The girl’s mom says he objected due to “personal beliefs.”
A 13-year-old in Albuquerque was prescribed an IUD to treat menstrual issues when other forms of birth control didn’t work, according to Yahoo! Beauty. Her doctor also prescribed her an anxiety medication, a pain reliever, and the hormone misoprostol, which softens the cervix to make IUD insertion easier. But when her mom went to Walgreens to fill these three prescriptions, the pharmacist allegedly agreed to fill the first two but said he couldn’t give her the misoprostol because of his “personal beliefs,” telling her to try another Walgreens.
The mother, known as M.S. in two complaints filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico and the Southwest Women’s Law Center, told the Albuquerque Journal that she began driving to another Walgreens before turning around to protest the pharmacist’s decision. She told him that “he was discriminating against me, that he should be ashamed for judging us, that he didn’t know my daughter’s medical history or her complications or conversation with her doctor. That he didn’t know what the medication was for,” she said. “And he just looks at me and says, ‘Oh, I have a pretty good idea.‘” He may have been referring to the fact that misoprostol can induce abortions.
In June of 2012, another Walgreens pharmacist refused to give a woman named Susanne Koestner birth control pills, the Albuquerque Journal reports. As a result of her complaint, the store agreed to fill prescriptions for birth control — and everything else — “as efficiently as other prescriptions without imposing any burden on the customer.”
However, a Walgreens representative told Yahoo! Beauty that its policy lets pharmacists “step away from a transaction to which they may have a moral objection.” But it also “requires the pharmacist or other employee to refer the transaction to another employee or manager on duty to complete the customer’s request.”
The ACLU’s complaint points out that traveling to another pharmacy can be difficult for many people, particularly those without cars or other nearby options. It also asks Walgreens to prevent this from happening again.
“Religious liberty does not mean the right to discriminate against others,” it reads. “Walgreens should take reasonable steps to accommodate employees’ religious beliefs and practices, but it cannot do so by imposing additional discriminatory burdens on women.”
Margaret Atwood has an eerie prediction about the outcome of abortionrestrictions, one that bears an uncanny resemblance to the dystopian future depicted in her hyper-relevant novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.
Speaking at New York City’s Book Con on Saturday, Atwood argued that when states obligate women into childbearing, they institute “a form of slavery,” Insider reported. State-mandated reproduction has two outcomes, she said: That women die, and that orphanages fill up.
Atwood referred specifically to Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott is poised to sign Senate Bill 8. The legislation not only requires abortion providers to bury or cremate fetal remains, but also bans the most common second trimester abortion procedure — dilation and evacuation — as well as dilation and extraction, the typical procedure for late-term abortions. Dilation and extraction abortions are, generally speaking, only performedwhen the mother’s life or health is in danger.
“I’m waiting for the first lawsuit,” Atwood said, explaining that she expected families of women who died to sue the state. “I’m also waiting for a lawsuit that says if you force me to have children I cannot afford, you should pay for the process,” she added.
Author Margaret Atwood speaks after being introduced for the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award at the National Book Critics Circle awards ceremony on Thursday, March 16, 2017.
Texas’ long-fought war on abortion access correlates with two trends that bear out Atwood’s theory: Since the Lone Star State began purposefully funneling federal money away from abortion providers in 2011, both maternal mortality rates and birth rates have spiked, mostly among women who rely on government funds to get medical care.
The reality of Texas’ abortion restrictions, Atwood said, is state-mandated reproduction without a safety net — and that’s a problem:
They [Texas] should pay for my [a woman’s] prenatal care. They should pay for my, otherwise, very expensive delivery, you should pay for my health insurance, you should pay for the upkeep of this child after it is born. That’s where the concern seems to cut off with these people. Once you take your first breath, [it’s] out the window with you. And, it is really a form of slavery to force women to have children that they cannot afford and then to say that they have to raise them.
Her assessment looks a lot like the picture painted in Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s currently experiencing a surge in popularity thanks to a Hulu show and a political climate in which abortion is demonized. Critics have drawn parallels between real life attacks on reproductive rights and female existence in the book’s fictional society, Gilead, where fertile women are conscripted as sex servants in the houses of powerful men. Their sole purpose is bearing children.
The difference between women in Gilead and women in Texas, though, is that the former are provided for. Atwood thinks Texas should, at the very least, do that.
“If you’re drafted into the army, the other situation in which the state seizes control of your body, at least you get three meals a day, clothing, and a place to sleep,” she said. “So, if you’re going to do that to women, pay up.”
