Abortion – Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information

• A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that an Alabama abortion law considered the strictest in the country will not go into effect.

Pro-choice supporters protest in front of the Alabama State House as Alabama state Senate votes on the strictest anti-abortion bill in the United States at the Alabama Legislature in Montgomery, Alabama, U.S. May 14, 2019.
Chris Aluka Berry | Reuters

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that an Alabama abortion law considered the strictest in the country will not go into effect, citing Supreme Court precedents that forbid bans on abortion prior to fetal viability.

Supporters of the Alabama law hope to use it to spur the Supreme Court to revisit those reproductive rights precedents, including the landmark decision Roe v. Wade. They expected lower courts to block the law.

The law criminalizes providing an abortion at any stage during a pregnancy, threatening doctors with prison sentences up to 99 years. It was set to take effect Nov. 15. The law provides no exception for rape or incest victims, but allows the procedure in cases where the patient’s life is at risk.

“Enforcement of the ban would yield serious and irreparable harm, violating the right to privacy and preventing women from obtaining abortions in Alabama,” District Judge Myron Thompson wrote. Thompson issued a temporary injunction that will prevent the law from going into effect until the court resolves the case in full.

Gov. Kay Ivey signed the law in May, acknowledging at the time that it was illegal under federal law and likely unenforceable.

The law came amid a flurry of other abortion restrictions passed in states led by Republicans attempting to test the Supreme Court’s new conservative majority.

The nine-judge panel has five Republican appointees, including Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whom President Donald Trump selected to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kavanaugh is generally seen as more conservative than his predecessor.

The ACLU, which has challenged a number of those laws, said in a statement that none of those measures have survived legal scrutiny.

“With this federal court ruling, it’s official: None of the state abortion bans passed earlier this year are in effect,” the group wrote in a post on Twitter.

In a statement, Attorney General Steve Marshall said that the district court’s decision was “not unexpected.”

“As we have stated before, the State’s objective is to advance our case to the U.S. Supreme Court where we intend to submit evidence that supports our argument that Roe and Casey were wrongly decided and that the Constitution does not prohibit states from protecting unborn children from abortion,” he said.

Planned Parenthood v. Casey was a 1992 Supreme Court decision that affirmed the central holding of Roe v. Wade.

The lawsuit was brought by Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union in the United States District Court for Middle Alabama.

The Supreme Court will hear a case this term challenging a Louisiana abortion law that opponents say will limit the state to one provider. The law requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at hospitals within 30 miles of their clinics.

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/29/federal-court-strikes-down-alabama-abortion-law.html

The state could become the first without an abortion clinic since Roe v. Wade.

Anti-abortion demonstrators outside Reproductive Health Services of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis region in St. Louis, Missouri, on May 31, 2019. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

The last abortion clinic in Missouri is battling for its existence.

Reproductive Health Services of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis region has been operating for 46 years, serving thousands of patients annually for STI testing, cancer screenings, and abortions. But it might have to stop offering abortion care thanks to a months-long dispute with state regulators.

The controversy started after an audit earlier this year, when officials say they found “deficient practices” at the clinic. While they haven’t been very specific about what those practices are, officials requested interviews with doctors working at the clinic. Some of the doctors agreed, but others did not, possibly fearing that the state would launch criminal proceedings against them. Meanwhile, officials said that if they couldn’t interview all the doctors, they would revoke the clinic’s license to perform abortions.

Beginning Monday, representatives from the clinic and the state will testify at a weeklong series of hearings to determine if the facility can keep its license. If the clinic loses, Missouri residents — including more than a million people who can become pregnant — will have to travel across state lines if they want to end a pregnancy. Advocates say this will increase the already significant obstacles that patients — who are disproportionately low-income — face when trying to get the procedure.

The outcome of the hearing could also signal the end of an era in abortion access: if Missouri loses its clinic, it will become the first state with no provider since Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that established the right to an abortion in America.

While near-total bans on abortion grabbed headlines earlier this year, states have also been engaged in quieter, more incremental efforts to restrict abortion. Some, including Missouri, have passed restrictions on abortion doctors, laws similar to one in Louisiana that will go before the Supreme Court this term. But Planned Parenthood says it is also using the clinic licensing process as a roundabout way of shutting the clinic down. If the facility has to stop providing abortions, advocates say, it could be the biggest success yet for the strategy of eliminating access without banning the procedure outright.

“It is the moment that we have long been warning about,” Bonyen Lee-Gilmore, director of state media campaigns at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told Vox: “the day that abortion access is eliminated without ever overturning Roe.”

State regulators say they have concerns about the clinic. It’s not clear what the concerns are.

The clinic that is now Reproductive Health Services of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region was founded in 1973, the year Roe was decided. Planned Parenthood bought the facility in 1996. Over the years, the clinic has been inspected a number of times, and inspectors were always collegial and professional, Dr. David Eisenberg, the clinic’s former medical director who still provides abortions and other care there, told Vox. But things started to change after the appointment of a new director, Dr. Randall Williams, to lead the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services in 2017.

Williams, an OB-GYN, was appointed by former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican, and has spoken little publicly about his position on abortion. In an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch earlier this year, he said only, “Abortion is legal in Missouri, and I want it to be safe.”

But soon after his appointment, Eisenberg said, state regulators essentially started saying, “We have reinterpreted the rules and regulations and found what you do to no longer be compliant.” (The health department has not yet responded to Vox’s request for comment.)

The department conducted an audit of the clinic in March, and said it had found “deficient practices,” according to Planned Parenthood, but it didn’t clarify what practices it found deficient. In a statement in June, the department said it was “reviewing incidents with significant medical evidence which point to troubling instances and deviations from the standard care, resulting in serious patient harm.”

To further investigate the deficiencies, the health department said it needed to interview all the doctors who practice at the clinic. The two doctors who are Planned Parenthood employees agreed to the interviews — but others, who were medical residents affiliated with a St. Louis hospital, did not do so.

The state said the results of the interviews could include “board review” or “criminal proceedings,” a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood said earlier this year. And Planned Parenthood said it could not force the residents to sit for interviews because they were not employees, according to the Kansas City Star.

The clinic was threatened with closure at the end of May, when its license was scheduled to expire and the health department declined to renew it. But a judge issued a preliminary injunction allowing the clinic to stay open.

Since then, the case has been referred to the state’s Administrative Hearing Commission, which handles disputes between state agencies and private individuals or groups. The commission will hold all-day hearings in the case this Monday through Friday.

