PORTLAND, ORE. – The Oregon House has advanced a $10 million reproductive health care bill that would require all insurance companies across the state to cover abortions and a variety of other reproductive services at no cost to the patient — regardless of income, insurance type, citizenship status or gender identity.
The bill, dubbed the Reproductive Health Equity Act, now heads to the Senate after passing the House in a 33-23 vote Saturday — one of the last major contentious policies the Democratic majority is trying to get done before the 2017 legislative session ends in 10 days.
The bill would also allocate almost $500,000 during the 2017-19 budget period to expand cost-free reproductive health coverage, including abortions, to immigrants who are otherwise ineligible for insurance under the Oregon Health Plan — the state’s Medicaid program that currently spends nearly $2 million a year to pay for roughly 3,500 abortions statewide.
Other services that must be covered include birth control, vasectomies, prenatal and post-partum care, counseling for domestic abuse victims as well as screenings for cervical and breast cancer and sexually transmitted diseases. Insurers would be prohibited from shifting costs of those mandates to enrollees’ deductibles, coinsurance or copayments, although the bill offers some religious-based exemptions as well.
“When people are healthy, they’re able to work, able to care for their families and are spending less money on emergency services,” said Democratic Rep. Jeff Barker, one of the bill’s chief sponsors and a retired police officer. “This benefits them individually, but it also benefits the economies of our local communities … with less crime, less violence and less turmoil.”
Oregon already has among the most liberal abortion laws in the nation, which are absent of otherwise common requirements for waiting periods or spending limits on taxpayer funds, among others. The bill was drafted in early March as way to strengthen those existing policies largely in response to GOP leaders’ earliest attempts in Congress to repeal former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which includes minimum coverage requirements for birth control and other reproductive services.
Up until this past week, Oregon House Bill 3391’s momentum had stalled. It was one of several progressive policies that Democrats placed on hold as negotiations with Republicans over other unrelated matters remained fragile.
The proposal also faced push-back from Providence, a Catholic-sponsored organization that operates eight local hospitals and currently covers 260,000 Oregonians. Providence had threatened to pull out of the Oregon insurance market, saying the bill’s religious exemptions didn’t go far enough.
The latest version approved Saturday was adjusted accordingly. But House Republicans argued the religious exemption is still too narrow and almost exclusively applies to churches and religious nonprofits.
“If an Oregon employer chooses not to provide abortion coverage, that does not mean an Oregon worker is going to be denied access to reproductive care,” said Rep. Jodi Hack, a freshman Republican lawmaker. “Nothing prevents an Oregonian from seeking additional coverage if they feel the coverage options provided by their employer are inadequate.”
You have probably already heard a lot about the new Senate health care bill which, in addition to proposing massive cuts to Medicaid, promises to defund Planned Parenthood for one year due to the fact that they provide abortion services. You have probably read some of the endless media coverage of the proposed defunding: the New York Times declared that the issue is “bringing a decades-old debate over abortion to something of a climax, pitting powerful abortion rights groups, women’s organizations and medical associations against the wealthy religious organizations and anti-abortion groups that most Republicans lean on.” You may have called your senator about the bill. Perhaps you took to social media to post about why we need to support Planned Parenthood and abortion rights (and got in an argument with someone you went to high school with in the comments).
But, for a brief moment, let’s zoom out. Though constant (and sometimes violent) conflict over abortion rights is the norm in the US, it’s actually completely different from how the conversation around reproductive rights plays out in most other countries in North America and Europe. The “abortion wars” are a unique American cultural institution. Which begs the question: why?
Across North America and Europe, abortion is not just widely legally available — it also often attracts substantially less public comment of any kind. This isn’t to say that abortion law in these countries is always more liberal than the US: Northern Ireland continues to ban abortion except under threats to the mother’s life or permanent risk to her health, as per a 1861 law; Poland’s proposed abortion bans drew massive protests last year, and women can be prosecuted for having abortions under many circumstances in Mexico.
But by and large, the abortion debate plays out differently in these countries. No European countries have made major moves to defund abortion providers. British doctors have just asked for abortion to be totally decriminalized, and France’s National Assembly recently voted to penalize anti-abortion websites that pose as neutral sources but actually “exert psychological or moral pressure” on women to keep the pregnancy. Denmark is so pro-choice that information about how to get an abortion is found on the official website of the city of Copenhagen, and even hyper-conservative Italy — where abortion is legal in the first trimester but up to 70 percent of doctors refuse to perform one— is gradually legalizing medication abortion (aka “the abortion pill”) to give women more options.
And despite the fact that some Western countries have more restrictive abortion laws than the US, violence against abortion providers and attacks at abortion clinics is almost unheard of in other places.
So why is abortion such a hot-button issue in the US? The answer seems to be embedded in America’s unique cultural and historic baggage.
Why Does America Have More Anti-Abortion Violence Than Any Other Nation?
