Reproductive rights

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Anti-abortion centers raked in $1.4bn in year Roe fell, including federal money

      by

      Anti-abortion facilities raked in at least $1.4bn in revenue in the 2022 fiscal year, the year Roe v Wade fell – a staggering haul that includes at least $344m in government money, according to a memo analyzing the centers’ tax documents that was compiled by a pro-abortion rights group and shared exclusively with the Guardian.These facilities, frequently known as anti-abortion pregnancy centers or crisis pregnancy centers, aim to convince people to keep their pregnancies. But in the aftermath of Roe’s demise, the anti-abortion movement has framed anti-abortion pregnancy centers as a key source of aid for desperate women who have lost the legal right to end their pregnancies and been left with little choice but to give birth.Accordingly, abortion opponents say, the centers need an influx of government cash.“Those are the centers that states rely on to assist expecting moms and dads,” Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, told anti-abortion protesters at the March for Life in January. The Louisiana Republican praised the centers for providing “the important material support that expecting and first-time mothers get from these centers”.Earlier this year, under Johnson’s leadership, the House passed a bill that would block the Department of Health and Human Services from restricting funding for anti-abortion pregnancy centers. State governments are also in the midst of sending vast sums of taxpayer dollars to programs that support anti-abortion pregnancy centers. Since the demolition of Roe, at least 16 states have agreed to send more than $250m towards “alternative to abortion” programs in 2023 through 2025. Those programs funnel money towards anti-abortion pregnancy centers, maternity homes and assorted other initiatives meant to dissuade people from abortions.Still, abortion rights supporters say, much of the anti-abortion pregnancy center industry remains shrouded in mystery – including their finances.“Stewards of both taxpayer and charitable funds should insist on a real impact analysis of the industry, whether investments that are being made are achieving their desired outcomes and are cost-effective,” said Jenifer McKenna, the crisis pregnancy center program director at Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch, the group behind the analysis of tax documents. “Taxpayers deserve performance standards and hard metrics for use of their dollars on these centers.”The analysis by Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch examined 990 tax documents, which most US tax-exempt organizations must file annually, from 1,719 anti-abortion pregnancy centers in fiscal year 2019 and from 1,469 in fiscal year 2022. The analysis confirms that the anti-abortion pregnancy center industry is growing: while the centers’ revenue in 2022 exceeds $1.4bn, it was closer to $1.03bn in 2019, even though more centers were included in the earlier analysis.Centers reported receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from private funders between 2018 and 2022. While only a relatively small fraction of the centers reported receiving grants from state and federal governments in both 2022 and 2019, that number is on the rise, according to the Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch analysis memo. In 2022, the centers said they received $344m in such grants, but they received less than $97m in 2019.Just 21 centers identified the federal grants that they received in 2022, the analysis found. Those grants included the Fema-funded Emergency Food and Shelter Program, which is primarily meant for organizations that alleviate hunger and homelessness, and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a program for low-income families.This accounting does not represent the full financial picture of the anti-abortion pregnancy center industry. More than 2,500 anti-abortion pregnancy centers are believed to dot the United States – a number that far outstrips the number of abortion clinics in the country.‘What did they do with all that money?’Much of the modern, publicly available information on anti-abortion pregnancy centers comes from one of their biggest cheerleaders: the Charlotte Lozier Institute, which assembles reports on the industry and operates as an arm of Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, one of the top anti-abortion organizations in the United States.In 2019, the Charlotte Lozier Institute said that 2,700 anti-abortion pregnancy centers provided consulting services to 967,251 new clients on-site. In 2022, the Institute said 2,750 centers provided consulting services for 974,965 new clients – an increase of 0.08%.Even though the US supreme court overturned Roe at the halfway point of 2022, it did not appear to result in a crush of new clients – despite anti-abortion advocates’ argument that the pregnancy centers need an infusion of funding to handle post-Roe clients.“The new client numbers alone don’t fully tell the story,” a bevy of Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars – Moira Gaul, Jeanneane Maxon and Michael J New – said in an email to the Guardian, adding that anti-abortion centers and groups have seen an increase in violence following the fall of Roe. (The abortion clinics that remain post-Roe have also faced rising violence. That has not stoppered the demand for their services, as rates of abortions have risen since Roe’s demise.)Anti-abortion pregnancy centers are seeing a dramatic rise in calls for certain kinds of help. Data from the Charlotte Lozier Institute reports show that centers handed out 64% more diapers, 52% more baby clothing and 43% more wipes in 2022, compared to 2019. Demand for new car seats and strollers also increased by about a third.All of these items would presumably go to new parents. The fall of Roe led to an estimated 32,000 more births, particularly among young women and women of color, a 2023 analysis found.The total dollar value of these goods and services was about $358m, according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute report. Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch found that the roughly 1,500 centers included in the group’s 2022 analysis reported expenses of more than $1.2bn on their 990 tax documents.“They took in – according to the 990s – $1.4bn, and they spent $1.2bn on expenditures,” McKenna said. “What did they do with all that money? There’s so many questions begged by their own reporting.”The Charlotte Lozier scholars said there were other expenses not listed in the report, such as maternity clothing, property-related payments, fundraising, marketing and staff salaries. Data from their report indicates that, between 2019 and 2022, the number of volunteers who work at the centers fell while the number of paid staffers rose. (Volunteers still make up the overwhelming bulk of the workforce.)“Most non-profits prefer to use staff when possible. Centers are attracting more professionals that desire to help women,” the scholars said. “Many centers are now in a place where they can pay them so they are less reliant on volunteers.”The institute’s report on anti-abortion pregnancy centers in 2022 is a very different document to the reports that it released to cover the centers in 2019 and 2017. The earlier reports span dozens of pages; the 2022 report is only four. A longer report is now in the works, the Charlotte Lozier scholars said, which will include information about government funding of centers.A lack of regulationAlthough anti-abortion pregnancy centers may appear to be local mom-and-pop organizations, in reality many are affiliated with national organizations like NIFLA, Care Net and Heartbeat International. These centers thrive in a kind of regulatory dead zone, providing medical services like ultrasounds. But many are not licensed as medical facilities, leaving them unencumbered by the rules or oversight imposed on typical medical providers.“They are changing their names a lot and changing their names in ways like including ‘clinic’ or ‘medical’ or ‘healthcare’ into their names and dropping things like ‘Care Net’ and other types of wording that might instantly identify them as a CPC,” said Andrea Swartzendruber, an associate professor at the University of Georgia College of Public Health who tracks anti-abortion pregnancy centers.These centers, she said, are “changing their names in ways that make them seem more like medical clinics”.The Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars said “calls for governmental regulation are nothing new” post-Roe and that “such efforts have been ongoing for decades”.“They have been found to be politically motivated and have been largely unsuccessful,” the scholars said. “Abortion facilities are in need of far greater government regulation.”Anti-abortion pregnancy centers’ taxes can also be deeply intricate. The analysis by Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch found that the centers used a variety of tax codes to describe themselves, frequently describing themselves as organizations that provide “family services” or “reproductive healthcare”. They were sometimes listed as organizations that work to outlaw abortions, or as explicitly Christian, religious organizations.The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a charity watchdog group, has previously found that many centers share tax identification numbers with much larger organizations that do multiple kinds of charity work, such as non-profits run by Catholic dioceses. By sharing numbers, these organizations are effectively collapsed into one legal and tax entity, the committee said.The Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars told the Guardian that “this is not our understanding at all”. NIFLA, Care Net and Heartbeat International do not share tax identification numbers with affiliated centers, they said.Just because these particular groups do not share tax identification numbers does not preclude centers from sharing them with other organizations. For example, Care Net is affiliated with a string of Florida pregnancy centers – which, rather than sharing Care Net’s tax ID, are instead listed on tax documents for a wide-ranging charity run by a local Catholic diocese.Anti-abortion pregnancy centers tend to be faith-based. Given the industry’s religious bent, courts have proven reluctant to restrict centers in order to avoid treading on their free speech rights.In 2018, the US supreme court ruled to toss a California law that would have forced centers to disclose whether they were a licensed medical provider. Then, last year, a federal judge in Colorado paused a law that would have banned “abortion reversal”, an unproven drug protocol that aims to halt abortions and is often offered by anti-abortion pregnancy centers. (The first randomized, controlled clinical study to try to study the “reversal” protocol’s effectiveness suddenly stopped in 2019, after three of its participants went to the hospital hemorrhaging blood.)“More regulation could lead to better reporting, which would also then help with reducing all of these risks,” said Teneille Brown, a University of Utah College of Law professor who studies anti-abortion pregnancy centers. “Then the consumers could get some sense of like, ‘Oh, this clinic has had a bunch of violations,’ and if there were regulation, they could actually even shut them down.” More

