Abortion – Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information

I wake up early and drive across St. Louis, Missouri, to the Planned Parenthood clinic in the Central West End one Saturday each month, rain or shine. I sign in, wave hello to the clinic staff, and slide on a neon-colored vest emblazoned with the words “Pro-Choice Volunteer” on the front. My only job that day is to walk with patients from their cars, into the clinic and back, to ensure their emotional and physical safety.

It’s because of this work that I fully support buffer zones, like the one up for a vote in St. Louis on Friday, March 2. Buffer zones provide a safe space for patients and staff to enter and exit clinics: an area where they can be free of harassment from people who have shown up to yell at them, demean them, and shove their anti-choice beliefs on them. And I’ve seen firsthand how big of an effect buffer zones would make on St. Louis clinics.

When I started volunteering for NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri’s clinic escort program (I now work at the organization as its communications and digital strategy manager), the Planned Parenthood at which I volunteered was the only clinic offering abortion services in the entire state, meaning patients were driving from all over Missouri—sometimes upwards of four or five hours—to access the constitutionally protected health care they needed, wanted, and deserved. Since then, two more clinics have opened, but additional barriers to access haven’t made obtaining an abortion any easier.

In addition to state-mandated restrictions on abortion such as medically inaccurate counseling and an unnecessary 72-hour waiting period, women face another intimidating barrier before they even walk into the clinic: protesters—the so-called prayer warriors and “sidewalk counselors,” all there in hopes of stopping patients from receiving the care they seek.

These anti-choice protesters show up every day of the week, but, on Saturdays in particular, they gather around the driveway and swarm the clinic. Since they’re not allowed inside the gated lot, this is the best they can do to get close to the patients.

Some protesters hold signs. Some stare at you, holding a rosary and whispering prayers to themselves. Some stand on stepstools so they can yell at patients and staff over the fence.

I’ve seen men yell at women and throw baby clothes at them. “You’ll always be a killer,” they shouted.

While the harassment at large is terrible, among the worst of it may be the “sidewalk counselors,” who wear vests that look like our clinic vests and hold up signs saying “Check-In Here.” In all of our Midwestern politeness, most cars stop in the driveway to check in, though of course all they will receive are pamphlets filled with anti-choice propaganda shoved through the window and an invitation to receive a free pregnancy test in a “crisis pregnancy center” RV parked across the street.

These fake clinics frequently pose as actual medical centers, even though they usually are not staffed by medical personnel; the anti-choice centers are simply fronts meant to provide a space to lie to women and convince them to carry a pregnancy to term. We don’t need people trying to deceive women at such a personal and vulnerable time in their lives.

Buffer zones have been shown to work in cities and states that have already enacted them. A 2013 survey from the National Abortion Federation of clinics found that 75 percent of clinics with a buffer zone reported that it improved ease of patient and staff access to the clinic.

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court protected a woman’s right to choose in its landmark Roe v. Wade ruling. We have a right to access abortion care, yet “sidewalk counselors” who believe they know our situations better than we do are allowed to deceive those seeking access to reproductive health care. It’s time we take action to protect women as they make a deeply personal decision, so they can take advantage of their constitutionally protected care free of harassment.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2018/03/01/st-louis-clinics-deserve-buffer-zone/

Mississippi lawmakers on Tuesday advanced a first-of-its-kind proposal to prohibit abortion care after the first trimester, as the Republican-controlled state Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee voted to approve the bill.

HB 1510, sponsored by Rep. Becky Currie(R-Brookhaven), would prohibit abortion care after 15 weeks’ gestation. The bill, which could receive a vote in the full GOP-majority state senate as early as next week, includes an exception in the case of a medical emergency or severe fetal abnormality.

The bill defines a medical emergency as an abortion necessary to save the life of the pregnant pregnant person if there is a “life-endangering physical condition” caused by the pregnancy or if carrying the pregnancy to term will “create a serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”

HB 1510 was passed February 2 by the GOP-controlled house in a 80-30 vote, with 12 Democrats joining the Republican majority and a single Republican joining the Democratic minority.

Gov. Phil Bryant (R) told Mississippi Today that if the 15-week ban is approved by the legislature, he will sign the bill into law. “As I have repeatedly said, I want Mississippi to be the safest place in America for an unborn child,” Bryant said. “House Bill 1510 will help us achieve that goal, and I am grateful the House passed it. I look forward to signing it once the senate follows suit.”