It should be noted that in America, white women have historically had very different experiences with reproductive rights than women of color. While white women’s reproductive lives were viewed as something to be regulated by laws or church decrees, women of color often had their reproductive lives controlled directly by the people involved in their oppression — for example, black female slaves who became pregnant were refused abortions by slave owner. Similarly, women of color have often had to fight for their right to become pregnant when they wish, in the face of state programs that forced them into unwanted sterilization and other road blocks to reproductive freedom.
And according to many historians, racist concerns about white supremacy fed much of the US’s early anti-abortion culture.
It might surprise you to know that, in the early part of America’s history, abortion for white women was largely seen as a private matter between a woman and her church, rather than something the law must deal with. A history of American abortion laws points out that the colonies initially adopted the abortion rules from their home country — for example, in Portuguese colonies, abortion was illegal, while in English colonies abortions were legal for white women if performed prior to “quickening” (the point where the woman can feel the fetus begin to move). Professor Leslie Reagan, in her history of American abortion, has pointed out that the first laws against abortion were actually attempts to control poisoning, because herbal abortifacients which were commonly available and widely advertised in the 1800s were totally unregulated and often dangerous to the women who took them.
In the 19th century, many white American antiabortion activists thought the problem with abortion was less about violating laws or committing a Christian “sin,” and more about trying to maintain high birth rates for white Americans.
In other words, white women were viewed as the ones most likely to be having abortions — and to racist anti-abortion activists, that made white dominance of American society vulnerable. The white fear of “becoming a race minority” in comparison to the children of slaves and immigrants of non-white background was massive in white American culture in the 19th century, and fears about abortion fed straight into it. It was part of a landscape of anti-miscegenation laws and other legal restrictions designed to make sure that white Americans retained privilege and non-white people had less political and social power. Racist fixations on white birth rates appeared in Europe as well, but in America, it was particularly vicious: it’s why Theodore Roosevelt famously declared that women of “good stock” who didn’t have kids were “race criminals.” Horatio R. Storer asked in 1868 whether the West would be filled with “aliens,” and declared, “This is a question our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.”
US Ideas About Sexuality Also Shaped Our Abortion Debate
According to many historians, US attitudes about sexuality (which often intertwined with racist thought) also played a huge role in the development of our abortion culture.
Gilda Sedgh, a principal research scientist with the Guttmacher Institute, told Foreign Policy that the difference between US and European attitudes towards abortion is tied to Europe’s “social acceptance of premarital sexual activity and contraceptive use.” And historian Anna M. Peterson argues that some of the difference stems from how white abortion-seeking women themselves were treated. By the late 1800s, “people in both Europe and the U.S.,” she writes, “had long expressed sympathy for women who had abortions and many believed abortions helped unfortunate women in difficult situations. American anti-abortionists instead put forth an image of women who procured abortions as frivolous and promiscuous.” She quotes the American Medical Association’s J. Milton Duff, who declared abortion in 1893 to be “a pernicious crime against God and society.” (It should be noted again, of course, that these attitudes of sympathy or concern were aimed almost exclusively at white women; women of color often found themselves subjected to eugenics-based efforts to control their reproduction).
White physicians were the big instigators behind the anti-abortion push in America in this period, but in the UK, people generally thought of abortion-seeking women differently. They characterized women who had them as “desperate and destitute,” victims of socioeconomic conditions instead of moral failings. (Other countries also saw it differently: Russia thought the rise of abortions in the 1890s was a product of capitalist excess, and the fight for birth control in France in the early 20th century was led by anarchists. Context, when it comes to abortion, has always mattered a lot.)
The Difference Between American & European Feminism Also Played A Role
American pro-choice feminism talked about women’s rights to control their own bodies — though, as Leslie Reagan has noted, a lot of early American feminists weren’t pro-abortion at all, or only accepted that the procedure might occur when women were abandoned by men or were “loose.”
By contrast, European feminist thinking framed the abortion debate in terms of “public health and humanitarianism,” arguing that legal abortion was necessary for every woman to have the best chance at health. Take, for example, the way in which people talked about abortion in Weimar Germany, from 1918 to the 1940s. “Abortion,” writes Weimar historian Cornelia Usborne, “would become superfluous in a society where inequality was abolished.” This is not to say that European, British, Australian, and other feminist activists working for abortion rights didn’t have a fight on their hands. Most countries have had their own internal squabbles about abortion’s legality and criminalization; but its unique status in American culture may also have been partially created by the moral framing of America’s attitudes.
The Religious Right’s Power In American History Changes The Narrative
Win McNamee/Getty Images News/Getty Images
The other big factor in the American abortion wars, according to historians, is Roe v Wade itself, and the kind of opposition it inspired. It was a big victory that created huge legal obstacles for anti-abortion activists, and so created a new kind of antiabortion movement. Professor Jennifer Holland, a gender and sexuality historian, has written:
As evangelical Christians became involved, the anti-abortion movement attained more political power and reach. Amanda Marcotte noted in Slate in 2013 that the religious right’s influence on the abortion debate in America was what really distinguished it, in the late 20th and early 21st century, from European abortion discussions. America’s very strong Christian right, with its focus on “family values,” has shaped American discourse with its use of political capital and resources. But it’s not the only factor.