    • 200 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Abortion rights are Biden’s most powerful re-election issue. He should act like it | Moira Donegan

      by

      For years, the beltway set had a standard line of advice for Democratic candidates: stick to the economy. The idea was that white, male, blue-collar voters – those magical creatures, somewhere out there in the windswept lands of the upper midwest, who always qualify in the pundit imagination as “real Americans” – would be turned off by so-called culture-war issues.These guys, we were told, didn’t want to hear about civil rights or social equality: they wanted to hear about economic growth. According to this advice, Democrats could be pro-choice, pro-racial justice, or pro-LGBTQ+ rights, but not openly, avowedly so. They had to play their progressive social positions in a minor key.It’s not clear that this advice ever really paid off for Democratic candidates. At any rate, you don’t hear it much any more. That’s because, for the past two years, Democratic electoral victories up and down the ballot have been driven disproportionately by one of those culture-war issues that candidates were typically told to avoid: abortion.American women’s anger over the US supreme court’s Dobbs ruling is the single most potent political force in America right now, and if Joe Biden wins re-election – a distinct if imperiled possibility – it will be because his campaign succeeded in making the election a referendum on Republicans’ abortion bans. There is no one issue with greater importance; there are few issues that have ever motivated voters so dramatically.You would think that this would be a gift to the Biden campaign. On paper, Republicans are almost solely responsible for the overturning of Roe and the draconian, morbid and dangerous abortion bans that have followed.Donald Trump continually brags about appointing three of the six justices who ruled to eliminate the abortion right; Republican politicians nationwide, not content with being able to ban abortion, have sought to eliminate life and health exemptions, to further restrict gestational age limits, and to impose criminal and civil penalties for things like advocating for abortion rights or transporting a patient across state lines. These are hateful, bigoted, invasive and lawless moves, ones that degrade women’s citizenship and are hated by the public. And they’re Republican moves.But the new prominence of abortion in electoral politics presents something of a conundrum for the Biden campaign: because while Republicans are vehemently anti-choice, Biden himself is not a particularly convincing abortion rights advocate.He is, at best, unenthused about the issue. Biden speaks of abortion in stilted, euphemistic terms, talking about “restoring the protections of Roe” or “a woman’s right to choose” more than “abortion”. (He did not use the word in public remarks until he was forced to after facing pressure from activists.) On the stump, he frequently ad libs, straying from prepared remarks to make his dislike of abortion clear. In one set of remarks last year, he unhelpfully offered that he was “not big on abortion”.In remarks this past week, he characterized his own position using anti-choice buzzwords, saying he was opposed to “abortion on demand”. Most of the campaigning on the issue has been passed off to Kamala Harris, admittedly a more comfortable messenger for a women’s rights platform. But outsourcing such a prominent issue to the vice-president is itself fraught with symbolic dangers: the campaign risks signaling that they consider abortion to be a second-tier issue by assigning it to their second-tier principal. And Harris is limited in what she can say by the somewhat narrow extent of the president’s comfort.And so Biden has taken on the task of marketing himself as a champion of abortion rights with all the relish of a third-grader told to eat his broccoli: he has been informed that doing so is good for him, but he really, really doesn’t want to. This week, as the Biden administration launched a series of policy and public relations efforts meant to frame the stakes of the elections for voters invested in reproductive freedom, things got off to something of a rocky start.Last Monday, on what would have been Roe’s 51st anniversary, Biden held a task force meeting in which he said that his administration would defend laws legalizing things like the FDA approval of mifepristone, which is being challenged by anti-choice lawyers in court. He said he would create a team to educate the public about when emergency abortions are legal in hospitals – a growing need in an era when more and more pregnant women are facing disastrous health risks because of abortion bans that prohibit the procedure from being used to spare them from catastrophic harm. He said he would encourage access to birth control.It was a tepid announcement, one where Biden seemed self-satisfied for doing the bare minimum. It was a policy agenda, too, that leaves all the agenda-setting power in the anti-choice movement’s hands: what the Biden campaign is offering American women – the ones who are angry and distraught, the ones that have suffered a blow to their dignity and an endangering of their safety – is that his administration might be willing to make minimal efforts to stop the people who are working maximally hard to make it worse.At a rally in Wisconsin the next day, Harris seemed more interested in describing the post-Dobbs landscape as one of a “healthcare crisis” – emphasizing, as Biden has, the stories of women denied life – and health-preserving abortions in moments of medical emergency. And it is true that the post-Dobbs world is one where it has become dramatically more dangerous to be pregnant, one where a capricious law, or a doctor’s fear of one, could cost you your life, your health or your fertility in the event that something goes wrong. And it is true, too, as Harris told the crowd, that a Republican victory would almost certainly result in a national ban on abortion – something a Republican president could effect in practice even without a filibuster-proof majority in Congress.But the campaign’s focus on these aspects of the Dobbs catastrophe – the women suffering complications from wanted pregnancies, the potential that things could get worse – does too little to grapple with the harm that’s happening right now, to women who simply do not want to be pregnant, and who deserve to be treated with the respect and dignity of citizens, not talked down to like children who cannot be trusted to act as custodians of their own bodily functions.Biden was not wrong when he said that women who were forced to become sicker and sicker during miscarriages before they were allowed to obtain abortions were subjected to an indignity. But so, too, are those who the law treats as de facto incompetent or suspicious: those who want and deserve their abortions, in Biden’s contemptuous phrasing, “on demand”.If anything, Biden is talking like he believes that abortion remains a delicate issue, as if it is something he thinks he will lose by being too strong on. But that advice, which maybe never quite worked, was from another time. It is not advice for this moment. Biden needs to change his strategy on abortion, to bring it more in line with both the sentiments of voters and the demands of our era. It is time for him to grow up, and eat his vegetables.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris kicks off abortion rights tour on 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade

