pregnant women and their newborns. A study of women who delivered after Texas’s Hurricane Harvey in 2017 revealed more complications including high blood pressure, cesarean sections, and infections during labor than those who had delivered in the years and months before the storm. Natural disasters can truly have deleterious effects, especially on vulnerable populations, that may not be evident until weeks or months later, lead author Dr. Hector Mendez-Figueroa told Reuters Health. According to the study, which was published in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, storm-exposed women also had higher rates of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, such as preeclampsia, and higher rates of infection during labor. What’s more, maternal morbidity saw a significant increase after Harvey only among low socioeconomic women, said Dr. Hector Mendez-Figueroa. The authors said these hurricane-related health problems are sometimes related to stress, which produces insulin that leads to metabolic problems. But they also pointed to the dispersal of chemical and environmental pollutants from the storm. Air, water, and land pollution all adversely affect pregnant women. Fresh water scarcity in coastal Pakistan caused gynecological and other health issues for women. In Pakistan’s Thatta district the southern coastal area of Sindh province people live or die by the water. Because of climate change and the purposeful diversion of Indus River water for power and agricultural use, fresh water has turned increasingly salty and unclean. Also, the coastal areas of the country have had a marked slowdown of farming in recent years as agriculturally related needs like grazing pastures and tree cover have become scarce because of climate change. Extreme heat threatens both lives and livelihoods. Women are feeling the brunt of the clean water shortage. Since women are primarily responsible for the family, the collection and management of water is primarily their responsibility, and they have to face the consequences of water scarcity if it is not easily available, the Bangkok-based group Mangroves for the Future wrote in a 2019 report. Mangroves for the Future said that eye and skin diseases commonly affect vulnerable groups (women, children, and the elderly) in Thatta because of unsafe drinking water. There are also significant sanitary problems for women, and gynecological issues. Women told the group that they have devised some coping mechanisms to deal with the unrelenting sun and heat, such as using a wet cloth on their heads to reduce body temperature. Fishing is the main industry along the coast but increasing heat causes fish to go bad quickly and there is no electricity for refrigerators. Families are facing a serious loss in income. Additionally, men stay inside longer to cool off. That means fewer hours catching the fish they need for their families’ livelihood. (Frances Nguyen contributed reporting.) Source: https://womensmediacenter.com//the-climate-crisis-has-crea

#abortion #rights This week, voters in Colorado defeated Proposition 115. This attempt by anti-choice extremists to introduce a cruel abortion ban was stopped i...n its tracks. Clearly, reproductive freedom is a winning issue. A Look at the Future of Abortion From Colorado https://abortion-blog.com//a-look-at-the-future-of-aborti/ Abortion-rights opponents pushed a 22-week limit because they believed they could win. They were wrong. With a newly expanded conservative majority on the Supreme Court, state-level fights over abortion have taken on even more significance: They’re a preview of what might happen if the justices grant more latitude to states to determine abortion restrictions. On Tuesday, by a margin of more than half a million votes, Colorado voters firmly rejected a proposition that would have limited abortion more than 22 weeks into a pregnancy. Watch White Noise, the inside story of the alt-right The Atlantic’s first feature documentary ventures into the underbelly of the far-right movement to explore the seductive power of extremism.Stream Now This decision has significant practical consequences: Colorado is one of only seven states that permits abortion at any point in pregnancy, and women in their second or third trimester consistently travel there for the procedure when they can’t find a provider in their home state. The political implications are also important. In a blue state with a strong history of conservative activism, voters were not willing to embrace an abortion limit that’s on the books in almost every other state, and is largely in line with public opinion on appropriate abortion restrictions. Colorado’s decision on Proposition 115 is the first vote in America’s new era of abortion politics, in which it is more likely than ever that the Supreme Court will reimagine the constitutional right to abortion. As terminating a pregnancy legally becomes more difficult in America, abortion-rights supporters in blue states may be unwilling to tolerate any efforts to restrict the procedure, knowing that women’s options are shrinking.https://14e2986b1a54ac68b5aec1c37f2f1f85.safeframe.googlesy Limits on abortion after 22 weeks are in a legal gray zone. The Supreme Court has said that states have the right to restrict abortion after a fetus reaches the point of viability, or possible survival, outside of the womb, and some studies now suggest that 22 weeks is the earliest this could happen. About 1 percent of abortions occur this late in pregnancy, many of those because of late diagnoses of fetal conditions or logistical barriers to obtaining an abortion. Recently, Democratic legislatures in New York and Virginia have pushed to expand access to abortion at later stages in pregnancy, leading to intense national debates. In the weeks since Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, several Democratic officials have proposed new measures to expand abortion access and protection in their states, including New Jersey and Massachusetts. Meanwhile, southern states including Georgia and Alabama have passed intensive new restrictions on abortion in the past year and a half, including bans after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, as early as six weeks after conception. Abortion-rights opponents in Colorado pushed a 22-week limit for a simple reason: They believed they could win. One of the campaigns behind the proposed ban, Due Date Too Late, stated on its website that Colorado voters have indicated in the past that they would not support a full abortion ban; this ballot measure was an attempt to create a reasonable restriction. This proposal really was an attempt to take advantage of the past couple of years of extreme demonizing of abortion later in pregnancy, Kelly Baden, the vice president of reproductive rights at the State Innovation Exchange, a progressive policy organization, told me. The ban’s organizers were proven completely wrong, in such huge numbers. Colorado has recently undergone a massive political transformation. For many years, conservative activists strongly influenced the state’s elections: Colorado is home to the evangelical organization Focus on the Family and some of the most notable megachurches in the country. But rapid growth in the state’s urban areas has tilted its politics to the left. On Tuesday, the state went for former Vice President Joe Biden by a comfortable margin, and voters replaced its Republican senator, Cory Gardner, with former Governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat. Although far-right conservatives still have political swayLauren Boebert, who has praised the conspiracy theory QAnon, just won a congressional seat to represent the state’s rural western regionColorado is now definitively blue. The shift feels permanent, Baden said. Polling has long suggested that abortion-rights opponents are more likely to be explicitly motivated by their views on the procedure compared with abortion-rights supporters. But with abortion back at the center of the American political debate following the Senate confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a former Notre Dame professor who has expressed skepticism of Roe v. Wade, that may no longer be true. Activists on both sides of this issue closely watched Colorado to see what its Democratic voters would do, and what future debates over 22-week bans might look like. On all counts, Coloradans have sent a clear mandate in favor of sexual and reproductive health-care access, Alexis McGill Johnson, the head of Planned Parenthood, said in a statement. Anti-abortion-rights activists have not given up. Lynn Grandon, who leads Respect Life Denver, an organization of the city’s Catholic archdiocese, told me she was heartened by the number of Coloradans who voted to end abortions that happen late in pregnancy. Even though the ballot measure failed, the support it received was a sign that her group’s education campaign is working. Every day that passes means more lives are lost, she added in a statement. The mobilization to help moms and save babies will continue to be our top priority. Source: https://www.theatlantic.com//colorado-voters-defe/616997/