If Roe falls, women may not face the same kinds of physical dangers from seeking abortion as in previous decades. Instead, however, I predict there will be far more criminal prosecutions of those involved in illegal abortion.63512
In fact, even as Roe remains the law of the land, women are in jail for attempting self-induced abortions.
Lauryn Gutierrez / Rewire
Evidence provided to Congress by state attorneys general and health departments proves that abortion is both extremely safe and highly regulated. Searchable by state.
The prospect of the overturn of Roe v. Wade—which the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation struggle over Judge Neil Gorsuch is highlighting—is terrifying to many, especially to those who remember the notorious pre-Roe days. It is also a real possibility, should President Donald Trump have the opportunity for another nomination, one that would replace a liberal judge with a “pro-life” one, as he pledged to do during the campaign. But if Roe falls, women may not face the same kinds of physical dangers from seeking abortion as in previous decades. Instead, however, I predict there will be far more criminal prosecutions of those involved in illegal abortion.
If Roe is overturned, the most likely immediate consequence would be that individual state legislatures would decide whether or not to allow abortions. According to legal analysts at the Center for Reproductive Rights, some 34 states are at risk of banning abortions, largely in the Midwest and South. About 40 million women live in those states. Predictably, many women seeking abortions will have to travel, paying not only for the procedure, but for transportation, lodging, and babysitters (nearly 60 percent of abortion patients already have children). These travelers, of course, may also lose wages for the time spent away from their jobs. One can safely assume that many won’t be able to afford an out-of-state option, as abortion patients are disproportionately among the poorest women in society.
Therefore, there will likely be a considerable increase in self-induced abortion. (In fact, such an increase is already occurring in the United States, as access to abortion is so difficult in many areas due to restrictive legislation and clinics being closed.)
What might we expect then? Will the abortion landscape resemble the pre-Roe days, when some scholars estimate that approximately 5,000 women per year died from illegal abortion in the 1960s, and tens of thousands more were injured?
If there is a second large wave of illegal abortion, a similar kind of danger is questionable. This is because of changes in abortion technology that have occurred since legalization. Pre-Roe, many women attempted to self-induce abortion by drinking dangerous substances such as turpentine and lye, and inserting various objects into their cervixes, including the infamous coat hangers. When they went to others—whether a medical provider or layperson—one of the main methods used was dilation and curettage, or the scraping of the uterus. In untrained hands, this was very risky.
Today, however, there is another method of pregnancy termination: “medication abortion,” which is in wide use in the United States and elsewhere. This method actually involves two drugs: mifepristone, formerly known as “RU-486,” which causes a fetus to stop growing, and misoprostol, a drug with several medical uses, which causes the cervix to open and the uterus to contract. Medication abortion is used both legally and extra-legally: Both mifepristone and misoprostol can be obtained over the internet, and misoprostol is available over the counter in many pharmacies in Latin America (and in flea markets in the United States).
To be sure, these drugs are not always 100 percent effective in ending a pregnancy. When they are ordered over the internet, the products are not always authentic or reliable, and misoprostol, often used alone because it is easier to get, is not quite as effective as the two-drug regimen. But even when ineffective, they are not usually dangerous. Some tragedies will inevitably happen with a large-scale return of illegal abortion, particularly among the young and most desperate, and among those who discover their pregnancies too late to use the medication abortion regime, which is largely recommended for use only through 10 weeks of pregnancy. Overall, though, women will not face the same kinds of death and injury as occurred before the Roe decision.
What will likely be different, however, is the degree of criminalization facing both women who attempt illegal abortions, and any providers or advocates who try to help them. Given the number of illegal abortions that took place before Roe (slightly more than 1 million per year in some estimates), it is striking in retrospect how relatively few prosecutions and jail sentences there were. This is not to suggest, however, that women who sought abortions and doctors and others who provided them were not terrified of being caught, as there was always the possibility of jail time, the loss of medical licenses for doctors, and public shame for both.
Today, though, anyone involved in illegal abortion would face a very different legal and political environment. In fact, even as Roe remains the law of the land, women have recently been jailed for attempting self-induced abortions. The Self-induced Abortion Legal Team has identified 17 known arrests or convictions in connection with alleged self-induced abortion since 2005.
There is already intense scrutiny and sometimes criminalization of pregnant women in the United States—and not only of those seeking abortions. This surveillance is made shockingly evident in a 2013 reportby researchers from the National Advocates for Pregnant Women and Fordham University, which tabulated hundreds of cases of pregnant women arrested since Roe for various reasons. In a particularly bizarre 2010 case, an Iowa woman who accidentally fell down a flight of stairs and sought help at a hospital was reported to police and arrested for “attempted fetal homicide.”