      by

      Kamala Harris kicked off her much-vaunted abortion rights nationwide tour in Wisconsin on Monday as Joe Biden convened a meeting of his taskforce on reproductive healthcare access, in a tag-team effort to double down on what is likely to be a key campaign issue this year.The vice-president chose the 51st anniversary of the Roe v Wade ruling to begin the Reproductive Freedoms Tour, announced in December, in the battleground state of Wisconsin, which the president won in the 2020 presidential election by just over 20,000 votes.Roe v Wade, the supreme court decision that enshrined the federal right to abortion, was overturned in June 2022 after then president Donald Trump nominated three conservative justices to the nation’s highest court.The decision was a major blow to supporters of reproductive rights, but since the ruling seven states – including the conservative strongholds of Kentucky, Kansas and Montana – have held ballot referendums where voters chose to protect abortion rights. The issue also appeared to hurt Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections.Wisconsin is a notable starting point for Harris’s reproductive freedoms tour. Last year, abortion rights propelled a Democratic victory in a critical election for the state supreme court.In the first of many similar scheduled events, Harris is expected to announce support for increased access to abortion and contraceptives through the new emergency care law, Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala).She will also denounce Trump, the runaway frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, for his hand in overturning the federally protected right to abortion.“Proud that women across our nation are suffering?” Harris will say, according to excerpts from her speech obtained by the Associated Press. “Proud that women have been robbed of a fundamental freedom? That doctors could be thrown in prison for caring for patients? That young women today have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers?”The following day, Harris will be joined by Biden for another abortion-focused event, along with their spouses, Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff.Biden’s re-election campaign also rolled out a new campaign ad Sunday, titled Forced, which aims to tie Donald Trump directly to the abortion issue.In Dobbs v Jackson, the 2022 supreme court case that overturned Roe, a Mississippi law that banned most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy with certain medical exceptions was upheld, negating the constitutional right to abortion and overruling the precedent set by Roe more than half a century ago.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a statement on the 51st anniversary of Roe V Wade, Biden said: “Fifty-one years ago today, the Supreme Court recognized a woman’s constitutional right to make deeply personal decisions with her doctor – free from the interference of politicians. Then, a year and a half ago, the Court made the extreme decision to overturn Roe and take away a constitutional right.“As a result, tens of millions of women now live in states with extreme and dangerous abortion bans. Because of Republican elected officials, women’s health and lives are at risk.”When announcing her tour in December, Harris said: “Extremists across our country continue to wage a full-on attack against hard-won, hard-fought freedoms as they push their radical policies – from banning abortion in all 50 states and criminalizing doctors, to forcing women to travel out of state in order to get the care they need.“I will continue to fight for our fundamental freedoms while bringing together those throughout America who agree that every woman should have the right to make decisions about her own body – not the government.” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘We don’t want to be the bad guys’: anti-abortion marchers seek post-Roe stance

      by

      While Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are planning a cascade of ads and events to coincide with the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade, hundreds of anti-abortion activists gathered on the National Mall in Washington DC on Friday in hopes of re-energizing a movement that has repeatedly stumbled since Roe’s overturning.Originally organized around the goal of overturning the Roe precedent that established federal abortion rights, the March for Life has seen what was once its greatest victory become a political liability. In the 18 months since Roe’s demise, abortion rights supporters have trounced anti-abortion activists in state-level ballot referendums. Yet the march’s message was largely similar to past years: speakers and attendees alike talked about the need to make abortion “unthinkable” rather than just illegal – with scant details on how to make that happen.“We don’t want to just go in and be the bad guys,” said Elijah Persinger, a 19-year-old from Fort Wayne, Indiana. “We want to make make people understand and help them understand the science behind things and the logic that we’re going by as well.”As in years past, march attendees skewed young. Schools and universities organize trips for students to attend the march, and groups often carry banners and flags with their schools’ names. Some groups all wear bright-colored, matching hats in order to keep from getting lost in the crowd.Persinger took a 12-hour, overnight bus ride to attend Friday’s March for Life. His group planned to leave DC after the event.But the crowd on Friday seemed relatively sparse. When the US House speaker, Mike Johnson, stood on a podium to speak, he was met with only muted applause – despite being a high-profile attendee for the march. The greatest response came when he mentioned Biden: when he said that the president’s administration planned to restrict funding to crisis pregnancy centers, the crowd booed loudly.Organizers also spoke from the stage about the need to support maternity homes and crisis pregnancy centers, facilities that aim to convince people to keep their pregnancies.“Christians don’t mean to impose what we believe on anyone. But this nation was founded as a Christian nation,” said Laurel Brooks, a march attendee from North Carolina.Brooks works for an organization called My Faith Votes, which aims to mobilize Christian voters, but she clarified that she was sharing her own views, not her organization’s.“The foundation of America is truly Christian,” Brooks remarked. “That doesn’t mean we reject, hate, dislike anyone who does not believe as we do. That’s not who Christians are. We accept people for their free will. God honors free will.”After the speakers finished, marchers spent three hours slowly walking from the National Mall to the steps of the US supreme court. The weather was unusually wintry, with marchers braving wind and several inches of snow.To keep from getting cold, some marchers danced to the Cha Cha Slide. Others started a call-and-response chant of, “We are pro-life, marching for life, saving the babies, one at a time!”Icons of fetuses and babies dominated the march. Many carried signs with ultrasound images above phrases such as “Future Doctor”, “Future Dancer”, and “Future Wife”. Others had signs with images of babies above the conservative slogan “Don’t Tread on Me”.“There are no mistakes, just happy accidents,” read another sign, complete with a hand-drawn beaming baby and portrait of the painter Bob Ross. One young woman even carried a baby made out of snow.At least one man was trying to sell Trump 2024 merchandise to marchers. But overall, Donald Trump had a minimal presence at the march despite being the frontrunner for the Republican White House nomination as he seeks a second presidency.Trump has waffled on his stance on abortion: while he has taken credit for installing supreme court justices who helped overturn Roe, he has also suggested that hardline stances on abortion can backfire on Republicans.“I’m not voting for Trump, I know that much,” said Ali Mumbach, 26. She carried a sign listing police brutality, gun violence and other issues that should matter to anti-abortion activists who call themselves “pro-life”.“Trump is anti-life, especially in regards to Black lives and the lives of immigrants. So, yeah, I don’t think that he is pro-life. I don’t think that he cares about people who live in poverty. I don’t think he has the best interests of the American people,” Mumbach said.Democrats, meanwhile, are hoping sustained outrage over Roe will propel them to victory up and down the general election ballot.The Biden campaign is now launching a paid media campaign, timed to Roe’s anniversary, to target women and swing voters in battleground states.Harris plans to appear on Monday in Wisconsin to spotlight post-Roe attacks on reproductive rights before holding a campaign rally alongside Biden in Virginia.In the November 2023 state elections, Virginia Republicans tried to take control of the state legislature by promising to enact a “reasonable” ban on terminating pregnancies that were 15 weeks or beyond – an effort that failed. More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘A generational struggle’: abortion rights pioneer offers insights to the post-Roe US