When we look at the American abortion wars, what we’re really watching is the impact of several centuries of US history, including issues as diverse as the legacy of slavery and the development of American feminism, as well as issues like America’s high rates of violent gun-related crimes.
Which may make it make more sense — but doesn’t make it look, from an outside perspective, any less unreasonable.
But airport officials say it’s against their rules.
CLODAGH KILCOYNE / REUTERS
A woman protests in Dublin in March against Ireland’s harsh abortion restrictions.
One anti-abortion group in Ireland is taking a new approach to shaming women who try to access the procedure.
Because of the country’s extreme regulations on abortion, many Irish women are forced to travel to the U.K. for their procedures, making the expensive and difficult appointment all the more arduous to access. According to the BBC, more than 3,000 Irish women a year make the trip to the U.K. to get abortion care.
Now, the Irish Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (ICBR) has announced that it will protest at the Cork and Dublin airports, as well as in the Cork city center, with anti-abortion signage in an attempt to stop women from getting on the plane to have their appointments. This campaign is a part of the anti-abortion organization’s “Abortion Education Project.”
Representatives for ICBR told the Independent that the signs are meant to be “non-judgemental and non-polemical.”
“This Public Education Display will consist of medical images of aborted foetuses displayed on vinyl banners with brief, content-neutral, identifying captions,” ICBR said on Wednesday. “They are non-judgemental and non-polemical and offer no negative commentary concerning abortion, or the people who choose abortion, or the people who perform abortion.”
The group will also work with local crisis pregnancy centers, and try to convince women to seek support from a center instead of getting on their flights. Crisis pregnancy centers are known for using misleading tactics to convince women to keep their pregnancies, and recent research has found that when women decide to have an abortion, they are certain about the decision.
ICBR is planning the protest from July 29 to August 13, but airport officials in Cork and Dublin have both said that protests of any kind on airport property are not allowed.
However, the group still has every intention of protesting.
ICBR Director Jean-Simonis Engela told the Independent that he hopes the Irish police will protect ICBR’s freedom of speech.
“It is our hope that [the police] will do what they can to ensure that we, the volunteers, are free from unlawful interference with our Constitutional right to freedom of speech,” he said.
OG History is a Teen Vogue series where we unearth history not told through a white, cisheteropatriarchal lens.
In the 1950s and 1960s, major city hospitals in the United States admitted as many as 20 to 30 women a day for complications from illegal or self-induced abortions. Wealthy women could potentially fly to a country where abortion was legal, but poor and young women were faced with unimaginable fear, desperation, and judgment. Doctors would tell young women things like “You tramps like to break the rules, but when you get caught you all come crawling for help in the same way.” If a woman was able to find an abortion provider, the abortion was likely to be expensive, unsterile, and sometimes even done with the patient blindfolded.
The reality of life before the legalization of abortion is what makes the story of Jane so legendary. Jane was a group of extraordinary women who, as member Judith Arcana states, were “afforded the ability to do righteous work in the world and have that work be useful.” From 1968 to 1973 they helped a estimated 11,000 women receive safe abortions back when the procedure was illegal and often deadly, with the death rate for women of color receiving abortions significantly higher than that of white women.
“Jane” started with 19-year-old Heather Booth and a University of Chicago dorm phone. In 1965, Heather had helped a friend’s sister find a safe doctor to perform an abortion. Like with a viral word-of-mouth tweet, word spread that Heather was someone who knew an abortion doctor, and a few weeks later, someone else asked her for help. “I was living in a dormitory,” Heather explained in the documentary Jane: An Abortion Service, “so I told people to call and ask for Jane.”
Teen Vogue spoke to a woman who experienced a life-threatening pregnancy when abortion was illegal. We will call her Ann to preserve her anonymity. “I was 19 years old,” Ann says, “and completely desperate. It’s hard for people to image how horrible it was then and how desperate we were.” She explained the complications of her pregnancy, and the lack of access to appropriate, life-saving medical care. “The placenta was probably detached from my uterus; I just kept bleeding and bleeding. I would go to the emergency room, where every time they’d pack me with lamb’s wool and put me in the abortion ward. They should have given me an abortion to save my life, but they wouldn’t. Then one day I saw in the student newspaper a newspaper: ‘Pregnant, need help? Call Jane.'”
“If it hadn’t been for Jane, I would have died,” she says.
By 1968, Heather was receiving so many phone calls she realized that organization was needed, so she formed a group. In the early years of Jane, the women counseled, raised funds, screened underground abortion providers, and helped procure abortions for women who needed them in Chicago. The abortions were safe, but not always ideal.
“It was terrifying,” Ann says. “I had to stand on a corner, wearing a red sweater so they’d know who I was. It takes a huge leap of faith to trust that you can get a medical procedure outside a medical office. I can’t describe how scary it was. A Jane picked me up in a car and blindfolded me. I was taken to what seemed like a motel room. The doctor made fun of me. There was no anesthetic; it really hurt. I remained blindfolded for the whole abortion.”