It’s not clear when the commission will issue a decision, but the process could take months, Gilmore said.

Planned Parenthood says the state’s goal is simple: shut the clinic down

Throughout the process, the state has maintained that there are safety issues at the clinic. According to the statement issued by the health department in June, officials are “concerned by the refusal of physicians to provide explanations for the deeply troubling instances of patient care and conduct under investigation.”

Details about the department’s concerns have been difficult to obtain — the statement of deficiencies was not made public. But a conference call between state officials and anti-abortion activists in May suggests that the state wanted to investigate “failed” abortions, in which a patient remained pregnant, and the number of ambulance visits to the clinic, according to the Kansas City Star.

Planned Parenthood, meanwhile, says the concerns about patient care are essentially a ruse, and the state’s real goal is simply to shut down the clinic. “The state of Missouri has waged political theater in order to ban abortion,” Gilmore said.

The organization points to the May conference call between Steele Shippy, then-communications director for Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, and Republican legislators and anti-abortion activists. The email invitation to the call ended with the phrase “#shutthemdown,” the Kansas City Star reported.

On the call, Shippy said that media would ask whether the state’s goal was to shut the clinic down. “While some of us, yes, it’s a main goal, but it also should be our main goal to protect the health and safety of women,” Shippy said.

The governor’s office declined to comment to Vox for this story. Shippy, who is now Parson’s campaign manager in his reelection campaign, has said that the call was nor arranged by the governor’s office. He is scheduled to testify at the hearings this week.

The closure of the clinic would mark a new era for abortion in America

Ahead of the hearings, Planned Parenthood said the stakes could not be higher. Even with the clinic open, “there’s over a million women” of reproductive age “in the state of Missouri with one freestanding health center providing abortion care,” Eisenberg said. If the clinic no longer provides abortions, any of those people facing an unwanted pregnancy would have to go to another state for care.

The majority of people seeking abortions in America are low-income, which means that traveling added distances can be a real financial hardship, especially if it means extra time off work. Last week, Planned Parenthood opened a new clinic just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, in Illinois, which could see Missourians if the Missouri clinic cannot. But other neighboring states, like Iowa, Kentucky, and Kansas, are restricting abortion access, not expanding it.

Meanwhile, the battle with state regulators is already having an effect, according to Eisenberg. “There’s a lot of confusion,” he said. “People think that abortion’s no longer available, when it is.”

And the outcome of the hearing will have implications outside Missouri too. In the last year, states around the country have passed strict bans on abortion. A Missouri law, for example, bans the procedure at eight weeks into pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest. But all these laws, including Missouri’s, have been blocked by courts.

Another, quieter movement against abortion, however, may be coming to fruition. Since 2010, states have been passing restrictions on abortion clinics and providers that have had the effect of shutting clinics down. A 2016 Supreme Court decision, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, found several such restrictions in Texas unconstitutional and struck a major blow to them nationwide. But since then, President Trump has appointed two conservative justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, to the court.

And earlier this month, the court announced it would hear the case June Medical Services v. Gee, which concerns a law in Louisiana very similar to those at issue in Whole Woman’s Health. Many abortion-rights advocates fear that the court will rule in favor of Louisiana, essentially giving states a green light to pass more and more onerous restrictions on clinics until abortion is impossible to access, even if it’s not banned outright.

The conflict in Missouri right now is about health department regulation and inspections, not laws. But, Gilmore said, the situation is still similar to the one in Louisiana — officials are “using the regulatory process under the guise of health and safety” to try to stamp out abortion in the state.

If the clinic does stop providing abortions, it will likely be seen as a sign by advocates on both sides of the issue that the strategy of restricting or regulating abortion out of existence is working.

That could have the effect of keeping doctors from entering the field of abortion care, Eisenberg said, exacerbating an existing shortage of abortion doctors in many places. Faced with increasing restrictions, they may feel that “this is ridiculous, I’m going to go find something else to do where the government’s not going to get in my way,” he said.

But, he said, the situation in Missouri should also galvanize activism around abortion rights: “for anyone who cares about the rights of people who can become pregnant in this country, now is the time to get up and fight back.”

Source: https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/10/28/20932235/planned-parenthood-missouri-abortion-clinic-roe-wade

Democratic politicians used to say abortions should be rare. Here’s how that changed.

Protesters in favor of abortion rights gathered in New York’s Times Square as part of a national day of action against recent abortion bans on June 4, 2019. LightRocket via Getty Images

“I agree with Hillary Clinton on one thing,” Rep. Tulsi Gabbard said at the Democratic presidential debate on Tuesday night. “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.”

Clinton used this language in her 2008 presidential campaign; Bill Clinton, meanwhile, had introduced it into Democratic politics back in 1992. The language was likely meant to appeal to people who supported the right to an abortion in principle but still felt morally conflicted about the procedure — a large group, according to some polling. But many abortion rights advocates argued that calling for the procedure to be “rare” placed stigma on people who seek it.

“There’s a fundamental notion of bodily autonomy that we’ve been fighting for as advocates and activists on this issue for years,” Destiny Lopez, co-director of the All* Above All Action Fund, a nonprofit that works to expand abortion access, told Vox. Saying abortion should be rare “completely negates all the work that we’ve done to really make this about the ability to decide what’s best for your body, for your family, for your community,” she said.

Over the years, Democrats have become more sympathetic to this view. By 2016, Hillary Clinton had changed her message, saying only that abortion should be “safe and legal.” It was part of a broader shift in the party toward more full-throated support of abortion rights. During the 2016 primaries, both Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders called for a repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for most abortions. Today, all the Democratic presidential candidates, including Gabbard, support allowing federal funding for the procedure — along with a slate of other reforms aimed at increasing access.

But as Gabbard showed, the framing of “safe, legal, and rare” isn’t gone. Her comment, and the conversation surrounding it, were a reminder not just of how much the Democratic Party has changed in recent years on abortion rights, but of the divisions that still remain.

Democratic politicians have been moving away from “safe, legal, and rare” since 2012

The phrase “safe, legal, and rare” entered common usage during the 1992 campaign, when Bill Clinton frequently used it, according to the New York Times. “We have to remind the American people once again that being pro-choice is very different from being pro-abortion,” he told the Congressional Women’s Caucus that year.

During her 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton echoed her husband’s message, emphasizing that “by rare, I mean rare.”

But over the years, abortion rights advocates have pushed back against the phrase. “Safe, legal, and rare” implies that getting an abortion is something that “you should be apologetic for,” reproductive justice activist Renee Bracey Sherman told Vox. “It places the blame on the person who’s had an abortion, as if they just did something wrong to need one, rather than addressing the systemic issue as to why someone might not be able to have access to consistent health care or contraception.”