      by

      The battle to bring back the federal right to abortion in the US hinges on much more than just the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, and winning will require proponents to be as organized and steadfast as their opponents, at least as one of the reproductive freedom movement’s most veteran voices sees it.Invoking scenes that played out all across the country after the supreme court’s Dobbs decision eliminated nationwide abortion rights, Merle Hoffman recently said: “It looks like thousands of people marching in the streets all over the country … [But] you can’t just do one action.“The pressure has to go, and go, and go.”Hoffman, 77, positioned herself at the forefront of the American reproductive freedom movement decades ago, when she helped open one of the US’s first abortion centers in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens in New York City two years before the supreme court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision established the national right to the procedure.Hoffman recently spoke to the Guardian about how Democratic control of the White House and one of the congressional chambers has offered little resistance to Republican command of the judiciary, which allowed the supreme court’s conservative majority to overturn Roe.She believes that gaining back the ground lost since Dobbs was handed down in the summer of 2022 requires more than just voting for pro-abortion candidates.“That’s one aspect, yes,” Hoffman said.But, given that the federal levers of power are divided among the two political parties, and the procedural blocks that one branch of government can leverage on another, “don’t assume – please don’t assume – that as soon as these people get into office, they’re going to put Roe v Wade right back,” Hoffman said.“They can’t.”Hoffman highlighted how little federal-level Democrats had done to protect abortion access with Joe Biden in the White House and a slim majority in the Senate since Roe v Wade was overturned.Biden has been unwilling to pursue an expansion of the nine-seat supreme court to add liberals to the bench and better balance its 6-3 conservative majority. Meanwhile, with control of the House and Senate split by thin margins, Congress has not been able to enact national protections for reproductive rights through legislation, creating a confusing checkerboard where abortion is nearly completely banned in 14 states.Hoffman had a hand in founding Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights shortly before Roe fell, with the aim of galvanizing popular opposition to abortion restrictions.She said the thousands who participated in mass street protests in cities across the US – including Washington DC, New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago – then and since have had the correct approach. And she complimented the energy younger advocates brought in organizing those events and similar, unrelated ones when unrest over Roe’s fall was at its highest.But Hoffman said such demonstrations have all but vanished in terms of size and intensity as other major events, including the Israel-Gaza war that erupted in October, have taken up the progressive left’s attention.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHoffman acknowledged that some believe street protests and walkouts in schools and workplaces have a limited effect within the current structure of power in the US. But she said she steadfastly believed enough actions like that, sustained over an adequate amount of time, would convince those in power to side with the majority of Americans who favor abortion rights over opposing special interests.She said reproductive rights supporters could also do more to advocate for the movement by contributing time or money to efforts aimed at improving healthcare for women who do want to have children.Meanwhile, Hoffman said, women who have had abortions but have chosen to remain silent because of the social stigma could help break that stigma by speaking up about their experiences and decisions.She likened it to LGBTQ+ people “coming out” about their sexualities, and how supportive that can be to members of their communities who feel shame and guilt in silence.“There’s an abortion closet,” Hoffman said. “The first thing you can do is come out.”Hoffman said it was perhaps most important to realize that truly taking back what was lost to Dobbs would take decades. That’s how long it took opponents of reproductive rights – as well as like-minded judges and lawmakers – to plot the seeds for the historic decision to end the right to abortion in the US.“This is a generational struggle,” said Hoffman, echoing the central point in her recent book Choices: A Post-Roe Abortion Rights Manifesto. “This is going to pass from me to the next generation to the next generation.“The opposition is extremely, extremely … relentless. They’re persistent, they’re creative – and they won’t stop until there is no abortion in this country.” More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      US supreme court agrees to consider abortion pill access