In 1971, the Janes learned to do the abortions themselves. They were able to lower costs, and provide compassionate care for the women who saw them. It is estimated that they helped more than 11,000 women get abortions.
Despite legalization of abortion, and the end of Jane, underground abortions remained. Teen Vogue spoke to a woman we will call Carley about her involvement from 2000 to 2004 in a women’s health collective that learned to perform menstrual extractions.
“I was in a small women’s health group that started as a group of five friends opening up to each other about abortions we’d had. None of us had ever really talked about our experiences. I had read about menstrual extraction — a home health care technique used to empty the uterus of a late period. It used basically a canning jar, a tight rubber lid, a brake bleeder kit, and a particular kind of cannula [a sterile, stiff but flexible plastic tube with holes on either side],” she says.
“We wanted to learn to do it, but didn’t know how we ever would, so we mostly studied, gave workshops on consent, wrote zines about women’s health. We connected with other groups across the country doing similar work, and then someone met a midwife who had been doing menstrual extraction since 1965. She taught us the basics in one day. We met another group of young women who had been doing menstrual extraction on the West Coast of the U.S. from 1994 to 1998, and they added another day of training and gave us some supplies. We practiced on ourselves, and then started providing very early-term abortions to friends.”
From 2000 to 2004, the cost of abortions rose due to TRAP (targeted regulation of abortion providers) laws which forced abortion clinics to modify their buildings to comply with hospital structural standards (like really wide corridors) rather than outpatient standards, despite the fact that abortion is one of the safest medical procedures in the country. In Carley’s town, the doctor who performed abortions twice a week at the clinic volunteered all her time, but the cost was still prohibitively expensive. Carley’s group performed 12 abortions to friends who were able to undergo the procedure their own home, with their partner as a support if they chose. “We encouraged the women to find their own way to honor the pregnancy loss,” Carley says. “I think this is one of the benefits of having an abortion with a group of friends rather than at the doctor’s. Most women we worked with, even if they were very certain of their choice, had a lot of feelings accompanying the decision — and we provided space to be present with those feelings.”
Currently, a new underground and above-ground initiative is emerging: Plan C. The Plan C campaign is dedicated to making mifepristone and misoprostol available to women. These are the drugs in medication abortion that U.S. law requires a doctor to prescribe despite the fact that women in Mexico are able to purchase them over the counter. According to plancpill.org, the initiative is guided by the belief in a world “in which the ability to end an early pregnancy is in the hands of the person who needs it most.” By turning the tables on abortion being a choice between a woman and her doctor, and demanding instead that women have a right to make their own bodily decisions, the Plan C movement joins Jane in the belief that some laws are unjust and need to be confronted and resisted. In the 1960s, other people outside the Women’s Liberation Movement, which Jane was a part of, were trying to change abortion laws. Legal scholars, the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, and the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws were working within the system to challenge the constitutionality of antiabortion laws. It wasn’t, however, until the Women’s Liberation Movement began demanding that women be heard, marching, demonstrating, disrupting legislative hearings, and performing abortions themselves, that abortion rights gains were made.
There is no single way to fight for rights to abortion and reproductive freedom — activists rely on a diversity of tactics. Direct support, like volunteering as a clinic escort or defender, or organizing with the clinic to develop an abortion doula service are two possibilities. Following in the footsteps of Women’s Liberation, people could form a face-to-face group of friends and like-minded people to engage in deep learning and conversation; films like The Abortion Diaries, I Had an Abortion, and Jane: An Abortion Service are good conversation starters, as is the upcoming book Comics for Choice.
When we asked Ann what she had to say to today’s youth about Jane and the current state of abortion, she stressed that it was essential that we don’t go back to the way things were — and that we can’t, because today’s political climate is even worse in many ways than it was pre–Roe v. Wade. Jane was Chicago’s best-kept open secret. Today’s climate is in many ways more hostile. Already in 2017, 168 antiabortion bills have been introduced to state and federal legislators, including Oklahoma House Bill 1441, which would force a woman who wants an abortion to get the consent of the person who impregnated her. Violence and threats of violence against abortion providers are not uncommon.
How far to the right does the pendulum need to swing? Will it take the reversal of Roe v. Wadeand hundreds of women dying from illegal abortions for enough people to mobilize, strategize, and fight for our rights to abortion and reproductive freedom? While some may choose to work underground, and push the movement forward by reclaiming our own ability to perform abortions or demanding over-the-counter access to medical abortion, it is important that we all stay informed and join with national and independent abortion providers and activists. It is a historic moment, with more support for abortion rights than ever, but still lacking the kind of multi-tactical mass movement we need to swing the pendulum back in the direction of autonomy. Join the fight in whatever way you can.
Regressive gender politics are resurgent in 2017, as demonstrated by a Republican bill that would be devastating to women’s health
John Barrasso, Mitch McConnell, and John Cornyn: three of the men behind the Senate healthcare bill. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
A decade or two ago, the notion that 13 men would be plotting the fate of American women’s healthcare behind closed doors, that they would delight in defunding the women’s health organization Planned Parenthood and impeding healthcare access for millions of American women, would have felt like the politics of a bygone era.