The push to destigmatize abortion has been part of a larger rise in people who have had abortions being open about their experiences.

“Prior to 2016, we did not have a lot of people publicly saying the word abortion” or talking about their first-hand experiences, Lopez told Vox. But “there has just been this seismic shift” in the last few years “where we’ve seen more public conversations about the realities of abortion access in this country.”

Those realities have changed a lot since 1992. Opponents of abortion have long sought to restrict the procedure, but after 2010, when Republicans took over many state legislatures, they successfully passed a slate of restrictions on abortion clinics that caused many facilities in the South and Midwest to close. Between 2011 and 2017, half of the clinics in Arizona, Kentucky, Ohio, and Texas shut their doors. In 2017, 89 percent of counties had no abortion clinic, and six states had just one.

That made it much harder for many Americans to get an abortion, especially if they couldn’t afford to travel to a far-away clinic.

Meanwhile, Trump’s election in 2016 was soon followed by the appointment of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Many advocates on both sides of the issue believe that conservatives on the Court now have enough votes, if not to overturn the landmark abortion decision Roe v. Wade, then at least to significantly weaken it. Earlier this month, the Court announced it would take a case that could give states the green light to pass even more clinic restrictions, possibly legislating clinics out of existence.

In a time when access is dwindling and Roe is at risk, advocates have argued that calling for abortion to be “rare” just makes it even harder for people who already struggle to get the procedure — who are disproportionately likely to be poor, people of color, LGBTQ, immigrants, or belong to more than one of these groups — to push for their right to get it.

“If there are barriers put in front of a person,” the “safe, legal, and rare” framing implies “that it does not matter because that procedure should be rare,” Lopez said. “So it essentially is denying these folks the ability to really access the care that they deserve.”

For that reason, the All* Above All Action Fund says that abortion should be “safe, legal, accessible, and affordable,” not rare, Lopez said.

Democratic candidates have been listening to concerns like these, and in recent years, they’ve moved away from “safe, legal, and rare.” The word “rare” was removed from the Democratic party platform in 2012, Bracey Sherman said, and in 2016, Clinton no longer used it on the campaign trail.

A discussion of abortion in her 2017 book What Happened showed how much the former candidate’s language had changed on the issue. “We can debate the morality of abortion forever,” Clinton wrote, “but at the end of the day, who decides whether a woman gets or stays pregnant?”

Her answer: “I say let women decide.”

Clinton’s shift was part of a bigger move in the Democratic Party toward more outspoken and less equivocal support of abortion rights. In particular, advocates had been calling for a repeal of Hyde for years because the amendment, first passed in 1976, blocks Medicaid coverage for almost all abortions. As a result, many low-income Americans are blocked from getting the procedure or forced to go into debt or forego necessities to pay for it.

In 2016, the Democratic Party added a call to repeal Hyde to its official platform. Today, all the Democrats running for the 2020 presidential nomination say they support allowing federal money to pay for abortions. Even former Vice President Joe Biden, who earlier this year supported leaving Hyde in place, now calls for its repeal.

The move to repeal Hyde and the move away from “safe, legal, and rare” are linked, Bracey Sherman said. “This is just a general shift in moving away from stigmatizing people who need and have abortions.”

Despite the shift, divisions on abortion remain among Democrats

But “safe, legal, and rare” isn’t completely gone. Gabbard — who once identified as pro-life but now says she supports abortion rights — used the phrase at the fourth presidential debate on Tuesday night, when she was asked how she would stop states from restricting abortion access.

“We see how the consequences of laws that you’re referring to can often lead to a dangerous place,” Gabbard went on. “I do, however, think that there should be some restrictions in place. I support codifying Roe v. Wade while making sure that during the third trimester, abortion is not an option unless the life or severe health consequences of a woman are at risk.”

Many abortion rights advocates criticized her response, but one — former Planned Parenthood president Dr. Leana Wen — praised her, arguing that “we should reduce the need for abortions by investing in prevention.”

Wen broke with other abortion rights advocates some time ago. When she was removed as Planned Parenthood’s president in July, she said in a statement that, “I believe that the best way to protect abortion care is to be clear that it is not a political issue but a health care one.” Some said the group ousted her because it was looking for “a more aggressive political leader” on abortion rights, while others said she had management issues.

Since she left Planned Parenthood, Wen has argued that the best way to build public support for abortion rights is to seek common ground with people who may be uncomfortable with the procedure, but want it to remain legal. She wrote in a New York Times op-ed shortly after her departure that while leading the group, “I reached out to people who wrestle with abortion’s moral complexities, but who will speak out against government interference in personal medical decisions.”

“We need to stop treating those whose views differ from our own with scorn and suspicion, and instead work together to safeguard our health, our rights and our future,” she concluded.

And after Tuesday’s debate, Wen made clear that she saw the “safe, legal, and rare” framing as a way to reach out to people with different views on the issue. “Pro-choice & progressive movements will lose unless we allow more people to join who do not agree 100% with the most extreme ideology,” she tweeted. (Wen declined, through a representative, to be interviewed for this story.)

She isn’t the only abortion-rights supporter to use “safe, legal, and rare” in recent months. In an interview with NPR’s Sarah McCammon earlier this year, Pamela Maraldo, a former president of Planned Parenthood who resigned in 1995 under circumstances similar to Wen’s, said that she wanted Planned Parenthood to return to that framing.

“I think that people that are pro-choice are afraid of stigmatizing abortion when they say it should be rare,” she said. But “that’s not where I’m coming from. I’m coming from a place that too many trips to the doctor’s, medical procedures, surgical procedures, could be and should be prevented.”

In general, those who argue on behalf of prevention say that better access to contraception would naturally lead to abortion becoming rarer. Indeed, the abortion rate has hit an all-time low in recent years, and experts say better access to long-acting reversible contraceptives like IUDs is likely the reason why.

But moves by the Trump administration, like increased restrictions on Title X family planning funding and a weakening of the mandate that employer-based insurance cover birth control, could threaten access to contraception, especially among low-income Americans.

Even if access were perfect, “contraception is not foolproof,” Lopez said. “People will always need abortion care in this country, period.”

The disagreement between Wen and other activists, and among Gabbard and other candidates, is a reminder that even among people who generally support abortion rights, there are a lot of differences in approach and priorities.