      by

      The US supreme court on Wednesday agreed to hear oral arguments in a case that could determine the future of a pill used in most abortions in the US, in the first major abortion rights case to land at the country’s highest court since the justices overturned Roe v Wade and abolished the national right to the procedure in 2022.A decision in the case will probably arrive in summer 2024, just months before the presidential election. The outcome of the case could affect not just access to the pill, which has been repeatedly deemed safe and effective, but the Federal Drug Administration’s authority to regulate all manner of medications.The drug at the heart of the case is mifepristone, one of the two drugs typically used in medication abortions, which make up the majority of US abortions. Last year, an association of anti-abortion organizations and doctors, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the FDA had overstepped its authority when it approved mifepristone in 2000.In April, a Texas federal judge appointed by former president Donald Trump issued a preliminary ruling to suspend the FDA’s approval of mifepristone and pull the medication off the market. The US court of appeals for the fifth circuit – one of the most conservative federal appeals courts in the US – ruled in August that, while it was too late to suspend the FDA’s approval, the agency should significantly restrict access to mifepristone. The Biden administration and Danco Laboratories, which manufactures mifepristone, then asked the supreme court to weigh in on the case.The supreme court paused lower-court rulings while the case plays out, so mifepristone remains widely available in states that permit abortion. If the court allows the fifth circuit ruling to stand, it would roll back recent FDA efforts that refined the drug’s dosage and expanded access by allowing it to be prescribed later on in pregnancy and through telehealth.On Wednesday, the supreme court agreed to hear the consolidated petitions from the Biden administration and Danco Laboratories, which asked the justices to focus on the legal attempts to roll back those later FDA efforts. Those petitions also asked the justices to consider whether the challengers have the legal right, or standing, to bring the case in the first place.“You can’t just bring random lawsuits in court. You actually have to have been harmed by something,” said Greer Donley, an associate law professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. “That’s really what standing analysis is all about, to try to figure out if if the people who bring the lawsuit actually have a stake in the case.” Numerous legal experts have questioned whether the challengers in this case have properly demonstrated that they have been harmed by mifepristone’s continued legality.The supreme court also denied a petition from the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine that asked the justices to explicitly consider the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone. That move suggests that the supreme court is unlikely to pull mifepristone off the market entirely.In Donley’s view, the outcome of this case will probably signal whether the supreme court, which is controlled 6-3 by conservatives, wants to be involved in the post-Roe war over abortion rights. If the justices decide to focus on the standing issues in the case, they could sidestep having to rule on the substance of the case entirely.“I could see the more moderates on the supreme court thinking: ‘we don’t want to touch this,’” Donley said. “It might make the supreme court look like less of an activist court if it were to dismiss this case on the basis of really legitimate standing problems.”Any ruling by the court would affect all 50 states, including those that have protected abortion rights. (In recent months, officials in states such as Washington and California have announced that they have begun to stockpile mifepristone.)A ruling could also imperil the FDA’s regulatory power writ large and pose an existential threat to pharmaceutical companies. If courts can rewrite the FDA’s approval of abortion pills, any kind of drug – including, for example, drugs used to protect against HIV or to provide gender-affirming care – could end up in conservative jurists’ crosshairs.The ruling from the federal appeals court, Danco Laboratories warned in its briefs to the supreme court, “destabilizes the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries by questioning when scientific studies – accepted by FDA – are sufficient”. More than 100 studies, conducted across 26 countries, have concluded that mifepristone is safe, a New York Times review found.If deprived of access to mifepristone, several abortion clinics have said that they would keep providing medication abortions using only misoprostol, the other drug typically used in medication abortions. Although misoprostol-only abortions are still overwhelmingly safe, they can have more side-effects and are slightly less effective than the two-drug protocol.Ultimately, regardless of how the supreme court rules, its decision will not curtail the thriving underground networks that routinely supply mifepristone to women looking to end their pregnancies, including in the 16 states with near-total abortion bans. In fact, a move to ban mifepristone is likely to cause a sharp rise in demand for the drug through those networks.In the wake of Roe’s fall, a vast web of abortion rights supporters and opportunistic merchants have sprung up to ship abortion pills to Americans. Inducing your own abortion is not illegal in most US states, even in states that have banned in-clinic abortions, and medical experts widely agree that it can be safe to use pills to “self-manage” an abortion early in pregnancy. More

    • 238 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Kate Cox begged Texas to let her end a dangerous pregnancy. She won’t be the last | Moira Donegan