#abortion #rights Colorado Prop 115 results: Ban on most later-term abortions defeated https://abortion-blog.com//colorado-prop-115-results-ban-/ State’s vote...rs have previously rejected personhood efforts A ban on most abortions at 22 weeks or later in pregnancy was defeated Tuesday night as voters rejected the fourth attempt since 2008 to more stringently regulate abortions in Colorado. About 1.6 million voters, or 59.2%, rejected Proposition 115 with 83% of the vote counted, while 1.1 million, or 40.8%, supported it. Proponents, who said they had strong grassroots support, were vastly outspent by opponents. Proponents spent $505,488, compared to opponents’ nearly $9 million, according to the Colorado News Collaborative’s FollowtheMoneyCO project. The ballot measure would have subjected doctors even attempting to perform a later-term abortion to misdemeanor charges and at least a three-year suspension of their license. The only exception would have been for an abortion that is immediately required to save the woman’s life. This measure bears no relation to previous attempts to pass personhood amendments in Colorado, which would have banned all abortions, said Giuliana Day with Due Date Too Late, an organization that campaigned for the initiative. Day said opponents used scare tactics to sway voters even though the proposal was a reasonable restriction and amounted to a human rights issue. However, those campaigning against Proposition 115 said it would have undermined women’s rights to reproductive health. For the fourth time in 12 years, Coloradans have rejected attempts to ban abortion at the ballot, trusting patients and families to make the personal medical decisions that are right for them, without interference from politicians, Lucy Olena, campaign manager for the No on 115 campaign, said in a statement. Colorado was the first state in the country to decriminalize abortion, passing a law in 1967 to allow the procedure in cases of rape, incest, if the woman’s health was threatened or if the unborn child might have birth defects. The vote on abortion restrictions came as the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court has raised the stakes for the fate of Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion. Barrett has been involved in organizations opposed to abortion. Abortions later in pregnancy make up only about 1.3% of abortions overall, said Karen Middleton, president of Cobalt, a Colorado organization that advocates for access to abortion and reproductive rights. She said the abortions are performed when a woman’s health is endangered or when something is wrong with the unborn child. The proposition is designed to sound reasonable, but it is not, Middleton said. What you’re doing is inserting an arbitrary line and essentially putting politics into the doctor’s office and into a family’s decision. Source: https://www.denverpost.com//colorado-prop-115-results-abo/

#abortion #rights Abortion-ban measure is one of Colorado’s two most expensive ballot questions and the outcome is too close to call https://abortion-blog.com/.../abortion-ban-measure-is-one-of/ The campaigns for and against Proposition 115 are focusing on misinformation and undecided voters in the final days before the election Opponents of a ballot measure that would ban abortion in Colorado after 22 weeks of pregnancy, except in cases where the mother’s life is at risk, have raised $8.7 million about 14 times as much as the groups pushing the initiative. And leading up to Election Day, the limited polling data available suggests Proposition 115 is too close to call. In the final days, supporters of Proposition 115 are focusing on unaffiliated voters who haven’t yet cast a ballot, while opponents said they were fighting against misinformation and what they consider confusing ballot language. The campaigns point to two polls conducted in recent weeks that showed the race at a statistical dead-heat, and neither side is surprised by the tight margin. While national polling for decades has found that the majority of voters support abortion rights, that gap narrows when it comes to abortion later in pregnancy, with Americans pretty evenly split on that question. Coloradans have soundly rejected three previous ballot measures since 2008 that asked them to define personhood as the beginning of biological development of a human being, or define fetuses as people under the Colorado criminal code. But Proposition 115 asks voters to ban abortion after 22 weeks of gestation, the point at which proponents of the measure say a fetus could survive outside the womb. Some doctors, though, say viability is 24 weeks. The measure allows only one exception: when the life of the mother is in imminent danger. There are no exceptions for cases where the baby would not survive because of fetal abnormalities or when the mother’s health is endangered. The measure would make it a misdemeanor for doctors to perform abortions after 22 weeks. They’re not interested in Colorado being a travel destination for late-term abortions. Nicole Hunt, Coalition to Help Moms and Save Babies The fact that polling is this close demonstrates that Coloradans support reasonable and moderate abortion policy, said Nicole Hunt, co-founder of the Coalition to Help Moms and Save Babies. They’re not interested in Colorado being a travel destination for late-term abortions. Colorado is one of seven states with no time limit on when a woman can get an abortion, and women travel from several states and countries to get abortions in Colorado each year. There were between 200 and 300 abortions in Colorado that occured after 22 weeks of pregnancy in most of the last few years, according to state health department statistics. Opponents of the proposed abortion proposal said they’ve spent the campaign battling myths and misinformation, including claims that women are traveling to Colorado to get so-called birthday abortions to end pregnancies just before their due dates. People don’t walk into a hospital at 38 weeks and ask for an abortion, said Dr. Rebecca Cohen, a Denver-area doctor who provides abortion care. It does not happen. And no one is forced to have an abortion or provide abortion care. A physician is never obligated to do what someone is demanding and it is not something that they would do. Instead, Cohen said, women seek abortions after 22 weeks most often because they find out at a 20-week scan that their fetus has life-threatening problems or because their own health problems grow more severe as their pregnancy continues. Women could develop preeclampsia, high blood pressure or maternal seizure disorder, or their pre-existing conditions such as heart or lung diseases could worsen, she said. Abortions in later pregnancy happen after deliberate discussion and counseling with doctors to explore all the options, she said. Late-term abortion is not a medical term but a political one, Cohen said. An abortion at term for a healthy pregnancy is not the right option and not something that is done, she said. Volunteers with the Due Date Too Late campaign brought boxes of signatures to the Secretary of State’s Office in March. (Photo provided by Sage Naumann, Colorado Senate Republicans) The measure, she said, would put doctors in the difficult position of deciding whether a woman needed an abortion because her life was in danger which would be allowed or whether her health was at risk which would not be allowed. The ballot measure bans abortions after 22 weeks except when the abortion is immediately required to save the life of the pregnant woman or when her life is physically threatened, but not solely by psychological or emotional condition. That last part means that women could not seek an abortion after 22 weeks because they did not feel mentally stable enough to have a baby. Hunt, a supporter whose daughter was born at 27 weeks, said that in cases of a lethal fetal diagnosis, there are better options than abortion. Alternatives, such as prenatal hospice programs, help women celebrate and mourn the passing of a loved and wanted child. They can provide comfort to a family during pregnancy, said Hunt, who volunteers for a crisis pregnancy center. There is closure. Abortion measure is 2nd-most costly in Colorado Proposition 115 is the second-most costly campaign initiative on the ballot this year, nearly tied with a paid family leave measure. Colorado Families First raised $8.9 million through Wednesday to support Proposition 118, the paid leave proposal. Abortion Access for All has raised $8.7 million to try to defeat the abortion ban proposal, including many large and small donations from across the country. Meanwhile, four groups supporting the abortion ban have raised a combined $609,000, according to campaign finance records. Those are the Coalition to Help Moms and Save Babies, the Coalition for Women and Children, Alliance for Life and National Right to Life. While we might not have as much money to spend, the amount of hours, the amount of engagement There is a lot of momentum that is quiet, Hunt said. It’s grassroots level. She said it feels different this time around, compared to prior abortion ballot measures in Colorado. This is not a personhood bill, Hunt said. The proponents are afraid that they are going to lose. If they lose Colorado on this ballot measure, that is something that they will find as a big setback to their agenda. Nobody is at 20-plus weeks whimsically saying, ‘I just don’t want this baby.’ These are serious, agonizing, complicated issues. Stefanie Clarke, Vote No on 115 The opponents received a boost in funding after the death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an abortion rights proponent, and again this week when her replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, was confirmed, said Stefanie Clarke, a spokeswoman for the Vote No on 115 campaign. The amount of money just underscores how important this is and the ramifications that this measure, if passed, would have on a national level, she said. The Vote No on 115 volunteers have been working phone and text banks every day to combat the intentionally confusing measure, Clarke said. Nobody is at 20-plus weeks whimsically saying, ‘I just don’t want this baby,’ she said. These are serious, agonizing, complicated issues. A University of Colorado Boulder poll found only slight gender differences in polling on Proposition 115, with men and women pretty evenly split on the measure. This is despite other races that showed big gender gaps, including the presidential race where Colorado women were more likely to favor former Vice President Joe Biden, said Anand Sokhey, an associate professor of political science who worked on the survey. On the abortion-ban proposal, partisianship was a much larger factor than gender with a majority of Democrats surveyed against the ban and a majority of Republicans in favor, he said. Source: https://coloradosun.com//abortion-ban-measure-2nd-most-ex/

#abortion #rights Hundreds of U.S. ‘Pregnancy Centers’ Are Now Offering Unproven ‘Abortion Reversal’ Method https://abortion-blog.com//hundreds-of-u-s-pregnanc...y-cent/ A new report from the top leaders of the anti-abortion movement provides a snapshot of their recent victories. Top leaders of the U.S. anti-abortion movement are congratulating their foot soliders for gaining ground in the war over abortionjust as the Senate prepares to confirm a Supreme Court justice that could help topple Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. The United States now has more than 2,700 pregnancy centers, according to a report released Tuesday by some of the nation’s leading anti-abortion organizations. These facilities, which are sometimes called crisis pregnancy centers, offer anti-abortion activists a physical presence in communities across the country. They do not offer or refer abortions and instead try to steer people into continuing their pregnancies. When I consider the triumphs of the pro-life movement, I think there can be no more ultimate measure of it, this side of paradise, than every resounding ‘yes’ to new life, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the powerful anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List, wrote in the introduction to the report. As a mother, as well as a convert to and leader in the pro-life cause, I am incredibly heartened by the ongoing work of pregnancy centers across our country to support women and their families in saying ‘yes’ to Life. (Life is deliberately capitalized. Dannenfelser also signed off her introduction with, For Life.) A 2018 version of the report found that, in 2017, there were around 2,600 pregnancy centers in the United States. By comparison, the U.S. had just 808 abortion clinics in 2017, according to the most recent data from the Guttmacher Institute, which studies abortion restrictions. The thousands of centers served around 1.85 million people in 2019, according to the new report, compiled by the anti-abortion think tank Charlotte Lozier Institute and the three top pregnancy center networks, Care Net, Heartbeat International, and National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA). And all of the 2,700 centers adhere to a set of standards that includes the commitment to never offer, recommend, or refer for abortions, abortifacients, or contraceptives. Eleven percent of the centersor 305 centersalso offer the abortion pill reversal, a controversial treatment that purports to help people stop their medication abortions. In 2019, the number of providers that offer abortion pill reversal increased by 30%, thanks to a mix of clinics, private practice, hospital systems, and pregnancy centers, the report found. More than 200 consulting pregnancy centers also support the practice by referring people to a hotline that counsels them about it, offering free ultrasounds, and providing what the report calls long-term support to reversal clients. No conclusive medical evidence exists to prove that abortion pill reversals work. In 2019, a study meant to evaluate the abortion reversal protocol instead ended early, after three study participants started hemorrhaging so much blood they went to the ER. The pregnancy center report shares the story of Sarah, a woman who underwent the abortion pill reversal protocol and ended up giving birth. However, the report says that, after Sarah took the first of the two drugs used in a medication abortion, a doctor found a heartbeat and then started her on the protocol, which typically involves giving patients several doses of the hormone progerstone. That account suggests that the pregnancy continued despite the first drug (which, one doctor told VICE News in 2018, isn’t a very good abortion-causing drug when taken on its own). It does not confirm that it was the progesterone that successfully saved the pregnancy. Abortion rights groups say that these pregnancy centers are often less than forthcoming about the fact that they don’t offer abortions, a tactic that’s designed to lure in unsuspecting pregnant people. Behind the doors of what are designed to look like full-service health clinics, ideologically motivated staff members deceive and manipulate women with dangerous misinformation, alleged a 2015 report from NARAL Pro-Choice America, which conducted undercover investigations into pregnancy centers in more than 10 states. A 2019 VICE News investigation found that, when searching for places to get an abortion in states where abortion rights are under threat, Google Maps will often return results for anti-abortion pregnancy centers. These centers had labels like pregnancy care centers or women’s health clinics, which made it difficult to tell which services were actually offered by the facilities. VICE News also found that these facilities’ websites frequently don’t clarify that they don’t support abortion. The report released Tuesday speaks highly of the medical, education, and support services offered by the pregnancy centers. Most performed ultrasounds, gave out goods like diapers and baby wipes, and gave what the report calls parenting/prenatal education program[s]. Many centers, the report noted, have stayed open throughout the coronavirus pandemic as essential services. (In the spring, public officials in multiple states cited the pandemic as a reason to stop abortion clinics from offering the procedure.) Just 30% of the pregnancy centers offered STI testing in 2019. About 20% offered STI treatment. And 2% offered pap smears and well-woman exams, where providers typically offer a kind of physical centered around reproductive health. In 2019, a total of 5%, or 147 pregnancy center locations, offered some level of prenatal care beyond the provision of prenatal vitamins on-site, the report found. Nearly 1,000 centers offered group sexual risk avoidance education presentations. Sexual risk avoidance is a rebranding of abstinence-only sex ed. The vast majority of people working at pregnancy centers are also not licensed medical professionals, according to the report. Out of around 53,000 volunteerswho make up the bulk of the U.S. pregnancy center workforcearound 6,400 were licensed to practice medicine. Just under 3,800 paid staffers, out of almost 15,000, had similar licenses. Another common service is after-abortion recovery and support, which 1,931 centers offered to nearly 22,000 people. While some people do have mixed or negative feelings after getting an abortion, a landmark study of abortion’s aftereffects found in 2019 that, five years after an abortion, 84% of women reported either feeling primarily positive about their abortions or having no feelings about it at all. The vast majority of the funding for pregnancy centers comes from private donations, the report found. But 340 pregnancy center organizations, in the words of the report, received government monies at some level through federal or state funding. That’s a 2% spike from 2017. By contrast, the Trump administration banned clinics funded by the only federal program dedicated to family planning from referring patients for abortions in 2019. Source: https://www.vice.com//hundreds-of-us-pregnancy-centers-are