That’s why advocates like Bracey Sherman, who started the hashtag #AskAboutAbortion in 2016, have been pushing for moderators to ask questions about abortion rights in Democratic debates. Tuesday was the first time in four presidential debates (two of them spread across two nights) that moderators asked anything about abortion, Lopez noted.

“For so long we heard, ‘well, they’re all pro-choice, it doesn’t really matter,’” Bracey Sherman said. On Tuesday night, though, “it was clear: they actually don’t all have the same stance.”

Source: https://www.vox.com/2019/10/18/20917406/abortion-safe-legal-and-rare-tulsi-gabbard?fbclid=IwAR2yFhhQy5jE7rHTzDgbVAwE8e41vofMgXNGBZnE2gt0uy4GSnx6s6xUSH8

The Fifth Circuit refused to dismiss a challenge to a web of anti-choice restrictions in Louisiana. But don’t call it a win for abortion rights.

It’s good news that last week the Fifth Circuit denied an emergency request by the State of Louisiana to dismiss a lawsuit challenging a web of abortion restrictions in the state. Louisiana’s request for the Fifth Circuit to effectively end the lawsuit at its earliest stages was extreme, even by anti-choice advocates’ standards, and the panel of judges considering the request seemed dangerously close to granting it.
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When the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit rules against a state defending some outlandish anti-abortion regulation, it’s usually a moment to celebrate. Wins for abortion rights are exceedingly rare in the conservative appellate district, after all, and they should be savored.

In that spirit, it’s good news that last week the Fifth Circuit denied an emergency request by the State of Louisiana to dismiss a lawsuit challenging a web of abortion restrictions in the state. Louisiana’s request for the Fifth Circuit to effectively end the lawsuit at its earliest stages was extreme, even by anti-choice advocates’ standards, and the panel of judges considering the request seemed dangerously close to granting it. That they didn’t should be commemorated given the circuit’s historic hostility to abortion rights. But the win manages to serve as a warning: If the Fifth Circuit gets its way, it is going to be much harder for plaintiffs challenging abortion rights regulations to have their day in court.

In June 2017, reproductive rights advocates filed a lawsuit challenging a host of anti-abortion restrictions in Louisiana that regulate everything from what documents abortion providers must provide the state to what information—true or not—providers must disclose to patients. The lawsuit builds off the 2016 abortion rights victory in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt that struck two Texas abortion restrictions as unconstitutional. In particular, the lawsuit seeks to build off the part of Whole Woman’s Health that recognized that abortion restrictions can cumulatively add up to unduly burden abortion rights, opening up new pathways for plaintiffs to challenge networks of abortion restrictions that work together to squeeze off abortion access.

Shortly after advocates filed their lawsuit, attorneys for the State of Louisiana filed a motion to dismiss the allegations that would have thrown out the case at its earliest stages and before any discovery on the factual allegations in the complaint had taken place. When a court is considering a motion to dismiss, it is required to take all the facts alleged in the complaint and assume them to be true at that stage in the proceeding. If a defendant disputes a particular factual claim, then the routine course is not for the court to grant the motion to dismiss and toss the case out of court, but to deny the motion to dismiss and allow the case to proceed to discovery. That’s because discovery is the “fact-finding” stage of litigation, where any evidence to settle a factual dispute, if it exists, is disclosed.

Defendants routinely file a motion to dismiss as a way to try and get plaintiffs to more clearly articulate the case they are trying to make and as a way to help refine defense strategy early on in the litigation. Because they happen early in the litigation process, courts routinely deny motions to dismiss and allow plaintiffs the opportunity to develop the factual evidence to support their claims with the understanding that if the plaintiffs are unable to do so, the court will likely toss their case close to trial.

And that is exactly what the district court did when it denied Louisiana’s motion to dismiss in March 2018. The case proceeded with the plaintiffs amending their complaint to further refine their claims and the State of Louisiana filing another motion to dismiss that was also denied.

That’s when things in the case got weird. Instead of proceeding to discovery and forcing the challengers to develop evidence to support their claims or risk summary judgment against them, attorneys for the State of Louisiana filed an emergency request with the Fifth Circuit asking it to dismiss the case. And the Fifth Circuit seriously considered doing so.

Thankfully it did not and instead turned away Louisiana’s request—but not without spending over 30 pages explaining why it would have liked to rule in Louisiana’s favor.

“This is an extraordinary case,” the opinion opens. But the three-judge panel was not talking about Louisiana’s request that the appeals court take the extreme measure of dismissing the challenge to the web of abortion restrictions. Rather they were referencing that the plaintiffs articulated a “cumulative effects” theory, an argument built off Whole Woman’s Health that abortion restrictions can work in concert and in their totality unduly burden abortion rights. Yes, individual restrictions can unduly burden abortion rights, the plaintiffs claim, but so too can networks of restrictions when taken together, as is the case in Louisiana.

What makes this case “extraordinary,” from the Fifth Circuit’s perspective, is that that the plaintiffs had the audacity to rely on Whole Woman’s Health to bring it at all.

In denying Louisiana’s request, the Fifth Circuit ordered the case back to the lower court to determine if the plaintiffs have legal standing to bring all of the claims in their complaint, suggesting that there wasn’t enough evidence that each of the challenged restrictions were causing the plaintiffs any legal harm or injury. That means that the lower court must now go through each individual regulation identified in the lawsuit and determine if the plaintiffs have a legal basis to bring a challenge to that regulation, despite the fact that the plaintiffs are alleging the cumulative harm of these regulations working in concert to restrict abortion access. The Fifth Circuit just demanded the plaintiffs be able to assert why they should be able to bring any of these individual claims at all.

“The plaintiffs’ theory, as we understand it, is that Louisiana’s various laws and regulations regarding abortion cumulate to an undue burden,” the opinion states. “But before any federal court can analyze the ‘cumulative effects’ of Louisiana’s laws, we must know which laws Plaintiffs have standing to challenge.”

“Perhaps they lack standing in ways not explored here,” the opinion states. “Perhaps they have standing in others. We leave that for the district court to decide on a provision-by-provision basis.”

The question of who has standing to bring legal challenges to abortion restrictions and what that legal standing requires plaintiffs to show is a very live legal question, now that the Roberts Court has agreed to review standing later this term when it takes up a different abortion rights case out of Louisiana, June Medical Services v. Gee. Conservatives have been trying to narrow the scope of legal standing in abortion rights cases for decades, in part because if fewer people or organizations have the ability to bring claims against laws restricting abortion rights, the more likely those laws are to go unchallenged.