The Democratic senator Kamala Harris told the Guardian the bill “is terrible for women”, while her New York colleague Kirsten Gillibrand has described it as “a cruel joke” and a “blatantly partisan attack on women’s health”.
But for many, it’s more than the substance of the bill that rankles. Specifically, it feels like a return to a kind of regressive gender politics they hoped had passed in America: a politics in which men make the decisions about what happens to women’s bodies.
“It’s outrageous that the future of healthcare for millions of women lies in the hands of 13 men,” Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, said. “It’s clear they don’t care about our opinion or our lives – because if they had asked us what we thought, we’d all be in a very different position right now.”
The Senate healthcare bill would increase the number of uninsured people in the US by 22 million, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, and is opposed by the American Medical Association on the grounds that it violates the Hippocratic oath.
It would also be particularly devastating to women’s health, in a number of ways. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate’s health committee, called it “nothing less than an attack on women’s health and rights”.
Harris said: “It blocks millions of women on Medicaid from getting care at Planned Parenthood. It allows states to stop requiring insurance companies to cover essential health benefits – like maternity care and birth control. Women in this country will not be silenced on this issue. We will only get louder.”
Under the Republican bill, women could pay as much as $1,000 more per month for maternity care, Murray told reporters in a conference call on Friday, and millions would lose access to even the most basic preventive care services at Planned Parenthood.
As Dana Singiser of Planned Parenthood put it on the call: “If we listed all the cruel things this bill would do we’d be here all day.”
Often the men who tout defunding Planned Parenthood seem to have no idea what the organization actually does.
Donald Trump signs the global ‘gag rule’, surrounded by men. Photograph: Ron Sachs / Pool/EPA
“Frankly, I am sick of coming down to the Senate floor to explain to Republicans what Planned Parenthood does,” Elizabeth Warren said in a recent statement posted to her Facebook page. “I am sick of explaining that it provides millions of women with birth control, cancer screenings, and STI tests every year. I am sick of pointing out again and again that federal dollars do not fund abortion services at Planned Parenthood or anywhere else.”
Because of the Hyde amendment, federal funding does not actually go toward abortion services, but to the other basic healthcare services Warren outlined, including life-saving cancer screenings and treatments.
It isn’t the first time in recent years she has had to explain to the men in charge of women’s healthcare how the largest US provider of reproductive healthcare operates. When the GOP mounted another effort to defund Planned Parenthood back in August 2015, she made a similar speech.
“Do you have any idea what year it is?” Warren asked at the time. “Did you fall down, hit your head, and think you woke up in the 1950s or the 1890s? Should we call for a doctor? Because I simply cannot believe that in the year 2015, the United States Senate would be spending its time trying to defund women’s healthcare centers.”
Perhaps she shouldn’t have been that surprised. For years, Republicans have worked to strip away women’s rights to make choices about their own bodies and more often than not, the efforts have been led by men. When Donald Trump signed the global “gag rule”, pulling US funding from any global organizations that so much as mention the word “abortion”, he did it flanked exclusively by white men in suits. A photo of President George W Bush signing a ban on a rare abortion procedure reveals yet another group of grinning, self-congratulatory men.
As Jill Filipovic, writing in the New York Times, has noted, in a way, men controlling women’s bodies is an election promise delivered. “At some point, we have to ask: Is this really a pattern of errors?” she writes. “Maybe these aren’t tone-deaf mistakes at all, but intentional messages to rightwing supporters.”
Warren seems to agree, at least with the notion that the bill is all about political messaging.
“Women come to the floor, we explain, we cite facts. But Republicans would rather base healthcare policy on politics than on facts,” she said recently, after the House speaker, Paul Ryan, called the bill “pro-life”. “Calling something pro-life won’t keep women from dying in back alley abortions; it won’t help women pay for the cancer screenings that could save their lives; it won’t help them take care of their families, have safe sex or afford their medical bills.”
Murray was even more sweeping in her assessment. “The moment we’re in right now is truly a pivotal one for women and women’s rights,” she told reporters Friday, adding that for every woman and everyone who cares about their access to healthcare, now is the time to fight back.
“Those 13 men cutting backroom deals about your healthcare access clearly didn’t want to hear from you, so make sure they do now,” she said.
I was about two weeks into my sophomore year at the University of Vermont and about 10 weeks into my first pregnancy when my friend Nancy Early picked me up in her red Fiat Spider and drove me to the Vermont Women’s Health Center on North Avenue in Burlington, Vermont. Nancy held my hand while a woman with a kind manner and a VWHC “Health Advocate” button narrated my abortion, sounding like voiceover for the world’s most compassionate nature documentary. After, I felt tired. I felt relieved. And I felt grateful that my abortion was safe and legal and, oddly, a familial legacy. Today—as the Trump administration defunds Planned Parenthood, states chip away at abortion access, and the U.S. Supreme Court tilts conservative—this legacy feels imperiled.