#abortion #rights Lindsey Graham says women ‘have a place in America’ and ‘can go anywhere’ if they are against abortion https://abortion-blog.com//lindsey-gra...ham-says-women-have/ Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Saturday that women are welcome anywhere in the country if they’re against abortion. I want every young woman to know there’s a place for you in America if you are pro-life, if you embrace your religion, and you follow a traditional family structure that you can go anywhere, young lady, he said at a campaign event. Graham was urging women to be more like newly appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who in the past has signaled her anti-abortion stances. Early in October, Graham made a similar suggestion, saying Black people are free to go and live in any part of South Carolina so long as they’re not liberal. On the campaign trail Saturday night, Sen. Lindsey Graham said women are welcome anywhere in the country provided that they’re anti-abortion. The Republican senator took the stage at a campaign event in Conway, South Carolina, his home state, and praised Amy Coney Barrett, the newly appointed Supreme Court justice. You know what I like about Judge Barrett? She’s got everything, Graham said. She’s not just wicked smart, she’s incredibly good. She embraces her faith. I want every young woman to know there’s a place for you in America if you are pro-life, if you embrace your religion, and you follow a traditional family structure that you can go anywhere, young lady, he continued. Throughout the confirmation process, Barrett has chosen to withhold details about her stance on abortion and reproductive rights. But in the past, Barrett’s actions have signaled she is against Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision granting abortion. Barrett, for example, publicly backed an anti-abortion ad appearing in a South Bend, Indiana, newspaper in 2006. Additionally, more than 1,500 alums from Barrett’s alma mater, Rhodes College, signed a letter in October that argued Barrett would seriously curtail Roe v. Wade if nominated. Women and LGBT activists are slamming his remarks, characterizing the parameters he listed as sexist and anti-LGBT. Graham’s remarks come weeks after the senator made limiting characterizations about Black people. On October 9, Graham said Black people are free to go and live in any part of the state, as long as they’re not liberal. I care about everybody, Graham said, speaking at a forum for South Carolina Senate candidates. If you’re a young African American, an immigrant, you can go anywhere in this state. You just need to be conservative, not liberal. Graham is fighting to keep his Senate seat against Jaime Harrison, a Black former state legislator who spoke at the forum just before him. For weeks, polls have shown either the two tied or one just slightly ahead of the other. Graham has a marginal lead of 3 percentage points over Harrison, according to a poll conducted last week and posted on Real Clear Politics. Harrison, with 46% of support, trails Graham’s 49%. The South Carolina senator did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment on his Saturday remarks about women. Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/graham-women-have-place-in-

#abortion #rights Oregon law protects reproductive rights if Roe v. Wade overturned, expert says "The Governor recognizes that many Oregonians are worried about... the impacts the decisions and rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court in the months to come will have on their family, their health care, their right to marry or their immigration status," says Governor Kate Brown. "She is committed to fighting to protect the rights of each and every Oregonian and ensuring our state will be a welcoming, inclusive state for all who call Oregon home." https://abortion-blog.com//oregon-law-protects-reproducti/ PORTLAND, Ore With the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and major cases on the high court’s list dealing with abortion, same-sex marriage, and healthcare, many Oregonians are wondering what this could mean locally. Many speculate because of Barrett’s seemingly conservative side, that she might rule to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade case. However, law experts say judges are often hard to read.Volume 90% Oregon law protects reproductive rights if Roe v. Wade overturned. (KATU) Law experts like Tung Yin, who is a law professor at Lewis and Clark College says even if some of these rulings are overturned. like Roe v Wade or Obergfell vs. Hodges, which deals directly with same-sex marriage, it would likely have little effect in Oregon because Oregon already has laws in place. If [Roe v. Wade] were overturned, all it would mean is that the constitution does not guarantee the right to an abortion, but a state could provide that, and in Oregon it does, Yin said. Oregon was one of the first states to legalize abortion. In fact, the right to an abortion is protected in the state constitution. And at that point, any state could make its own laws about abortion. State legislatures have generally far more power, the only limits are imposed by their state constitution or the U.S. Constitution Bill of Rights, Yin said. Yin says the only way a state would be prevented from legalizing abortions is if there were a crime attached to it. When it comes to the Affordable Care Act, there are a few more possibilities. Oregon could certainly implement its own version within the state. That would not help people outside the state, but within the state. Nothing in the Affordable Care Act rulings would prevent the states from doing so, Yin said. In fact, so could Congress. In DC, lawmakers could go back to the drawing board on the Affordable Care Act, so to speak, and pass a new version. As for what will happen, time will tell, but on Monday, Governor Brown’s office released this statement on the possibility: The Governor recognizes that many Oregonians are worried about the impacts the decisions and rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court in the months to come will have on their family, their health care, their right to marry, or their immigration status. For example, striking down the Affordable Care Act would have dangerous consequences for Oregonians with pre-existing conditions and families who rely on it for necessary preventive and non-preventive health care coverage. If that law is invalidated, more than 546,000 Oregonians could lose coverage. Here in Oregon, Governor Brown has been a champion for access to health care, reproductive rights, LGBTQIA rights, and for our immigrant and refugee communities. She’s fought to improve the quality of health care all Oregonians receive, as well as eliminating health disparities and improving access to care; signed Oregon’s Reproductive Health Equity Act into law in 2017; championed driver’s licenses for all and protections for our dreamers; and championed Adi’s Act to help prevent youth suicide, ban conversion therapy, and make Oregon the first state to pass a stand-alone transgender justice bill. The Governor is committed to fighting to protect the rights of each and every Oregonian and ensuring our state will be a welcoming, inclusive state for all who call Oregon home. Source: https://katu.com//oregon-law-protects-reproductive-rights-