That’s not unlike what the Fifth Circuit is setting up with last week’s order.

The plaintiffs in this case challenge numerous regulations and restrictions, including a variety of reporting and record-keeping requirements. Individually, a requirement that abortion clinics enact “safeguards” to protect patient-privacy may not harm providers enough to create an undue burden on abortion rights. But when considered alongside all the other reporting and record-keeping requirements Louisiana requires of abortion providers, those requirements cumulatively create the kind of harm that does amount to an undue burden.

The Fifth Circuit essentially wants plaintiffs to tease out each instance of individual harm at the earliest stages of litigation—before a court should allow them to proceed with claims that the entire system unduly burdens abortion rights. It’s a way to try and short-circuit cumulative effects claims based off Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt before the theory can effectively undermine state regulatory networks that have historically targeted abortion providers for heightened restrictions as a means to roll back abortion rights. It’s also a way to limit challenges to abortion rights generally by suggesting a different, more difficult pleading standard in early litigation for abortion rights challenges than for other types of claims. And it just might work.

The case now heads back to the district court, where the plaintiffs will have to engage in that “provision-by-provision” analysis mandated by the Fifth Circuit for their case to proceed. Should the district court rule against the plaintiffs on standing grounds, it could unravel their combined claims against Louisiana—which is likely the outcome the conservative panel of Fifth Circuit judges hope to see.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2019/10/23/did-the-fifth-circuit-just-try-to-make-it-harder-to-bring-an-abortion-rights-challenge/

Northern Ireland has long been the dirty little secret of the UK. Out of sight and out of mind across the Irish Sea, the UK’s most far-flung region has always been a place apart not just geographically, but also psychologically. Consumed by the Troubles, the violent civil conflict that raged between 1968 and 1998, our recent history can be confusing and bewildering to many. As a result, many in Britain unfairly view Northern Ireland as a dark and unruly place where bad things happen, like an embarrassing distant relative who shouldn’t be acknowledged unless strictly necessary.

Here, the treatment of minority and marginalised groups that would not have been tolerated elsewhere in the UK become a settled status quo, dismissed as a quirk of life in the little understood region, and not something for the rest of the nation to concern itself with. However, as the clock struck midnight on Monday night, that finally changed. Westminster finally acted to overturn Northern Ireland’s bans on abortion and equal marriage with much-needed and long overdue reforms.

Pro-choice supporters pose as they gather at Parliament buildings on the Stormont Estate in Belfast on October 21, 2019.

© Paul Faith/Getty Images

On the steps of Stormont yesterday, the region’s parliament, pro-choice and pro-marriage equality activists gathered for the historic moment when a new Northern Ireland was ushered into being. The momentous changes are the result of decades of campaigning by women and LGBTQIA+ rights groups, who have often risked everything to tell their personal stories and put a face to the suffering the bans caused.

Although abortion was effectively legalised in England and Wales in 1967, the legislation was not extended to Northern Ireland after local politicians objected on grounds of Christian morality. Instead, the region retained the 1861 Offences Against The Person Act, a piece of Victorian-era legislation that pre-dates the invention of the light bulb and amounts to some of the harshest abortion restrictions in the world, making it a criminal offence with a penalty of life in prison to have an abortion – unless a woman’s health is at risk of serious imminent harm. It forced countless women to travel to England by air or sea for terminations instead.

Members of pro choice group Alliance for Choice make their way to Stormont on October 21, 2019 in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

© Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

Similarly, while equal marriage for same-sex couples was legalised in 2013 in England, with the first ceremonies taking place in 2014, the legislation was not extended to Northern Ireland after resistance from local politicians. As each year has gone by, Northern Ireland has slipped further behind the rest of the UK. Rallies and protests were organised as part of passionate grassroots campaigns, but often with a weary sense that few people outside of the region knew or cared.

Social media gave women and the LGBTQIA+ community a platform to speak out about their experiences and be heard, and with each story, the stigma slowly began to erode, and Northern Ireland’s outdated laws became increasingly impossible to ignore. In 2014, the journalist Lyra McKee, who was murdered by the IRA earlier this year, wrote a moving open letter to her younger self about growing up gay in Northern Ireland, and the intense psychological toll of being forced to feel “other” and “less than” the rest of society. The article struck a chord with many people here and quickly went viral, later being turned into a short film.

A newly painted mural featuring murdered journalist Lyra McKee, whose death sparked a new round of political talks chaired by the British and Irish Governments.

© Paul Faith/Getty Images

The previous year, a young woman called Sarah Ewart spoke openly about her experiences of having an abortion after she was told her unborn child would not survive birth. Rather than suffer in silence, Ewart contacted a local BBC radio station and told of her devastation at the loss of a much-wanted pregnancy, compounded by the distress of having to travel to England for a termination.

In 2016, a woman was put on trial for an abortion. The court was told the woman was just 19-years-old when she experienced a crisis pregnancy. She had tried to save money to travel to England for a termination but ran out of time. Instead, she performed an abortion on herself at home. Her flatmates found bloody remains in a kitchen bin and reported her to the police. The woman pleaded guilty and was given a suspended sentence.

As these stories emerged, the harsh human reality of the laws became impossible to ignore not just in Northern Ireland but also across Britain. Another key moment came when, following their failure to secure a majority government in 2017, the Conservatives entered a confidence-and-supply arrangement with the Democratic Unionist Party. The pact shone a spotlight on the previously obscure Northern Irish party, members of whom had been among the chief opponents of abortion and LGBTQIA+ rights. Years of intensive Brexit talks have also highlighted the ways in which Northern Ireland is treated the same as, or differently to, the rest of the UK – and resulting disparities in social justice.

Abortion-rights demonstrators march through the streets of Belfast ahead of a meeting of the Stormont Assembly on abortion rights and gay marriage on October 21, 2019.

© Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

In addition, following a breakdown in relations between nationalist and unionist politicians, the Northern Ireland government collapsed in January 2017 as the parties could no longer agree to govern together. As a result, the parliament has lain empty for almost three years, increasing pressure on Westminster to take responsibility in the absence of a local government.

In July of this year, MPs at Westminster decided to finally act. Labour MPs Stella Creasy and Conor McGinn tabled motions demanding that if the government had still not returned by midnight on 21 October, then abortion would be decriminalised and equal marriage would be legalised.

As the date drew nearer, local activists waited nervously to see if politicians would set aside their differences and return to block the changes from happening. However, as the clock hit midnight on Monday, the long overdue changes were secured. Within minutes, couples across Northern Ireland were celebrating engagements – many having waited years or even decades for the right to marry. Many pro-choice activists were left speechless, able only to sob with relief.