Abortion became legal in the United States with Roe v. Wade in 1973, but Vermont had legalized abortion almost exactly a year earlier. In January 1972 Beecham v. Leahy & Jeffords, a court case brought specifically to challenge Vermont’s 1846 law criminalizing abortion, came before the Vermont Supreme Court, who found on the part of Beecham. This decision made the existing abortion law unconstitutional on the grounds that it held doctors who provided abortion—but not the woman getting one—criminally responsible. (New York State had decriminalized abortion, the first U.S. state to do so, in 1971.)
A group of Vermont women thought that it wasn’t enough that abortion was now legal. They wanted a place that could offer safe abortions, and they wanted to put it in place before anyone could register opposition. As the Supreme Court was deciding Beecham, about 20 Vermont women started to meet clandestinely, and by March 1972 the Vermont Women’s Health Center, the country’s first free-standing, women-run health clinic, opened in Colchester. Though the VWHC merged with Planned Parenthood in 2001, its importance to Vermont women—including me—is indisputable.
My mom, Jennifer Kochman, and her mother, Helen Lyon King, who died in 1983, were two of the founding members of the VWHC. “This small group of women got together,” my mom remembers, “and they said, ‘OK, what do we need to do in order to provide this service for Vermont women?’ They had the connections. They had the know-how. They knew which bank to go to.” My mother recalls that the president of a local bank quietly gave the group a loan for $30,000. Sister Elizabeth Candon, a secretly prochoice nun in the order of the Sisters of Mercy, sat on the board. Two doctors were corralled from the local hospital. A space was found under a kinesiologist’s office in a nondescript cement building. It was all very DIY, almost as if these women willed the VWHC into being.
One of the groundbreaking reproductive rights clinics, the VWHC presented a model for other clinics. My mother remembers being at a wedding in Portland, Oregon, in 2001, and meeting an ob-gyn who, hearing my mom was from Vermont, exclaimed, “We studied how you all got that going!” While VWHC was the first, it wasn’t the only one. Renee Chelian, who had an illegal abortion in the mid-1960s, founded Northland Family Planning Center in Detroit in 1976. Whole Woman’s Health, a feminist-run group of clinics in multiple states, got its start in 2003. Trust Women LLC, an abortion provider in Oklahoma, took over after the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an antiabortion extremist in 2009, operating in his very building since 2013. And organizations like Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project, founded in 1991, help women across America get access to clinics, abortions, and contraceptives. All of these places, including the VWHC, have found themselves under attack from people who want to keep women from accessing their services.
So the VWHC wasn’t the last, but it was the first—and it happened very, very fast. Vermont lawyer and activist Sandy Baird, another VWHC founding member, still marvels at the speed of the clinic’s opening. “We all formed committees, we formed the board, we hired a couple of doctors, and we rented a space and we opened,” Baird says, “That’s really how it happened.” It’s something that’s hard to imagine today. For one thing, while most voting adults continue to support legal access to abortion, the political climate has changed—for example, Trump reinstated the Global Gag rule, the House voted to defund Planned Parenthood, and there’s increased state laws aimed to restrict abortion, such as the Texas law that mandates aborted fetal tissue be burned or cremated. For another, it’s harder to keep a secret in the information age.
It was a sanguine thing to do, slipping a full-fledged abortion clinic into the slender weeks between one law’s being overturned and the drafting of a potential new one. “We wanted to get a clinic in place, so that people could see that this is not scary, that abortions could be carried out in a healthy way, and people aren’t going to be dying,” my mother recalls. “The goal, for us, for me, and for what we wanted was to make abortion healthy, legal, safe, and rare.” Baird seconds my mom’s assessment, saying, “We didn’t do it openly so there would be no real attack at first and we would be able to get together.”
Abortion opposition had to play catch-up, and they did, trying to gain an upper hand to the control they’d lost as the VWHC opened its doors. “The backlash happened almost right away by those institutions that want to control women’s reproductive lives,” Baird says. By the time that the November 1972 election rolled around, the township of Colchester had put a ballot initiative outlawing all unlicensed clinics; it failed. After that, the effort went statewide. Throughout the 1970s and into the ’80s, Republicans in the Vermont House repeatedly introduced laws that would limit abortion, eliciting reactions from the many vocal liberal Democrats that were shaping the state’s electorate. My grandmother was one of these vocal opponents.
“I feel that there is for every woman that point beyond which one pregnancy is one too many,” my grandma testified before the Vermont House Health and Welfare Committee in 1975. “A woman may reach this point at the seventeenth pregnancy, thirteenth pregnancy, third pregnancy, or even the first pregnancy.” There is no existent recording of my grandmother’s testimony on bill H.25, just one of many failed Republican initiatives to limit abortion in Vermont. I imagine my grandma’s voice to be quiet yet precise; I see her body tense and determined. “I am grateful to the obstetrician who made it possible for me to not continue a fifth pregnancy,” her testimony reads. “I was one of the lucky ones. I could afford good medical care, and my doctor recognized that I have a choice of whether to have one more baby or not.”