This is the first bill introduced in the United States that prohibits abortions after 15 weeks of gestation, and appears to be the first bill introduced as part of a legislative effort by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which aims to “eradicate Roe” and pass laws banning legal abortion at the state level.

ADF, a Christian legal advocacy firm classified as an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has typically focused legislative lobbying efforts on religious imposition laws.

Felicia Brown-Williams, Mississippi state director at Planned Parenthood Southeast Advocates, told Rewirethat the 15-week abortion ban is “unspeakably dangerous” for the women and families in Mississippi and a waste of taxpayer dollars.

“HB 1510 is part of a strategic attack on Roe v. Wade and a blatant attempt to chip away at women’s rights,” Brown-Williams said. “Mississippi legislators know that if it passes, HB 1510 will be the subject of a lengthy and expensive legal battle, with Mississippi taxpayers footing the bill. The thing is, they don’t seem to care.”

https://rewire.news/article/2018/02/27/unprecedented-abortion-rights-attack-moving-fast-mississippi-legislature/

A panel of male Republican lawmakers in Wyoming unanimously advanced legislation permitting death certificates for miscarriages, after hearing from nearly a dozen women who’d reportedly had miscarriages and opposed the bill.

The new certificates would apply to a nonviable birth, which the bill defines as an “unintentional, spontaneous demise of an unborn child” between nine and 20 weeks’ gestation.

Being offered such a certificate, a series of women testified in person and in writing, would make them feel a “range of emotions from awful to infuriated,” according to Better Wyoming, a progressive blog. But the five GOP committee members reportedly said they believed the death certificates, which are voluntary, would provide “comfort.”

The sponsor of the bill, state Sen. Brian Boner (R-Douglas), reportedly said the measure was inspired both by a friend and by a recent Florida law, which allows the state to issue “certificates of nonviable birth.” The advent of such certificates is rare, but growing. Idaho provides miscarriage certificates on a voluntary basis, and Arizona furnishes voluntary “fetal death” certificates.

The Wyoming bill is in the same vein as the “Unborn Infants Dignity Act,” copycat legislation by the anti-choice group Americans United for Life (AUL) that recommends states also issue death certificates in cases of abortion. But unlike the AUL legislation, the pending bill doesn’t include death certificates in cases of abortion.

Opponents of the Wyoming bill called it a veiled attempt to give legal rights to fetuses, as Better Wyoming reported. A Laramie OB-GYN estimated that 1,000 of her patients had lost pregnancies over the past decade, and she reportedly told lawmakers that not one had asked for a death certificate for the fetus. She suggested the bill could worsen the state’s shortage of doctors.

Under the Wyoming bill, the name of the “miscarried child” would be included on the certificate. Other options are “Baby Boy,” “Baby Girl, or “Baby,” along with the last name of the requesting parent.

Wyoming already allows certificates in cases of stillbirth, which is generally defined as a loss after 20 weeks.

Republicans control the state legislature and governor’s office. If the legislation clears both chambers and is signed by the governor, it would go into effect July 1. Last year, Gov. Matt Mead signed into law the state’s first abortion restrictions in nearly three decades.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2018/02/26/wyoming-gop-pushes-death-certificates-miscarriages/

The Arizona health department has issued draft rules requiring doctors to perform life support on a fetus in the exceedingly rare case that one is born alive during an abortion procedure.

Published this month, the proposed rules require clinics and hospitals that provide abortion care after 20 weeks’ gestation to be outfitted with equipment to administer oxygen, monitor heart functions, and perform neonatal resuscitation measures. After the procedure, staff must document whether a fetus was delivered alive, among other requirements.

Critics compared the draft rules to Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers(TRAP) laws, favored by anti-choice state legislators, that often have the effect of shutting down abortion clinics.

“They’re trying to make it impossible to provide care,” Kat Sabine, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Arizona, said of the proposed rules. “Honestly I don’t see a medical provider who’s not impacted.”

The new rules come out of Republican-led legislation in 2017, SB 1367, that was modeled on the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act from Americans United for Life, an anti-choice legislation mill. Passed in nearly half of U.S. states, the anti-choice legislation mandates an “affirmative duty of physicians to provide medical care and treatment to born-alive infants.”

A tiny fraction of “induced terminations” result in infant death, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An estimated 143 infant deaths occurred nationally between 2003 and 2014, and most involved pregnancy complications.