As a journalist from Belfast specialising in social inequality issues, I have come across many harrowing stories throughout my career of the impact of the laws. Teenagers struggling with suicidal feelings due to the fear they could be outed and ostracised for their sexuality. Women who performed abortions on themselves at home – alone, vulnerable and terrified of a knock on the door from police. Couples who had been engaged for years, forced to contemplate a civil partnership for fear older family members might not live to see the law change. Girls who have made up excuses about a “spa trip” or holiday to see a long lost cousin in England and then boarded a lonely flight to Britain to have a termination in secret.

As the law changed at midnight, I thought of their stories and how they might be feeling at that moment. I thought, too, of the untold stories that exist in every village and city in Northern Ireland, which cut across all age groups and walks of life. Today’s changes won’t undo the trauma they endured, but may go some way in healing some of that hurt. Crucially, a new generation may now grow up never knowing the pain of living under the bans. In years to come, they may come to hear about the cruelty that was once enshrined in law and be bewildered that the bans ever existed.

Due to Northern Ireland’s complex history as a post-conflict society and the painstaking rate of progress towards issues which have been long resolved elsewhere, it can be hard for people here to feel hope that change is possible. However, these changes are positive proof of what can come about through decades of determined refusal to merely accept things as they are, but to instead insist on what could be.

Source: https://www.vogue.co.uk/news/article/northern-ireland-legalising-abortion-and-same-sex-marriage?fbclid=IwAR27yqfa83q1iiPJ6P2HKxpFQ6yJ4fOh4rN0VlO4FnK0MsPCNwNIfTpTDLc

Abortion-inducing medications can be taken at home.

Misoprostol is one of two drugs used to induce abortions. George Frey / Reuters file

Women living in states with more restrictive policies on abortion are turning to online sources for medications that can be used to induce the procedure, a study published Thursday found.

The study in the American Journal of Public Health examined data from a European online service called Women on Web. The service mails women early in their pregnancy two drugs — mifepristone and misoprostol — after a doctor reviews an online form filled out by the women.

The women can then take the pills at home, without having to go to a clinic or other abortion provider.

Over a period of 10 months — October 2017 to August 2018 — 6,022 people in the U.S. sought out Women on Web for access to the abortion pills, the study found. Of those, 76 percent were living in states with added restrictions on abortion, such as mandatory counseling and ultrasounds.

The highest demand was in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee and Texas, though requests came in from every state in the country — even those with the fewest restrictions, like New Hampshire. The only stipulation in that state is aimed at minors, who must notify a parent before having an abortion.

Reasons why women turned to an online source for abortion pills varied, but cost was a big factor.

“We know that requiring people to come for two ultrasounds or have a waiting period makes the abortion cost more,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Abigail Aiken, an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

“In supportive states, the biggest barrier was fear of harassment by protesters,” Aiken said.

A previous study by Aiken and her colleagues found that using medications to induce an abortion is as safe as going to a clinic, as long as the medications are taken early enough in pregnancy.

Mifepristone and misoprostol have been used since 1988 in some countries to induce early abortions. (Initially, the Women on Web program was meant only for women in countries where abortion was illegal, and as a result, didn’t ship to the U.S. But that didn’t stop American women from reaching out anyway.)

Women who use the drugs may experience side effects, though, such as pain, heavy bleeding and fever.

Experts say that’s why it’s critical women have access to doctors for information and follow-up care if needed.

“It’s important to think about the role other providers and clinics can play in supporting people who are accessing abortion medication online,” said Megan Donovan, a senior policy manager at the Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive rights.

“We should always be pursuing policies that support a range of options for care,” she told NBC News. “If you want to turn up to a clinic or to your doctor for abortion care, you should still be able to do that.”

The Food and Drug Administration approved the use of abortion medication in 2000, and today it’s used in up to a third of all abortions in the U.S.

However, FDA rules stipulate that the drug must be dispensed in clinics or a doctor’s office. The FDA’s website warns consumers against buying abortion pills online, saying “drugs purchased from foreign internet sources are not the FDA-approved versions of the drugs, and they are not subject to FDA-regulated manufacturing controls or FDA inspection of manufacturing facilities.”

But the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists supports lifting barriers to accessing such medication, calling the FDA rules “outdated” because they “substantially limit access to this safe, effective medication.”

Indeed, the new data illustrates how women seek to manage their own abortion care.

“Just because we restrict access and we put barriers in the way of people when it comes to abortion access,” Aiken said, “it doesn’t mean people won’t find ways of having abortions.”

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/people-are-going-online-abortion-pills-especially-states-more-restrictions-n1068036?fbclid=IwAR23fRPs8ugrg4QZFOXKKCpjwT2Btl8l3l4dT462bP3PC0PizRXcCKWwOXk

The collapse of local government allowed Parliament to step in and bring the territory’s laws in line with Britain’s principles of human rights.

Protesters supporting the legalization of abortion in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Sunday.CreditCharles Mcquillan/Getty Images

The legal attack on patients’ right not to be harassed comes amid a spike in threats and violence against abortion providers.

The elimination of buffer zones around abortion facilities would not only make the scene around abortion clinics more dangerous; it could also prevent people from accessing abortion.
SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

Laurie Bertram Roberts is familiar with the scene outside the Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Jackson, Mississippi. She volunteered as one of the abortion clinic’s first patient escorts in 2013, putting herself between anti-choice protesters and the patients she guided into the building.

The protesters were often so close she could feel their breath on her neck, Roberts said. There were, after all, few legal protections keeping those seeking care safe from protesters.

“They want to be intimidating. They want the experience to be scary and shameful,” Roberts told Rewire.News. “What they do influences people’s behavior, and they know that. They want you to be uncomfortable. It’s all about power.”

Now, an anti-choice group is challenging a new Jackson ordinance protecting clinic patients and staff from harassment. The buffer zone ordinance, passed this month by the Jackson City Council, prohibits protesters from gathering within 15 feet of the entrance to any health-care facility, including Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the state’s only abortion clinic. The ordinance bans protesters from coming within eight feet of patients or staff, unless the person they’re approaching consents to receive a pamphlet.

The Mississippi Justice Institute filed a lawsuit in the Hinds County Circuit Court on behalf of the anti-choice group, Sidewalk Advocates for Life, claiming the ordinance violates the protesters’ rights to free speech.