My grandmother’s illegal abortion was the best possible kind. In the mid 1950s, she suspected she was pregnant and visited her doctor. He took a look at her, saw an unhappy woman with four kids struggling to make ends meet on her husband’s social worker salary, and performed an illegal, compassionate D&C on the spot. “In a very matter of fact way,” my mom remembers, “she said it was a blessing that he just accepted her dilemma and helped her.” My mother grew up, never learning of her mother’s illegal abortion until my grandma chose to testify. “I think she felt it was a private decision,” my mother says, “a decision between her and her doctor.” Today only Vermont, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., have no legal restrictions on abortion. And there’s no abortion law at all in Vermont, which could be a problem if the state ever shifts from blue to red.
Choice is integral to my family history. Choice, somewhat ironically, affords me the ability to write this story. See, when I got pregnant at 18, abortion was legal; when, in 1962, my mother got pregnant at 18, it was not. My grandmother, a social worker at a Chicago-area unwed-mother’s home, pressed my mother to give me up for adoption. Visiting the home, my mother asked, “What is this like, when you give up your baby? Can I spend a couple of days with my baby and just get to know him/her?” She was told that “it’s best not to bond with the baby” and that the adoption agency took the baby right away.
She decided to keep her child, despite her mother’s pressure. “I already was attached,” my mom says. She married my biological father; then she divorced him when I was about six months old, raising me as a single mother for the next seven years. “I felt strongly that a person ought to have a choice,” says my mom when she reflects on being a young, unmarried, and pregnant college student. Had abortion been legal in 1962 when my blonde, skinny mom got pregnant, maybe I wouldn’t be here. Maybe I would—even my mom isn’t sure what her decision would have been. Because of my mom’s decision, I am here now, writing this article about my grandmother’s choice, my mother’s choice, and my own.
A ruling that Northern Ireland’s restrictive abortion laws breach human rights in certain cases was overturned by a Belfast court on Thursday, the same day Britain pledged to fund terminations for Northern Irish women who travel to England.
Unlike in other parts of the United Kingdom, abortion is banned in Northern Ireland unless the life or mental health of the mother is in danger. Women can be jailed for life, as can doctors who perform abortions.
In a landmark ruling in 2015, Belfast’s High Court found that the laws breached the European Convention on Human Rights by failing to provide exceptions in cases of fatal foetal abnormality or sexual crime.
Belfast’s Court of Appeal quashed that ruling on Thursday following a challenge by Northern Ireland’s justice department and attorney general, concluding that abortion legislation should be a matter for Northern Ireland’s provincial assembly.
The board of the non-governmental Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIRHC), which brought the original case, said they plan to lodge an appeal to the British Supreme Court in London.
“We first raised this issue in 2013 and remain as concerned today in 2017 that the law as it stands does not protect women and girls right to be free from torture and inhuman and degrading treatment,” NIRHC Chief Commissioner Les Allamby said in a statement.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court narrowly upheld a ban on Britain’s National Health Service funding abortion care in England for women from Northern Ireland, out of “respect” for the decisions of the region’s assembly.
That prompted Britain’s opposition Labour Party to propose an amendment to Prime Minister Theresa May’s new legislative programme, calling for women from Northern Ireland to have access to free abortions in England.
Just as in the Republic of Ireland, where the law is equally strict, thousands of women travel to Britain from Northern Ireland every year for abortions.
To avoid a potential defeat on the amendment, which had support among May’s Conservative lawmakers, finance minister Philip Hammond said London would “fund abortions in England for women arriving here from Northern Ireland”.
The leader of Northern Ireland’s Alliance Party described the move a “helpful measure” but not a solution, as women would still have to travel and face financial costs while Northern Ireland continued to “export” the issue.
“We have got to find a solution which is respectful of the sensitivities of our society but at the same time respectful of the fact that women have to be given some degree of control over their own fertility rights,” Naomi Long told reporters.
The Government is heading off a possible defeat on the issue at the hands of Labour
The English NHS will provide free abortions for women visiting from Northern Ireland, the Government has announced.
Chancellor Philip Hammond announced the policy change in the House of Commons after Labour proposed an amendment to the Queen’s Speech that would have forced the change.
The amendment, proposed by MP Stella Creasy, was picked for a vote later today – and was expected to be backed by some Tory backbenchers.
Many hundreds of Northern Irish women make the journey across the Irish Sea to Great Britain to have abortions because of the province’s restrictive laws.
There, terminations are illegal in almost all cases, even when a woman has been impregnated through rape or incest.
The forced move is likely to annoy the Conservatives’ newfound allies in the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), who are staunchly anti-abortion on religious grounds.
But the Tories minority government status means that even with DUP votes the Government is vulnerable to rebellions by just seven of its own MPs if opposition parties gang up against it.
The latest episode could be a prelude of the difficulties that Conservative whips will face passing legislation in the coming parliament – a hurdle reflected in last week’s threadbare Queen’s Speech, which was stripped of most major Tory manifesto promises.
More than 100 MPs backed the amendment tabled by Ms Creasy demanding that Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, acts.