The Arizona Medical Association and American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Arizona opposed the GOP’s controversial “born alive” bill.

“Doctors take life saving measures if a viable infant is truly ‘born alive,’” the Arizona chapter of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said in a statement against SB 1367. “Before viability, resuscitation is not recommended by most doctors,” the statement noted.

Dr. Peter Stevenson, an Arizona neonatologist, said the standard of care for fetuses delivered before 22 weeks’ gestation is “comfort measures,” not resuscitation.

Even so, state Sen. Steve Smith (R-Maricopa), the bill’s sponsor, told Rewire last year that state and federal laws offered inadequate protection in the rare cases of infant death related to a termination. “All we’re saying is if this is happening, we want to make sure that the baby is taken care of,” Smith said.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) signed the legislation in March 2017. Now, the proposed rules will implement the new law in affected health-care facilities.

Abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation accounted for 1 percent of abortions in Arizona in 2016, according to the most recent figures from the state health department.

NARAL’s Sabine said she’s concerned about language in the draft rules striking a reference to “nationally recognized medical journals,” and replacing it with “peer-reviewed medical information.” She said the state was one of the first to push unproven abortion “pill” reversal, and fears the health department is trying “to get rid of scientifically and medically accurate information.”

“They want to keep pushing bunk science like abortion reversal … and ideology about care,” she said.

Written comments on the proposed rules can be submitted to the Arizona Department of Health Services.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2018/02/21/arizona-gop-trying-make-impossible-provide-abortion-care-new-rules/?utm_content=buffere26da&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

President Trump’s Friday morning address to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) included a series of conservative dog whistles lauding his administration’s regressive victories at the expense of reproductive health.

Trump cheered on his overhaul of the federal judiciary and piecemeal attacks on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare. But he failed to acknowledge their human cost. Here, Rewire accounts for it.

What Trump said:

“We’ve confirmed a record number—so important—of circuit court judges, and we are going to be putting in a lot more, and they will interpret the law as written.”

What’s really happening:

Trump and Republicans in the U.S. Senate have partnered to remake the federal judiciary in their anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ image. Leonard Steven Grasz, an abortion rights foe and “conversion therapy” ally, was “so far outside the judicial mainstream” that the American Bar Association rated him as “not qualified” to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, Rewire’s Jessica Mason Pieklo noted in an analysis.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) nevertheless pushed through Grasz and other radical nominees, including birth control benefit opponent Amy Coney Barrett, to the Senate floor for final confirmation. Senate Republicans have easily confirmed these nominees to lifetime slots on the federal bench, thanks to a rule change under the chamber’s former Democratic majority leader, Sen. Harry Reid (NV), who “nuked” the filibuster and allowed a simple 51-vote majority to confirm most presidential picks.

What Trump said:

“And we’ve confirmed an incredible new Supreme Court justice, a great man, Neil Gorsuch.”

What’s really happening:

Neil Gorsuch has broken with professional norms while advancing his far-right ideology in the time since he was confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court last April. Rewire reported on Gorsuch’s parade through small-town Colorado and his Trump Tower address to a conservative group funded by the Koch brothers and dark-money organization Donors Trust. The associate justice stands to do damage to civil rights in the current Supreme Court term’s cases, among them partisan gerrymandering, voter purges, union fees, immigrant detention and removal rights, and religious refusals to serve LGBTQ couples.

Trump had promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the court’s 1973 decision that established the right to abortion care until fetal viability. Conservative leaders worked with Trump and his senior advisers on Gorsuch’s nomination, per White House pool reports.

Those leaders included National Rifle Association Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre, a CPAC headliner who addressed the conference little more than a week after a mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school left 17 students dead, and Concerned Women for America CEO and President Penny Nance Young, who addressed a CPAC panel that revealed conservative divisions in anti-choice legislative strategy. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) then triggered the nuclear option to pave the way for Gorsuch’s confirmation with just 51 votes. (McConnell blocked President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, allowing Trump to later fill the open seat.)

What Trump said:

“I think we may be better off the way we’re doing it. It’s piece by piece by piece. Obamacare is just being wiped out.”

What’s really happening:

Trump and congressional Republicans repeatedly failed to repeal Obamacare and in doing so, also failed to defund Planned Parenthood, end the law’s birth control benefit, and ban abortion coverage even in private insurance plans. But all along, Trump’s virulently anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ federal agencies were waging a stealth regulatory war on health-care benefits and protections for women and vulnerable populations.