“Our clients are engaging in quintessential free speech, and they are doing so peacefully and respectfully,” Aaron Rice, director of the Mississippi Justice Institute, said in a statement. “They care deeply for the unborn and feel morally led to offer life-affirming alternatives to people entering an abortion facility. Jackson’s new ordinance is an attempt to silence our clients’ speech, and we are proud to stand with them and defend their rights.”

In the six years since Roberts first volunteered as a patient escort, the anti-choice protesters outside the Jackson clinic have only escalated their tactics, often stepping into the road, blocking traffic, and creating chaos in the business district where the clinic is located. At the urging of the business community, the Jackson City Council passed the buffer zone ordinance in a 3-1 vote. Violations could result in a $1,000 fine or 90 days in jail.

“They have gotten away with a lot, and it’s chaotic for patients,” Roberts said. “There is no other medical procedure where people have to go through this. There are other procedures people may object to being done, but you don’t go through this.”

The challenge to Jackson’s buffer zone ordinance comes as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to consider a challenge to a similar ordinance in Chicago that prohibits protesters from coming within a 50-foot radius of a clinic entrance. The Chicago ordinance establishes a “bubble zone” around people entering and leaving a clinic, banning anyone from coming within eight feet without permission.

In 2014, the Supreme Court struck down a Massachusetts buffer zone law that banned protesters within 35 feet of an abortion clinic. Anti-choice activists challenging these ordinances say buffer zones infringe upon their free speech rights, but the goal of these laws is to protect patient privacy and safety, said Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues manager for the Guttmacher Institute.

“This is harassment and intimidation. This isn’t about free speech or having a marketplace of ideas,” Nash told Rewire.News. “Clinic violence is pervasive and ongoing. What we are talking about is protecting those going in and out of abortion clinics. In the last couple decades, patients, staff, and volunteers have been subject to harassment and violence.”

Abortion providers are facing unprecedented levels of violence and threats, according to the National Abortion Federation (NAF), which tracks incidents of disruption and violence against providers. From 2017 to 2018, NAF members reported a 78 percent increase in incidents of trespassing and acts meant to obstruct access to clinics.

The elimination of buffer zones around abortion facilities would not only make the scene around abortion clinics more dangerous; it could also prevent people from accessing abortion.

“Clinic violence furthers stigma,” Nash said. “We’re talking about people trying to do their jobs or access a health-care service. We have been seeing increases in violence, which leads to less understanding and more stigma, and can keep people from accessing services. People are so intimidated by what they see that they can’t even make it to the front door.”

Roberts said the anti-choice protesters in Jackson claim they are counseling patients on alternative choices to abortion. Roberts, who founded the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund in 2013 to provide financial and logistical support to people seeking abortion, said many callers opt to travel to surrounding states for abortion care in order to avoid the protesters.

“No one should be harassed for their personal health-care decisions,” Roberts said. “Abortion is legal and people are conducting their own personal, legal business. Abortion is a human right and abortion is health care. Free speech does not equal harassment.”

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2019/10/18/its-all-about-power-mississippi-anti-choice-group-targets-buffer-zone-ordinance/

Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel drew on real-life politics but has never been more prescient, writes Jennifer Keishin Armstrong.

A white, wide-brimmed bonnet and a red cloak have come to mean one thing: women’s oppression. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale seared this image into our souls with its depiction of a near-future dystopia in which women are forced into reproductive slavery to bear the children of the elite – and wear this uniform to underline their subservience. For more than three decades, the image has shown up on the covers of the book around the world, on posters from the 1990 film, in ads for the 2017 TV series, and even on real women at demonstrations for reproductive rights.

The handmaid we’re presumably seeing in most of these images, though we often don’t know for sure, is Offred, the tale’s narrator. As a handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, she must routinely submit to ritualistic sex with her commander, Fred. (Her name derives from the term “of Fred.”) She’s one of the still-fertile women rounded up for the job of reproduction after many women in the ruling class were rendered infertile by environmental toxins. Before a coup toppled the US government to form the new theocratic state Gilead, she was married to a man named Luke and had a young daughter.

The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985 to instant acclaim and success – it was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and the Nebula Award (Credit: McClellan and Stewart)

Atwood conceived the novel as ‘speculative fiction,’ a work that imagines a future that could conceivably happen without any advances in technology from the present. In other words, she said, “Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen.” Every aspect of the book was inspired by social and political events of the early 1980s, when she wrote it.

Margaret Atwood, aged 78, won the Man Booker prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin – other works of hers have been adapted for TV and film, such as Alias Grace (Credit: Alamy)

Because of this, Atwood’s novel has an eerie way of always feeling of the moment, as it turns out, from its first publication through every other iteration that has followed. When it debuted in 1985, Atwood even took newspaper clips to her interviews about the book to show her plot points’ real-life antecedents. The book mirrored the United States’ embrace of conservatism, as evidenced by the election of Ronald Reagan as president, as well as the increasing power of the Christian right and its powerful lobbying organisations the Moral Majority, Focus on the Family and the Christian Coalition – not to mention the rise of televangelism. The character of Serena Joy in The Handmaid’s Tale is a former televangelist who articulates theocratic policy suggestions that have now forced her, like all women, into a life solely at home: Atwood writes of Serena Joy, “She doesn’t make speeches anymore. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn’t seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.”

Atwood writes in The Handmaid’s Tale that African-Americans have been resettled to “National Homelands” in the Midwest

Though Atwood is Canadian and writing about a later time – Joyce Carol Oates, writing in The New York Review of Books, speculated the book was set around 2005 – she has said the commentary was aimed squarely at the United States of the 1980s, including the rising political power of Christian fundamentalists, environmental concerns, and attacks on women’s reproductive rights. The backlash against abortion in the US at the time included a widely distributed propaganda video called ‘The Silent Scream,’ a rash of abortion clinic bombings and arson cases and a proposed law that would give foetuses civil rights protections. The Reagan administration also broke with longstanding policy and declared that the US government would fund only international women’s health groups that promoted ‘natural’ family planning – that is, abstinence – in underdeveloped countries. As English professor SC Neuman wrote in a 2006 paper published in the University of Toronto Quarterly, “Offred, in short, is a fictional product of 1970s feminism, and she finds herself in a situation that is a fictional realisation of the backlash against women’s rights that gathered force during the early 1980s.”