      by

      In most cases, we would never have learned her name. Kate Cox, a Texas woman, is in a sadly common set of circumstances: a 31-year-old mother of two, Cox was pregnant with her third child when doctors informed her that something was wrong. Pregnancy complications are common, but in a state like Texas, they have become newly dangerous, threatening women with potentially disfiguring health complications, along with unimaginable heartbreak, as the state’s multiple bans have mandated grotesque and inhumane treatment of doomed pregnancies.Cox’s fetus had trisomy 18, a chromosomal disorder. Trisomy 18 is a devastating diagnosis. Most pregnancies end in stillbirths; those infants born alive with the disorder live anguished, short and painful lives. Cox was informed that her fetus, in the sterile medical parlance, “could not sustain life”. The fetus had malformations of the spine, heart, brain and limbs. The pregnancy also posed dire threats to Cox’s health; most significantly, she was at risk of losing her future fertility if she remained pregnant.If Cox made it to delivery – a big if – the child would live for perhaps an hour, perhaps a week. It would have to be treated with pain medications for the entirety of its brief life. None of these were cognizable concerns under Texas’s abortion ban. The law said that she would have to remain pregnant – would have to get sicker, have to endure greater and greater pain and grief, and then would have to labor and give birth to a daughter, who she would watch suffer and die.There are hundreds of women like Cox living in Republican-controlled states, women carrying pregnancies in which there is no hope that a living baby will result at the end of nine months. These are pregnancies that – because of abortion bans that provide no actionable exemptions for medically futile pregnancies or maternal health – women are forced to keep carrying anyway.Most people in this situation suffer in private; they endure the cooing at their bellies from oblivious strangers while they remain pregnant, and they purchase tiny urns in the brutal days after. Cox is different only because she made the decision to share her situation publicly. As her health deteriorated and she made multiple visits to the emergency room, she published an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News, and petitioned Texas courts for an abortion. It is the first recorded instance of an adult woman having to ask for government permission to end her pregnancy since Roe. On Friday night, the Texas supreme court refused. On Monday, Cox left the state, seeking an abortion elsewhere.There is a tendency, in coverage of abortion law, for writers to try and discipline their language. The issue is fraught and passionate enough, the thinking goes, surrounded as it is by stigma, ignorance and misinformation. There is one line of journalistic thought that holds that the best way to serve one’s readers, and to maintain their trust, is to write with as strict neutrality as the facts will allow. If I were to follow that line, I would tell you that the case raises vexed and unresolved legal questions about the extent of medical exemptions to abortion bans, and that the actions of Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, whose office intervened to prevent Cox from receiving an abortion, is signaling a maximalist view. I might not mention, in the interest of neutrality, that among the Texas supreme court justices who denied Cox her abortion was John Devine, an extremist Christian conservative with a long history of anti-choice activism, including, according to his boast at a campaign event, being arrested 37 times in harassment actions outside abortion clinics.But there is another line of thought that holds that euphemism is dishonesty, and that the effort to maintain journalistic neutrality in situations of grave injustice winds up obscuring more than it reveals. If I were to follow this latter method, I would tell you plainly that, by refusing to let her end this pregnancy, Paxton and the state of Texas in effect allowed Kate Cox to be tortured, and that she was forced to flee to escape that torture.Cox will not be the last woman in this position. She will not be the last woman to make a public plea to be permitted an abortion for a dangerous and non-viable pregnancy; she will not be the last one who is denied. She is part of a growing cast of abortion rights plaintiffs, a product of Dobbs’s cruelties and of the shifting strategic posture of the reproductive rights movement. These new claimants are not the traditional pro-choice litigators – clinics or doctors – but prospective patients themselves. In particular, the new plaintiffs are women who are seeking medical exemptions to terminate wanted but dangerous pregnancies. (In her op-ed, Cox referenced Zurwaski v Texas, a lawsuit in which 20 such women are suing to clarify and expand medical exemptions to Texas’s abortion ban.)Think of it as a crusade of the medically endangered: women who are faced with tragic, dangerous and heartbreaking circumstances in their pregnancies are emerging as a new face of the pro-choice legal movement. Like the anti-choice movement spent decades chipping away at the abortion rights and expanding restrictions, these women’s lawsuits seek to expand access in the most sympathetic of cases – those of medical emergencies – to carve out slightly larger loopholes for more women to access abortion through.It’s an incrementalistic strategy, one that assumes that legal abortion bans like those in Texas are here to stay for the foreseeable future. And it is also a strategy that makes some concessions to the bigotries and biases of the Texas court, to say nothing of American public opinion. Like many of the medically endangered plaintiffs, Cox is white and married. She is already a mother, and wants to be pregnant – she speaks extensively, and movingly, of desiring more children, and of wishing that she could have this one. Unlike many in her shoes, when faced with a horrible consequence of a sadistic law, she was able to seek both publicity and legal help. Unlike many in her shoes, when she was denied an abortion, she was able to flee.None of these things about Cox – neither her privilege not her palatability – make her a bad person, or make her suffering any less horrific. But they do make her an appealing face for a movement that is seeking to reason with a rabid and revanchist cadre of judges. There is nothing the right can object to in her, the thinking goes, and there is nothing they can get from making her suffer: her child will die. And yet her plea was rejected by the Texas courts, which suggests that the anti-choice movement does feel that they can get something out of Kate Cox. They get the ability to make her beg. Then, they get the satisfaction of saying no.The way we talk about abortion has warped in the wake of Dobbs. We use bloodless language of gestational limits; we may even be tempted to describe once-unheard of 15 week bans as comparatively “moderate”. We look on the bright side, like to the fact that Cox, denied the care that will keep her healthy and alive in Texas, was able to go elsewhere. Amid these adjusted expectations it is easy to lose track of how far we’ve fallen in our standards for women’s dignity and freedom. Two years ago, a woman in Cox’s shoes was able to control her own body and life on her own terms; now, she has to go before a court, all her virtues on display, and beg not to be maimed. “I am a Texan,” Cox said in her op-ed. “Why should I or any other woman have to drive or fly hundreds of miles to do what we feel is best for ourselves and our families, to determine our own futures?” It was an appeal to her dignity as a citizen. But Texas only saw her as a woman.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      High stakes for abortion rights as Pennsylvania votes on key judge pick