#reproductive #abortion #rights Most U.S. women under 50 use contraception: Report A new CDC report shows that most American women (65%) between the ages of 15 ...and 49 years use birth control. Nevertheless, cost remains a prevalent barrier to access for women who want to, but can't use contraception https://abortion-blog.com//most-u-s-women-under-50-use-co/ Most American women between 15 and 49 years of age use birth control, according to a new U.S. government report. Between 2017 and 2019, 65% of those women used some form of contraception, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This report provides this unique snapshot of all women of reproductive age at a point in time, said lead researcher Kimberly Daniels. She’s a demographic statistician at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) in Hyattsville, Md. The most common types of birth control were female sterilization (18%), oral contraceptive pills (14%), long-acting reversible contraception, or LARCs (10%), and male condoms (8%). LARCswhich include intrauterine devices and under-the-skin implantswere most popular among women in their 20s and 30s. Among 20- to 29-year-olds, 14% used LARCs, as did 13% of women in their 30s. LARCS were the method of choice for 6% of 15- to 19-year-olds and 7% of women in their 40s, the findings showed. Hispanic and Black women were more likely to rely on condoms (11%), compared with white women (7%), the researchers found. And women with more education preferred contraceptive pills over sterilization, the study found. The less commonly used methods in terms of percentages would be natural family planning and diaphragms, Daniels said. The last time Daniels looked at contraceptive use was 2018, and the most common methods are still the same. Understanding contraceptive use across populations sheds light on fertility patterns, including birth rates and unintended pregnancies, she said. The report was published Oct. 20 in the CDC’s NCHS Data Brief. Dr. Jill Rabin, co-chief of ambulatory care and obstetrics and gynecology at Northwell Health in New Hyde Park, N.Y., reviewed the findings. Contraception is an individual choice which is dynamic and changes with people’s lives and the desire for fertility or needing to protect against an unintended pregnancy, Rabin said. Half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintendedbut that doesn’t mean unwanted, Rabin said. A significant portion of people who are not using contraception are either seeking fertility or not actively seeking to become pregnant, but if they did become pregnant, they would be happy, she said. Many people who don’t use birth control are LGBTQ or don’t have heterosexual sex, she added. One of the main barriers for women who want contraception is cost, Rabin said. Whether a woman has health insurance or not can determine what type of birth control is available to her. Condoms are cheap and readily available, but birth control pills and LARCs require a prescription and are costly, which limits their availability to many poor and uninsured women, Rabin said. And abortion is not a method of birth control, she added. While effective in preventing pregnancy, Rabin cautioned that contraceptives do not protect against sexually transmitted infections (STIs). The STI rate is way too high. Even condoms are not 100% effective against sexually transmitted infections, she said. Source: https://medicalxpress.com//2020-10-women-contraception.htm

#abortion #rights Amy Coney Barrett Has Joined The Supreme Court. What Happens To Roe V. Wade Now? https://abortion-blog.com//amy-coney-barrett-has-joined-t/ ...Justice Amy Coney Barrett has officially been confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States, filling the seat once held by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Barrett was confirmed on Monday with a 52-48 Senate vote (the first time in 151 years a justice was confirmed with zero support from the minority party), eight days out from the November election. While Barrett, who has now cemented the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority, is poised to rule on a number of issues that could affect our lives in the immediatethe Affordable Care Act, absentee ballot deadlines in essential swing stateswhen the nation first heard of Ginsburg’s passing, the future of Roe v. Wade was top of mind. President Trump previously promised to nominate judges with the intention of overturning Roe, the 1973 ruling that confirmed the constitutional right to abortion. So now that Barrett is on the court, what does that mean for the future of abortion rights? Here, what you need to know. Where does Amy Coney Barrett stand on abortion? Barrett, a conservative Catholic, is known to be personally anti-abortion. She has said she believes life begins at conception, and in 2006, she signed her name to an ad that opposed abortion on demand. She is also an originalist, meaning she interprets the Constitution according to the understanding of those who drafted and ratified it, according to the New York Times. In a 2013 law review article, she wrote: I tend to agree with those who say that a justice’s duty is to the Constitution and that it is thus more legitimate for her to enforce her best understanding of the Constitution rather than a precedent she thinks clearly in conflict with it. In 2016, NPR reports she said, I don’t think the core case, Roe’s core holding that women have a right to an abortion, I don’t think that would change. But I think the question of whether people can get very late-term abortions, you know, how many restrictions can be put on clinics, I think that will change. Though Barrett, who joined the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in 2017, does not have an extensive judicial record, according to Vox, she has twice voted in favor of abortion restrictions. (Read more about the specific cases, here.) Throughout her confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court, Barrett did not directly say how she might rule on Roe or abortion rights. However, as stated above, she’s made clear that she’s open to reversing precedent if she believes that decision is in conflict with the Constitution. Nancy Northup, the president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a legal advocacy organization, told ELLE.com: The confirmation hearing made clear that Judge Barrett has the most extreme record and opposition to reproductive rights of any SCOTUS nominee in three decades. She continued, You can see it in her approach to Constitutional interpretation, you see it in her opinions on the Seventh Circuit, and she had vitriolic public advocacy defending the right to life from fertilization. That is a straight-on legal perspective that is not consistent with the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence recognizing that the right to access abortion and contraception is protected in the 14th amendment. I think states are going to open the floodgates for those that want to restrict access to abortion. They’re going to see this opportunity with her on the court. What could happen to Roe v. Wade with Barrett on the court? It’s essential to note that abortion rights can be stripped away without Roe being overturnedand it’s already happening across the country. There are bans on when you can have an abortion, the type of abortion you can have, and barriers to access, like long waiting periods.ADVERTISEMENT CONTINUE READING BELOW A number of states also have Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws that advocates say chip away at abortion access and ultimately intend to shut down abortion providers. Planned Parenthood describes TRAP laws as costly, severe, and medically unnecessary requirements imposed on abortion providers and women’s health centers, such as creating building requirements for clinics or requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. For example, in 2016, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law in the case Whole Woman’s Health vs Hellerstedt that would have required providers to have admitting privileges; even though the law was ultimately deemed unconstitutional, before the Supreme Court even ruled, it caused half of the state’s abortion-providing clinics to close. (Also, since these laws are introduced at the state level, it is essential to vote down-ballot in the upcoming election if you are concerned about electing pro-choice state leaders.) When it comes to what Barrett could soon rule on, according to CBS News, there are 17 abortion-related cases that are one step from the Supreme Court. Two others have already reached the court, though it’s yet to be announced whether they will hear arguments for either case. One of those cases is a 15-week abortion ban in Mississippi that CBS reports challenges the core holding of Roe, which legalized abortion until fetal viability, usually around 24 weeks of pregnancy. (The Supreme Court, including Justice Barrett, will be considering that petition this Friday.) Northup said the 15-week abortion ban is a straight-on challenge to Roe v. Wade and that the court cannot uphold it without reversing Roe v. Wade. Beyond those 17, there are dozens of others cases currently making their way through the judicial system, including six-week abortion bans, which also present a direct challenge to Roe. (For more information, on what could happen in your particular state if Roe were to be weakened or overturned, check out the Center for Reproductive Rights’ interactive map, What If Roe Fell?) When it comes to reproductive rights, we must also consider the issue of healthcare, especially as the Supreme Court is set to hear a challenge to the Affordable Care Act this November. The Affordable Care Act has probably been the most significant advancement of women’s reproductive