In October, Trump officials created broad exemptions for the ACA’s birth control benefit that guarantees no-copay contraception for some 62.4 million cisgender women and an untold number of transgender and gender non-conforming people.  And last month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services created a new health-care discrimination wing, complete with regulations bolstering its power to support health-care providers who don’t want to treat LGBTQ patients or provide reproductive health care, including contraception, miscarriage management, and abortion care. The office could, among other things, undermine the protections outlined by the ACA to protect LGBTQ patients.

After congressional Republicans were unable to defund Planned Parenthood through repealing Obamacare, HHS coordinated with a prominent hate group to undermine family planning access for people with low incomes, the majority of whom are women of color and women in rural areas.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2018/02/23/translated-trumps-top-cpac-dog-whistles-undermining-reproductive-health/

High-profile women at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) didn’t convey a unified strategy about how to pass anti-choice bills in the absence of a GOP supermajority in the U.S. Senate.

The four activists gave their input on Senate rules that have so far stood between them and their legislative victories during the late Thursday afternoon “Are Conservatives Serious about Defunding Planned Parenthood?” panel.The Senate’s 60-vote threshold in January stopped an unconstitutional 20-week abortion ban from advancing to a final vote and onto President Trump’s desk for his promised signature into law.

Triggering the “nuclear option” would get rid of the threat of a filibuster, or unlimited debate on an issue, and allow a simple 51-vote majority for a bill’s passage. Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) triggered the nuclear option to confirm most presidential picks, and current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) followed suit for U.S. Supreme Court justices.

McConnell has so far resisted President Trump’s calls to completely end the filibuster. Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ), the original lead sponsor of the 20-week ban passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, frequently criticized both the filibuster and McConnell. Franks, however, resigned in December when news broke that he had asked female staffers to bear his child via surrogacy, and other congressional Republicans haven’t expressed the same zeal for eliminating the filibuster.

The CPAC panelists had different takes on the filibuster in response to a question from the white nationalist publication Breitbart News.

Concerned Women for America CEO and President Penny Young Nance took a measured approach.

“I’m a survivor of the Obama years, and we stopped a lot of bad stuff [thanks to Senate rules],” Nance told the audience. “As much as I’d like to think that Republicans, and conservatives in particular, will hold the Senate forever—probably not. And so, I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer is. It’s a hard one.”

Nuking the filibuster was seemingly not a priority for Kelly Marcum, a government affairs office coordinator for the Family Research Council, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group.

“There’s frustration, but there’s also a lot of strategy obviously that goes on in those conversations about what merits that decision,” Marcum told the audience.

While Marcum said she shared the frustration that Breitbart News referenced in its filibuster question, she lauded McConnell’s “very useful, very strategic move” to bring up the 20-week ban, forcing red-state Senate Democrats to “have that negative vote on record” as they head into the midterm elections.

The strategy Marcum outlined doubled down on one that Susan B. Anthony (SBA) List President Marjorie Dannenfelser detailed to Rewire in 2017. The groups hope to increase Republicans’ Senate majority and end the legislative firewall between a nationwide prohibition on legal abortion care at 20 weeks, further eroding access as they work to do away with it entirely.

At CPAC, Marcum name-checked Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), falsely claiming that she high-fived Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) over her nay vote on the 20-week ban. Marcum also mentioned Sens. Claire McCaskill (MO) and Sherrod Brown (OH); both, along with Heitkamp, are targets of SBA List ad campaigns against the pro-choice Democrats in states that Trump won in 2016.

“We’re kind of just bringing these bills, and [the] Senate is putting these bills on the floor, so that we can actually get that bigger majority.”

That plan, however, could just as well backfire, according to a Rewire analysis following the failed Senate vote on the 20-week ban. Recent polling indicates that Democrats across the board could benefit at the ballot box from embracing abortion rights, rather than running from them.

Day Gardner, founder and president of the National Black Pro-Life Union and associate director of the National Pro-Life Center, was the only CPAC panelist to endorse nuking the Senate’s filibuster for the sake of immediate anti-choice victory.

“In understanding that you can’t get the 60 votes right now, my first thought was then, ‘Let’s just kind of go nuclear,’” Gardner said.

Americans United for Life President and CEO Catherine Glenn Foster didn’t remark on the filibuster.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2018/02/23/cpac-anti-choice-leaders-split-strategy-ram-restrictions/