      by

      Pennsylvania voters will select a new member of the state’s supreme court on Tuesday in a judicial election that has become the unlikely focus of Republican billionaire donors, political action committees and abortion rights advocates.Democrat Daniel McCaffery is facing off against Carolyn Carluccio, a conservative judge whose apparent opposition to abortion access has drawn the ire of Planned Parenthood and other reproductive justice groups.As McCaffery and Carluccio compete for a seat on the Pennsylvania supreme court, total spending in the race surpassed $17m, according to the Associated Press – an unusually high price tag for an election that typically sees low voter turnout. But Democrats and abortion rights advocates hope Pennsylvania voters view Tuesday’s ballot as a proxy for reproductive freedom in Pennsylvania.“This election, Pennsylvania voters have a choice between Carolyn Carluccio, who has tried to hide her anti-abortion positions and dodge questions about the judiciary’s role in protecting abortion rights, and Daniel McCaffery, a proven champion of reproductive freedom,” said Breana Ross, campaigns director of Planned Parenthood Votes Pennsylvania.Abortion rights advocates hope to energize Pennsylvania voters by casting Carluccio as an existential threat to abortion access. This strategy delivered liberals a resounding victory in the Wisconsin supreme court race earlier this year, when record numbers of voters turned out to elect Janet Protasiewicz, a Democrat who pledged to defend abortion rights. Protasiewicz’s conservative opponent, Dan Kelly, refrained from voicing his opinion on voting rights.Carluccio’s campaign, taking its cues from Kelly’s unsuccessful playbook, has avoided sharing her views on abortion. After winning the primary election in May, Carluccio removed information about her opposition to abortion from her campaign website, according to a May report from the Keystone.Carluccio’s campaign site previously vowed to defend “all life under the law”.“When we redesigned our website, we chose to no longer include a résumé link. Judge Carluccio listed on her résumé that she would ‘defend all life under the law’, and she meant just that: under the law,” Rob Brooks, a spokesman for Carluccio’s campaign, told the Guardian.Carluccio has frequently branded herself as a non-political actor who operates outside the bounds of traditional partisanship.“I reject calls to rule based on partisan or ideological grounds and instead rule according to our laws,” Carluccio wrote in an August op-ed about her candidacy.Despite Carluccio’s insistence on her own ideological neutrality, her campaign has invited the support of distinctly rightwing groups. In a February letter to the Pennsylvania Coalition for Civil Justice Reform, Carluccio disclosed that her candidacy was endorsed by the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation, a leading anti-abortion group in the state.According to campaign finance reports, her campaign received over $4m from Commonwealth Leaders Fund, a political organization funded by the billionaire GOP donor Jeffrey Yass.Pennsylvania Democrats said Carluccio is hiding her ties to the anti-abortion movement in a disingenuous bid for primary voters. The general electorate is supportive of abortion access – 64% of all Pennsylvania voters in the 2022 midterms said abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to polling from the Associated Press.“Her campaign is clearly trying to portray her as acceptable to a primary audience,” said JJ Abbott, executive director of Commonwealth Communications, a progressive political consulting firm. “They know abortion is a motivator for voters, since the Dobbs decision, voters are more likely to engage in elections because of what is at stake for abortion.”But the stakes of Tuesday’s election are not straightforward. Unlike Wisconsin, where the threat of the 1849 near-total abortion ban loomed overhead, the outcome of Pennsylvania’s supreme court race will not directly affect abortion access in the state. Tuesday’s race will not change the composition of Pennsylvania’s high court – four of the seven seats on the current bench are held by Democrat-affiliated justices. Carluccio is operating in what appears to be a much less dire political environment than Kelly, whose campaign struggled to avoid the topic of abortion while Wisconsin was feeling the effects of the 1849 ban.Still, Planned Parenthood and other reproductive justice advocates said the abortion rights movement needs to look ahead to the 2025 election, when three of Pennsylvania’s Democratic justices will appear on the ballot.The long-term maintenance of Pennsylvania’s liberal supreme court majority is a priority for abortion rights advocates. In September, Planned Parenthood Votes launched a seven-figure advertisement campaign against Carluccio, the largest ad buy in the group’s history.As anxieties mount, abortion rights supporters are hopeful that Pennsylvania voters, as in Wisconsin, will heed the warnings offered by Planned Parenthood on the long-term consequences of Carluccio’s candidacy.Dr Benjamin Abella, a medical professor and emergency physician in Philadelphia, said voters like him are “paying attention” to Carluccio’s efforts to hide her campaign’s ties to rightwing anti-abortion groups.“The public understands that we should not be lulled into a false sense of security on abortion rights, especially if a judge is keeping quiet on their intentions and positions,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a safe state any more and that any and every election poses a risk.” More