healthcare since Roe, Northup said. As she explained, more people are covered under the ACA due to the Medicaid expansion and the affordability of insurance, meaning more are getting maternal healthcare. Insurance companies can no longer exclude people who, for example, have had C-sections from receiving pregnancy care, and the law’s no copay contraception guarantee allows many to get their choice of contraceptive without cost. How to help: According to Northup, this is now the most conservative court on abortion rights, probably since Roe. So what can you do? The vast majority of the nation wants abortion to be safe and legal, and it really matters to make that support visible, she said. Everything from talking to family, friends, and co-workers, to making that support visible on social media, to making that support public with protests and being out there on the streetsall of those are very, very important. It matters the context in which this will be decided. You can also donate to an abortion fund, which assists patients in securing and paying for abortion care. The Cut has created an extensive guide to abortion funds in states considered hostile, meaning lawmakers will try to prohibit abortion if Roe falls, and states considered not protected, meaning places where abortion will not have legal protection if Roe falls. You can also find abortion funds across the country through the National Network of Abortion Funds. Vote down-ballot in the upcoming election, and urge your representatives to support laws like the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would protect people’s access to abortion by establishing federal statutory rights for providers to provide and patients to receive abortion care free from medically unnecessary restrictions and bans, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Source: https://www.elle.com//amy-coney-barrett-roe-v-wade-abort/

#abortion #rights What Is ‘Late-Term Abortion’? Here’s What Politicians MeanAnd Why It’s Not Medically Accurate The inflammatory phrase seeks to politicize a s...ituation that can cause unimaginable suffering for pregnant people. The political focus on abortion later in pregnancy does not reflect the medical reality and disproportionately impacts those who find themselves in need of critical healthcare." There’s a lot of disinformation about abortion later in pregnancy, so here’s what you should know to combat these anti-choice attacks. https://abortion-blog.com//what-is-late-term-abortion-her/ Opponents of abortion have long tried to stigmatize the medical procedure, but in the past few years, they’ve targeted abortions performed in the second and third trimester. President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have repeatedly claimed that Democratic lawmakers support late-term abortions done up to the moment of birth. Doctors, meanwhile, have repeatedly explained that they do not perform abortions while people are in labor, or in the days before their due date, but the talking point persists. My patients didn’t ask to be spoken about this way, they didn’t ask for their health care to be politicized, and they’re the ones that are suffering the most from all of this, Jen Villavicencio, MD, MPP, an ob-gyn and abortion provider in Michigan and the Darney-Landy Fellow at the American College of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, tells Health. Inflammatory language like ‘late-term abortion’ is used to deflect the conversation away from the safe, legal provision of compassionate medical care to patients, Dr. Villavicencio says. Here, ob-gyns and abortion providers cut through the political talking points and focus on the facts regarding abortions later in pregnancy. This is what you need to know. What do politicians mean when they say ‘late-term abortion’? In short, it’s a sensationalized phrase that doesn’t reflect science or medicine. While people may have heard physicians use late term in a medical setting, it refers to women in the 41st week of their pregnancy, that is, women who are still pregnant after their due date, and no abortions occur during this time period, Dr. Villavicencio says. Physicians instead say abortions later in pregnancy or later abortions, or simply refer to the trimester when the procedure happens. What is a later abortion, and how often does it happen? It depends on who you ask, but generally later abortions are those that happen after a specific point in pregnancy (for example, beyond 20 weeks or in the third trimester) or after a fetus is viable, which is thought to be at about 24 weeks though that’s not a hard and fast rule. There is no magic switch that flips in the same week of every pregnancy after which that fetus is viable; viability is determined by a physician on an individual basis. Abortions in the second trimester are most often done via a procedure known as dilation and evacuation, or D&E, where the cervix is dilated either with medication or seaweed sticks known as laminaria that swell and open the cervix, and then the pregnancy is removed through the cervix using instruments. Abortions in the third trimester, which are a very small number of procedures, involve inducing labor, Daniel Grossman, MD, and ob-gyn and abortion provider and a professor of obstetrics at the University of California San Francisco and director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), tells Health. These later abortions are rare: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2016, just 1.2% of abortions were performed at 21 weeks of pregnancy or later. Another 7.7% were done from 14 to 20 weeks, while the vast majority, 91%, were performed at or before 13 weeks. Put another way, this means 98.7% of all abortions happen before 21 weeks. Dr. Grossman says there isn’t great data on the breakdown of procedures after 21 weeks but, he says, it’s clearly much less than 1% past 24 weeks. Given that these later procedures are so uncommon, Dr. Villavicencio says: The political focus on abortion later in pregnancy does not reflect the medical reality and disproportionately impacts those who find themselves in need of critical healthcare. Why do people get later abortions? There are several reasons why people have later abortions, and they generally fall into two categories. It’s either due to some new information that has come about during their pregnancy or a result of barriers that exist to getting abortion, Dr. Villavicencio says. The new information category includes learning something about the health of the fetus or the pregnant person, but it also encompasses people not realizing they’re pregnant until later on. This can happen because they’re using birth control, they have irregular periods, or they’re young and not aware of pregnancy symptoms, Dr. Grossman says. Dr. Villavicencio says she’s had abortion patients who are grandmothers and didn’t think they could get pregnant. Late recognition of pregnancy is not unusual, and certainly not a fault of someone for not knowing. Unless you’re taking a pregnancy test every single month, which no one does, it’s very easy to miss a pregnancy, she says. Fetal health problems could include a malformation of the fetus or genetic abnormality that means the fetus won’t survive. But these problems often aren’t diagnosed until later in the second trimester or into the third because the screening tests and scans don’t pick these problems up until that late, Dr. Grossman says. The special ultrasound that’s colloquially known as an anatomy scanwhere the fetus is large enough that doctors can see the heart, brain and spineisn’t usually done until 18 or 20 weeks, but can be as late as 23 weeks, based on the availability, where a person lives, or even what’s going on in their life, Dr. Villavicencio says. Then if the scan does pick up something concerning, people need time to get a specialist appointment for a second opinion. Similarly, people can develop dangerous health complications in pregnancy that may not emerge until the later second trimester or early third trimester. Two examples are pre-eclampsia, or high blood pressure later in pregnancy that can become life-threatening, and placenta previa, when the placenta is covering the opening of the uterus and can cause severe bleeding during pregnancy. The treatment for these conditions is delivery and C-section, respectively, Dr. Grossman says, but if the patient is still in their second trimester and the fetus isn’t viable, abortion is sometimes the best option for their health. Barriers to accessing care can also push people who want abortions to get them later in pregnancy. These obstacles include living far away from an abortion clinic thanks to anti-abortion clinic shutdown laws, facing a medically unnecessary state-mandated waiting period of 24 to 72 hours that requires multiple trips to a clinic, and the costs associated with that travel such as gas, hotel