The main reason for this predicted difference in punishment before and after Roe is that in the earlier era, there was not in place anything resembling the national anti-choice movement of today. Prosecution before Roe was very idiosyncratic, dependent on local factors. But if Roe falls, criminal justice officials, from the virulently anti-choice Attorney General Jeff Sessions on down to local police and district attorneys in many jurisdictions, can be expected to avidly pursue those who break the law.
When Donald Trump, shortly after his election, was asked by a journalist about what the possible overturning of Roe would mean for American women who sought abortions, he casually answered, “Well … they’ll have to go to another state.” Yes, Mr. President, some will go to other states, but many others might go to jail.
What’s alarming about the administration’s plan – and how women should prepare
Contraception access advocates in front of the Supreme Court in 2014. Alex Brandon/AP
On Wednesday, Vox published a leaked draft of the regulation the Trump administration plans to use to gut the Obamacare contraception mandate – that is, the rule currently ensuring that most women’s insurance covers contraception without a copay.
Put simply, the Trump administration is planning to make it more difficult for women to use the insurance they earn and pay for to afford birth control pills, IUDs and other forms of contraception. In 2017. In America.
The administration’s plans fly in the face of public opinion, not to mention common sense and decency. The Obamacare mandate is supported by 71 percent of Americans, has caused out-of-pocket costs for contraception to plummet and has coincided with an acceleration in the decline in the abortion rate.
Still, contraception opponents who claim the rule infringes on their religious freedom have fought it for years, and the Obama administration bent over backwards to try to appease them. But what Trump’s leaked rule shows is that opponents’ ultimate goal was never to win exemptions from the law for religious groups – it was to block the government from expanding access to contraception altogether by freeing all corporations, no matter how secular, from requirements to provide equitable health coverage to women.
The long, often mind-boggling, battle over the Obamacare mandate is worth revisiting, to illustrate how we ended up here.
The first version of the rule exempted houses of worship from providing health plans that cover contraception. This was based on a “church autonomy” rationale – the idea being that someone who works for a church likely shares its beliefs and has consented to religious governance, voluntarily forgoing the protections employees enjoy under generally applicable law.
But the exemption for churches wasn’t good enough for contraception opponents. They insisted religiously affiliated groups like universities and hospitals shouldalsobe exempt. The problem with that idea is obvious: Accepting a job at a university, hospital or social service organization is not at all like joining a church. Despite the prevalent stereotyping of religiously affiliated institutions as places where one should expect bishops or other religious authorities to make the rules, they are in fact able to recruit employees and receive government funding precisely because they present themselves as largely secular institutions that are welcoming to people of all or no faiths.
So there’s no church autonomy rationale when it comes to these institutions, but the Obama administration came up with an accommodation to try and make them happy anyway – while still ensuring that women’s health care services would be covered, as men’s are. The workaround allows such institutions to opt out of providing contraceptive coverage by sending a two-page form to their health insurers self-certifying that they have a religious objection to insurance that covers birth control. The third-party insurer is then obligated to provide separate coverage to the employee, for which it is reimbursed by the government. Women get their birth control but not through the health plans of the religiously affiliated non-profits they work for. Everybody wins, right?
Nope. The Obama administration made the mistake of thinking the objectors were negotiating in good faith for a religious accommodation – when their realgoal was to torpedo expanded access to contraception altogether. The attempts to appease the objectors came back to bite the administration in an unprecedented litigation campaign led by right-wing Christian legal groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Beckett Fund that involved more than 100 lawsuits. Secular for-profit corporations like Hobby Lobby sued to be given the same accommodation as religiously affiliated non-profits, and won at the Supreme Court. The non-profits also sued, claiming that filling out the form to get the accommodation – literally just filling out a form – violated their rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act since their employees would still end up getting contraceptive coverage in the end.
The Supreme Court wasn’t willing to go so far as to allow employers to block their employees from getting coverage from a third party through the government’s workaround. But the administration that Trump has filled with some of the nation’s premiere anti-contraception zealots is poised to give the objectors what the courts wouldn’t. When the coverage rule was first proposed, Cardinal Timothy Dolan explained the only outcome he would accept: “All Washington has to do is say, ‘Any entity that finds these mandates morally objectionable is not coerced to do them,’ and leave it there.”
Laws do not generally work this way – you don’t get to only follow the ones you agree with. But that’s precisely what Trump’s contraceptive regulation would do. Any employer that decides it has a religious or moral objection would be able to prevent its employees from obtaining contraceptive coverage – even employees currently receiving it through a third party. It’s an exemption that swallows the whole rule.