Hulu’s TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale was the streaming service’s biggest hit to date and the series won best drama at the Emmy Awards in 2017 (Credit: Hulu)

Not everyone in the US government at the time even opposed apartheid in South Africa: future vice president Dick Cheney was against the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, while Senator John McCain voted not to divest from the South African government. Recalling the Bantustans of apartheid-era South Africa, Atwood writes in The Handmaid’s Tale that African-Americans have been resettled to “National Homelands” in the Midwest.

Puritanism and public policy

The Handmaid’s Tale is always discussed as a feminist warning of sorts, and has also been interpreted as a commentary on sexism in the book of Genesis. But some of what Atwood describes wasn’t merely speculation about the end result of the religious right taking power in the US but was based on what was happening elsewhere. Atwood says she was inspired in part by Nicolai Ceausescu’s preoccupation with boosting female birth rates in Romania, which led to the policing of pregnant women and the banning of abortion and birth control, not to mention the murders of dissidents by the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Philippines. The idea of ‘giving’ the offspring of lower classes to the ruling class came from Argentina, where a military junta seized power in 1976, subsequently ‘disappearing’ up to 500 children and placing them with selected leaders.

Elisabeth Moss plays Offred, the main character in Atwood’s story – the TV series now goes beyond the events of the novel, with its writers inventing new material (Credit: Hulu)

But American Puritanism is undoubtedly the central reference point in Atwood’s text – and she drew connections between what was happening in the US in the 1980s and the original Puritan colonists in 17th Century New England. “Nations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren’t there already,” Atwood wrote in The Guardian in 2012. “Thus… the USSR replaced the dreaded imperial secret police with an even more dreaded secret police, and so forth. The deep foundation of the US – so went my thinking – was not the comparatively recent 18th-Century Enlightenment structures of the republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of church and state, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-Century Puritan New England, with its marked bias against women, which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself.” Reagan himself referred to his dream of the US being a ‘shining city on a hill,’ coopting the term the Puritans had for their Massachusetts Bay colony.

Forever relevant?

Atwood’s book was a hit with critics and readers, but the film adaptation four years later was a dud. The production’s own difficulties showed how relevant it was: most studios wouldn’t consider putting out a movie that was so heavily female, and many major actresses were afraid of the radical material. The 1990 film version is a sometimes serious, sometimes sexed-up version that squandered the talents of stars Natasha Richardson and Faye Dunaway. German director Volker Schlöndorff envisioned it as a sexual thriller, an obvious misinterpretation of the original material. Richardson as Offred, was not only stripped of her agency – the script avoided voiceover, losing the urgency of the book – she seemed more objectified than ever. Reviews were mostly dismissive, and the film failed at the box office, too, making back only $5m of its $13m budget.

Atwood, who is from Canada, took inspiration from the logo of the Canadian laundry and cleaning products company Old Dutch for the handmaids’ bonnets (Credit: Old Dutch)

Since then, The Handmaid’s Tale has inspired a number of lower-profile adaptations and related works. Stage adaptations have been produced in the United States at Tufts University and for a UK tour. An opera by Poul Ruders premiered in Copenhagen in 2000, and was performed by the English National Opera in London in 2003 and by the Canadian Opera Company in 2004-05. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet offered up its interpretation of the story in 2013.

In June 2017 women wore outfits inspired by the TV series to protest restrictive new abortion bill in Ohio (Credit: Jo Ingles/Ohio Public Radio/TV Statehouse News)

It wasn’t until last year, when The Handmaid’s Tale premiered on Hulu as a television series adaptation, that the work got its pop cultural due. The show’s producers changed details to bring the series into the present day, including modern touchstones like Uber, Tinder, cappuccinos, and Craigslist in flashbacks to Offred’s pre-handmaid life. But the series felt all the more chilling because of the massive shift in US politics with the election of Donald Trump, who was inaugurated just three months before the series premiered. Suddenly, the book and series’ major flashpoints felt more possible than ever: a government declaring martial law after an attack by Islamic extremists, a regime that systematically eliminates gay people, a society that prioritises procreation (and subjugation of women) above all else. “[H]ow eerily prescient that the Republic of Gilead was established by a coup when Christian fundamentalists, revulsed by an overly liberal, godless, and promiscuous society, assassinated the president, machine-gunned Congress, declared a national state of emergency, and laid blame to ‘Islamic fanatics,’” Joyce Carol Oates wrote in a Handmaid retrospective in 2006. “As in Orwell’s 1984, the Republic consolidates its strength by maintaining continual wars against demonised ‘enemies.’”

Manx protestors donned Handmaid’s Tale inspired outfits in July 2017 to protest women’s lack of access to abortion providers in the Isle of Man (Credit: BBC News)

This all dovetailed with fears of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and his vice president’s anti-gay and anti-abortion beliefs. Handmaid costumes even became common at protests of laws intended to limit women’s reproductive freedom. The Women’s March inspired by Trump’s inauguration mirrored the TV series’ flashback scenes of women in the streets protesting the stripping of their rights.

The 1990 film version starring Natasha Richardson had the tagline ‘A haunting tale of sexuality in a country gone wrong’, suggesting it was more an erotic thriller (Credit: Alamy)

As The Handmaid’s Tale returns for its second season, it feels more vital than ever, even though the cultural landscape has once again shifted in a major way for women. Since the last series, the #metoo movement has taken hold, and Offred’s story is shifting with it. Without giving too much away about the second-season premiere, which goes, in some fashion, beyond the narrative in Atwood’s novel, Offred is now finding methods to take back her own power in the oppressive regime and seizing those moments in satisfying ways – not unlike women finding power in telling their own stories via #metoo and #timesup. Of course, this isn’t a coincidence; the producers of The Handmaid’s Tale series were aware of the changing women’s movement as they constructed this season.

Since the book’s release, The Handmaid’s Tale’s most quoted phrase has been the one scratched, presumably by Offred’s handmaid predecessor, in the wall of her room’s cupboard: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. It has become such a feminist rallying cry that many women have the phrase tattooed on their bodies. “Revellers dress up as Handmaids on Hallowe’en and also for protest marches – these two uses of its costumes mirroring its doubleness,” Atwood wrote for the Guardian. “Is it entertainment or dire political prophecy? Can it be both? I did not anticipate any of this when I was writing the book.”

The Handmaid’s Tale’s messages and iconography feel more applicable than ever today. But we always seem to be saying that about Atwood’s story. Will we be doing the same if yet another adaptation appears, three decades from now?

Source: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180425-why-the-handmaids-tale-is-so-relevant-today?fbclid=IwAR1wRU77hD59C4xNtoJqG_pNTGgaw2ac6S_mANVyGgfATcjlJIKOC32mn8E