stays, childcare (60% of people seeing abortions already have kids), and unpaid time off from work. Plus if you’re having an abortion procedure rather than getting the abortion pill to take at home, you might need someone to travel with you, Dr. Villavicencio says. Another is the cost of the procedure itselfan average of just over $500 at 10 weeks in 2014which may not be covered by health insurance, especially for people living on low incomes who have Medicaid. Thanks to the 1976 Hyde Amendment, the federally funded Medicaid program can only cover abortions in the cases of rape, incest, or threat to the mother’s life. States can use their own funding to cover the procedure, but only 16 do so while 34 states and Washington, DC, stick to the federal standard, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Because of structural racism, Black and Latinx women are more likely to have Medicaid insurance and are thereby less likely to have the procedure covered. The price of the procedure is, of course, added to any travel costs mentioned above. That is a real, real barrier for many patients, Dr. Grossman says. [The Hyde Amendment is] a common reason why people end up presenting for care in the second trimester because it took time for them to get the funding together to be able to pay for the abortion. And the later an abortion is, the more expensive it is, so the problem snowballs. By contrast, in a 2012 study in the American Journal of Public Health, Dr. Grossman found that in the two years after Iowa made early medication abortions easier to access through a telemedicine program, that people were almost 50% more likely to have a first-trimester abortion while second-trimester abortions declined, even after controlling for other factors. I think there’s a lot of evidence showing that these restrictions can push people later in pregnancy and increase the likelihood that they’ll get a second-trimester abortion, and conversely, that efforts to expand access to early abortion can help to reduce second-trimester abortion, Dr. Grossman says. Which states restrict later abortions? Forty-three states ban abortion after a specific gestational age, with 17 banning it after 20 weeks, while seven states do not have gestational limits, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Under the Supreme Court rulings Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey, states can only ban abortion after the fetus has reached viability, meaning it could survive outside the womb, as long as there are exceptions to save the life and health of the mother. That framework means state bans after viability don’t have to permit exceptions for people who faced barriers to getting care or those whose fetuses have severe anomalies. Of the 17 states with 20-week bans in effect, 13 lack exceptions for lethal fetal anomalies, meaning people who want abortions in those cases would have to travel out of state. States that have passed bans before viability have typically done so in an effort to provoke a Supreme Court challenge, per Guttmacher. Gestational age bans also ignore the medical reality that some pregnancies will never be viable. What do politicians mean when they talk about babies born alive in abortions? President Trump has also repeatedly claimed that doctors are delivering healthy babies and then executing them, which does not happen. There are rare cases where the fetus has been diagnosed with a severe condition that is clearly incompatible with life. After counseling with their medical team and specialists, some patients choose to induce labor, knowing that the fetus will not survive after delivery, and offer comfort care. This is called perinatal palliative care and it’s an accepted medical practice, Dr. Grossman says. Sometimes people choose to induce labor rather than having a D&E procedure because they want to hold their baby or because the labor process will be cathartic for those who were preparing to deliver, Dr. Villavicencio says. Dr. Villavicencio says these are heart-wrenching, tragic situations where the decisions made are no different than other end-of-life careit’s just that this is at the other end of the spectrum of life. Families are deciding whether they want to take futile steps like intubation and CPR or let their loved one pass away peacefully. But crucially, it is not medical dying and it’s not physician-assisted suicide and it is not hastening the death of anyone in any way, she says. This is purely a way to offer as much comfort as possible while the inevitable occurs. These are not abortions of healthy pregnancies. This is not ‘hey by the way, I forgot I want an abortion.’ They’ve had conferences with the neonatal intensivists, with the obstetricians, with the pediatricians, with the palliative care team to discuss how and when this palliative birth is going to occur, Dr. Villavicencio says. If [politicians] were being honest about what they were talking about, they wouldn’t be talking about ‘moment of birth,’ because that’s not when the abortion decision is being made. Source: https://www.health.com/condit/pregnancy/late-term-abortion

#abortion #rights Mississippi Tees Up a Ridiculous Abortion Rights Claim Just for Amy Coney Barrett https://abortion-blog.com//mississippi-tees-up-a-ridiculo/... With abortion foe Amy Coney Barrett newly minted as a Supreme Court justice, we’re bracing for impact. I have a question. Is Mississippi OK? Not the people in Mississippi. There are lots of good people in Mississippi. But I mean public officials in Mississippi. Like the governor. And the attorney general. And basically any attorney representing Mississippi in court. Because not only have they ignored my plea to stop filing Supreme Court petitions, they actually upped the ante by filing a supplemental brief containing legal arguments (please read those quotation marks as sarcastically as possible), which supposedly explain why the state’s unconstitutional 15-week gestational ban is actually constitutional. In making its legal arguments, Mississippi blabbers on for seven blissfully short pages, managing to cram in a lot of bullshit about cases that have nothing to do with Mississippi’s case. And frankly, it’s starting to make me lose my mind a bit. Mississippi’s case, Jackson Women’s Health Organization v. Dobbs, is about a 15-week gestational ban, yet another flavor of pre-viability abortion ban anti-choice numpties like to cook up. Under current abortion law, pre-viability abortion bans are unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has ruled over and over again that states cannot outright ban abortion before viability. Everyone agreesMississippi’s lawyers includedthat no fetus is viable at 15 weeks. Mississippi’s law is therefore unconstitutional. Period. That’s why the district court struck it down. And that’s why even the extremely conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck it down. But Mississippi doesn’t have to convince the district court or the Fifth Circuit that its legal arguments are sound. Mississippi has to convince the Supreme Court, where a new justice was installed on the bench just yesterday to destroy access to health care, including abortion care. If Mississippi’s lawyers give newly minted Justice Amy Coney Barrett an abortion turd, she’ll find a way to polish it into an abortion stone. So, what did attorneys for Mississippi do last week as Barrett’s nomination was barreling through the Senate? They filed a nonsense supplemental brief discussing how the federal courts have been ruling in recent cases involving TRAP laws (targeted regulations of abortion providers). TRAP laws are laws that regulate only abortion providers. Mississippi’s abortion ban is not a TRAP law. An abortion ban is a law that well bans abortionlike Mississippi’s 15-week ban. In cases involving TRAP laws, courts have to do an undue burden analysis. Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a case almost as foundational to abortion rights as Roe v. Wade, requires it. And right now there’s a live fight about what kind of undue burden analysis courts need to do, thanks to Chief Justice John Roberts leaving a ticking time bomb in his concurring opinion in June Medical Services v. Russo this summer. Roberts may have helped Louisiana clinics stay open in the short term, but his ruling will likely end up wiping out clinic access across the country. It’s already being used to wipe out access in Kentucky. But none of this should have anything to do with Mississippi’s case. Mississippi’s case is about a pre-viability ban. The TRAP law cases are about abortion regulations. There’s no need for an undue burden analysis when it comes to pre-viability bans because they are unconstitutional. But no. Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch has been desperately trying to get someone to buy her argument that the abortion ban isn’t really a ban. It’s a regulation. And if it’s not a regulation, it’s at most, a partial ban. And besides, Casey doesn’t ban all pre-viability abortion bans! But that’s exactly what Casey does.All of this nonsense is a transparent effort to prime the pump so that when Justice Barrett is seated, Mississippi and every other state controlled by anti-choice forces can float any bullshit argument before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court in Casey said, viability marks the earliest point at which a State’s interest in fetal life is constitutionally adequate to justify a legislative ban on nontherapeutic abortions. A state can start banning abortion after fetal viability. Not before. That’s it. End of discussion. Everyone go home. But Mississippi doesn’t want to go home. Mississippi wants the Court to analyze its pre-viability ban as if it were a TRAP law. If Mississippi can convince a court to apply the undue burden test to all abortion restrictionsincluding already unconstitutional pre-viability abortion bansthen Mississippi’s 15-week ban might stand a chance. After all, you can’t even get an abortion in Mississippi after 16 weeks. Anti-choice legislators in Mississippi have made sure of that. So when you think about it, a 15-week ban is only a burdenif you can even call it thatfor a week. And how many pregnant people will that even affect? It’s too few to even bother counting. That’s Mississippi’s argument. And it might seem like a reasonable one if you ignore what the court in Casey said: Our adoption of the undue burden analysis does not disturb the central holding of Roe v. Wade, and we reaffirm that holding. Got it? The Casey Court reaffirmed the holding of Roe. And what is that holding, pray tell? Regardless of whether exceptions are made for particular circumstances, a State may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability. One more time! A State may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability. Nuh-uh, says Mississippi in court documents filed with the Supreme Court. Regulations designed to foster the health of a woman seeking an abortion are valid if they do not constitute an undue burden. But Mississippi’s law isn’t a regulation. It’s a fucking ban. Well fine, then, Mississippi flounces. It’s a ban. But it doesn’t matter anyway because viability is the wrong standard. It’s outdated. Please, oh please, Justice Barrett, won’t you hear our cries and upend the foundation of abortion rights jurisprudence? (Attorneys for Mississippi didn’t actually say this, but they may as well have since this will be one of the very first cases that Justice Barrett will consider.) Is it obvious that Mississippi is getting on my goddamn nerves? Because Mississippi is getting on my goddamn nerves. All of this nonsense is a transparent effort to prime the pump so that when Justice Barrett is seated, Mississippi and every other state controlled by anti-choice forces can float any bullshit argument before the Supreme Court and be relatively confident that the conservative supermajority, all of whom hate abortion, will buy it. All these states need to do is give the conservative justices on the Supreme Court enough cover so that when they reverse either Roe and Caseyor interpret one or both cases in a way that further guts access to abortion carestates like Mississippi can implement laws that for more than 40 years have been unconstitutional. And with the Supreme Court scheduled to discuss on Friday whether to take this case, Mississippi may get its wish. Source: https://rewirenewsgroup.com//mississippi-tees-up-a-ridicu/

#abortion #rights Senate to confirm Trump’s Supreme Court nominee a week ahead of Election Day https://abortion-blog.com//senate-to-confirm-trumps-supre/ Sena...te Republicans are poised to confirm President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett on Monday, a major victory for the President and his party just days before November 3, that promises to push the high court in a more conservative direction for generations to come.The stakes in the Supreme Court battle are immense and come at a pivotal time in American politics in the run up to an election where control of Congress and the White House are on the line. Trump’s appointment of a new Supreme Court justice will mark the third of his tenure in office, giving Republicans a historic opportunity to deliver on the key conservative priority and campaign promise of transforming the federal courts through lifetime appointments. Trump is expected to swear-in Barrett at the White House in an outdoor ceremony at 9 p.m., Monday, after her expected confirmation, a source familiar with the invitation tells CNN. Barrett, who is 48 years old, is likely to serve on the court for decades and will give conservatives a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, a shift in its makeup that will have dramatic implications for a range of issues that could come before it, including the future of the Affordable Care Act and any potential disputes regarding the 2020 election. Senate Republicans, who hold a majority in the upper chamber, have pushed ahead with one of the quickest nomination proceedings in modern times following the death of the late Justice and liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg last month.They have the votes to confirm Barrett over the objections of Democrats who have argued that the process has been a rushed and cynical power grab that threatens to undermine Ginsburg’s legacy. The Senate is doing the right thing. We’re moving this nomination forward and, colleagues, by tomorrow night we will have a new member of the United States Supreme Court, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Sunday after the Senate advanced the nomination in a key procedural vote to break a Democratic filibuster.The confirmation battle has played out in a bitterly-divided Senate, but the outcome has not been in question for much of the fight. With few exceptions, Senate Republicans quickly lined up in support of Barrett after her nomination by President Trump. All Democrats are expected to vote against the nomination.Two Republican senators crossed party lines to vote with Democrats in opposition to Sunday’s procedural vote Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Collins, who is facing a competitive re-election fight, is expected to vote against the nomination over concerns that it’s too close to Election Day to consider a nominee. Murkowski has already announced, however, that she will ultimately vote to confirm Barrett in the final vote, but said that she would vote against the procedural vote after having previously voiced opposition to taking up a nominee to fill the open seat so close to the election.Senate Republicans have largely rallied around the nomination, however, praising Barrett as exceedingly qualified to serve on the Supreme Court. Republicans, who have a 53-seat majority, only need 51 votes to confirm a new justice. Senate Democrats, in contrast, have decried the nomination and the confirmation process.Democrats have warned that Barrett’s confirmation will put health care protections and the Affordable Care Act in jeopardy. They have argued that the confirmation process has been rushed and accused Republicans of hypocrisy in moving ahead with the nomination after blocking consideration of former President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in 2016. The Republican Party is willing to ignore the pandemic to rush this Supreme Court nomination forward, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said in a floor speech on Sunday.Democrats, who are in the minority, have been limited in their ability to oppose the nomination, but have protested the process in a variety of ways. When the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance the nomination, Democratic senators on the panel boycotted the vote, filling their seats instead with pictures of people who rely upon the Affordable Care Act in an effort to draw attention to an upcoming case on the health care law’s constitutionality and their arguments that Barrett’s confirmation would put the law at risk.During confirmation hearings, Democrats sought to elicit answers from Barrett on a number of controversial topics the Supreme Court could take up. Barrett repeatedly declined, however, to specify how she might rule on a range of topics, from the Affordable Care Act to Roe v. Wade and the high court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. Barrett explained during the hearings that she shared a philosophy with the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, whom she clerked for, but argued she would not be an identical justice if she is confirmed. If I’m confirmed, you would not be getting Justice Scalia. You would be getting Justice Barrett, she said. And that’s so because originalists don’t always agree. Source: https://edition.cnn.com//senate-confirmation-vo/index.html