This is an example of a larger strategy by right-wing religious groups to attack legal protections that should be applied generally under the guise of “religious exemption.” For example, they’ve claimed that laws protecting the rights of LGBTQ people to adopt children violate religious organizations’ rights, only to admit they’re really objecting to any kind of organization having to abide by anti-discrimination laws.
These religious warriors against anti-discrimination laws will surely be emboldened if Trump implements the new regulation as written. However, women should not assume they are no longer entitled to contraceptive coverage. Despite the Hobby Lobby decision, most women – including those who work for religiously affiliated institutions – are currently entitled to birth control without a copay via the workaround. So this is a good time to get one’s birth control situation sorted out, before the Trump administration issues the new rule or otherwise dismantles Obamacare. In particular, women interested in long-acting removable birth control (like an IUD), which is more effective – and more expensive – than birth control pills, should take action pronto.
But even if the new rule goes into effect, don’t assume coverage is gone. Obamacare has strengthened the norms around birth control coverage, and we can expect most plans to voluntarily continue covering it. Furthermore, there is reason to believe the Trump rule won’t survive court review. It doesn’t comply with procedural requirements for issuing new rules – and, worse, it’s discriminatory. So as with many of Trump’s legallydubiouspolicies, expect it to be tied up in court for a long time.
Adding to the plentiful criticism of his controversial 2018 proposed budget, President Donald Trump’s proposed budget also allots millions to abstinence-only education programs — $227 million to be exact. While it’s unfortunately not an unheard of move for a Republican administration to support these sort of programs, investing in education policies that seek to shame and discourage sexual activity rather than providing information that allows young people to protect themselves remains deeply unsettling and insulting.
As concluded by countless studies over the last 25 years alone, these sorts of programs — which vehemently oppose promoting or even mentioning forms of contraception while discouraging all sexual contact “until marriage” — are considered aggressively ineffective. Research also shows that the states that rely on “wait until marriage” philosophies and policies actually have higher rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. And it makes complete sense when you consider the fact that they’re straight-up refusing to tell young people about the tools available to prevent those things. But, more anecdotally, students who encountered these programs (and the few stray parents who sit in on lessons) report that the culture of shame surrounding sex adds yet another layer of insult to the injury of state-sanctioned ignorance.
With nearly 95 percent of Americans engaging in that sweet, sweet premarital sex on the reg, arguments claiming that having sex out of wedlock makes a person lesser remain fundamentally flawed. However, that still hasn’t stopped the steady flow of federal funding to these programs.
El Salvador has one of the worst records on reproductive rights in the world. Since 1998, Article 133 of the Penal Code has made abortion illegal in all circumstances, without exception, punishable by up to eight years in prison. Sentences of up to 30 years have been handed down when a judge determined that “homicide” rather than abortion had occurred. The Alliance for Women’s Health and Life has reported that 147 El Salvadorian women were charged with crimes relating to abortion between 2000 and 2014.
Because our laws are so draconian, so tilted in favor of the rights of fetuses over those of living women, pregnant women experiencing difficulties may not feel safe in El Salvador’s hospitals. We’ve all heard about Maria Teresa Rivera, who was sentenced to 40 years in prison after she miscarried. (She was released after serving four.) We are terrified of having medical problems during pregnancy as there is an underlying presumption of guilt. So women often suffer in silence, which causes further complications.
The U.N. committee stated that the country violates the basic human rights of women and girls, including their right to life, health, nondiscrimination, human dignity and the right over their own bodies.
Those who call for continued restrictions on safe and legal abortion in El Salvador fail to realize that making the procedure illegal does not reduce its prevalence. (The country’s Ministry of Health has estimated that 19,290 abortions took place between 2005 and 2008.) Lack of choice means that women tend to seek out dangerous covert methods, which put their lives at risk. These women are also reluctant to seek post-operative medical care after their abortions have taken place.
El Salvador is not supportive of women’s rights. The power of the Catholic Church and right-wing conservatives here and throughout Latin America has meant that our laws are not secular, but are heavily influenced by subjective interpretations of religion. The Trump administration has further exacerbated the problem by making it illegal for U.S. organizations providing international aid to so much as help women access information about reproductive rights, let alone provide abortions.
El Salvador is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for women. We have the highest rate of femicide in the entire world: A woman is murdered every 15 hours. A 2010 law made femicide a specific criminal category, but most perpetrators still evade arrest. The levels of gang violence and other forms of civil unrest are extremely high, and women bear the brunt of it both inside and outside our homes.
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