UK taxpayers are currently being denied access to abortion services in England and Wales, which is a matter for English and Welsh MPs to decide,” Ms Creasy told The Independent.
Women from Northern Ireland – where abortion is illegal, except in very rare circumstances – typically pay £1,400 for a private termination in England, Scotland or Wales.
Official figures show 726 Northern Irish women paid for the operation last year, but the true figure is thought to be higher, because others gave a false address on this side of the Irish Sea.
Equalities Secretary Justine Greening said this afternoon that the move would be funded from the Government Equalities Office so that “no English health service user is disadvantaged as a result of the change”.
The Health Secretary had previously said a “consultation” about scrapping the charges was underway but there was confusion after Department of Health officials played down Mr Hunt’s claimed.
In the Commons, former Conservative Cabinet minister Maria Miller signalled her support for the amendment when she labelled the current access to abortion in Northern Ireland as “wrong”.
“The High Court has ruled this law contravenes human rights law – which is a responsibility of the UK Government, not a devolved matter,” Ms Miller said.
In reply, Commons Leader Andrea Leadsom said it was “an incredibly sensitive and important issue” which the Government was “discussing and looking very closely at”.
The Chancellor announced the change in the House of Commons on Thursday afternoon (Getty Images)
Under the terms of confidence and supply agreement, the DUP must vote in favour of the Queen’s Speech, even if abortion amendment is passed.
However, it does not appear to be a deal breaker for the Northern Ireland party. One of its MPs, Ian Paisley Jnr, agreed whether to provide free terminations was a matter for Westminster.
Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that Northern Irish women are not entitled to receive free abortions in England.
However, two of the justices said the current situation, nonetheless, breaches women’s rights – piling pressure on the Government to act.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt decision, a landmark reproductive rights case which pro-choice advocates believe reaffirmed women’s rights to a safe and legal abortion. But instead of being in a celebratory mood, we have to admit that the possibility of losing our abortion rights in the Trump era is looking higher and higher.
Anti-choice politicians across the country are passing laws restricting abortion left and right, with little regard for women’s autonomy. And so-called “pro-life” advocates sure aren’t backing down, employing new strategies that include a softer lens on their beliefs and a batch of fresh millennial faces.
If the abortion apocalypse is nigh, what can we do to stop it? Well, there’s plenty: You can make donations and volunteer with pro-choice organizations; you can go out and protest; and you can cast your vote for pro-choice politicians the next time a local or national election comes around.
But there’s also a small action you can take every day to remind lawmakers that women’s rights are human rights: contact your representatives.
Ahead, we break down exactly how to do that and list the elected officials you should be calling. The time to fight for our reproductive rights is now.
First, find your representatives and their contact info
If you don’t know your elected officials at the state level, this is the time to find out. Go to this guide, which will direct you to your state assembly or legislature’s website. From there, you can navigate the page to identify your representatives. And if you want the contact information for your governor, check this website.
To find out who represents you in Congress, you can input your zip code below.
You can also go to the House and Senate’s official websites to input your zip code or state and find out who represents you. Once you have the names of your elected officials, you can find their contact information in this House directory and this Senate directory.
If for some reason you lose their numbers, make sure to remember two crucial things: Their names and this phone number, 202-224-3121. That line will direct you to the Capitol’s switchboard. Once you speak with an operator, you can ask them to connect you with the office of your representative.
Time to pick up the phone
Look, we know there are plenty of alternatives to contact your representatives. You can always send them an email, a tweet, or even an old-school letter. But the truth is that they respond better to pressure from phone calls; it’s a quicker way to tally up support, and it’s the most difficult to ignore. Plain and simple, they can overlook the build-up of tweets, emails, and letters, but they can’t ignore a barrage of phones ringing without losing their mind a little bit.
It’s very likely that a legislative assistant will be the one to answer the phone. They’ll ask you whether you need a response, but it’s better to say you don’t. It will save everyone time, because they won’t need to add you to a response database.
Make sure you’re clear about what issue you’re calling about. The reasons why you support or oppose certain topics are, frankly, irrelevant. Getting straight to the point makes things better for everyone involved, including those who are waiting in line for their calls to be picked up.
So, what do I say?
My dear friend, we’re here to make your life much easier. Below, we have two scripts you can modify and follow.
First, let’s say you’re in a place like Missouri, where the state House passed sweeping legislation restricting abortion access. The Senate is currently working on the bill’s revisions, so this is the perfect time to call. Here’s what you could say:
“Hello, my name is Mary Williams. I’m a constituent from St. Louis County, zip code 63001. I don’t need a response. I am opposed to the Senate Bill 5 and I strongly encourage the senator to please oppose this devastating bill. Thank you!”
“Hello, my name is Jane Smith. I’m a constituent from New York, zip code 10001. I don’t need a response. I am opposed to the Better Care Reconciliation Act and the defunding of Planned Parenthood. I strongly encourage the senator to please vote ‘no’ on this bill. Thank you!”
You can modify these scripts when calling everyone from your mayor to your senators about any issue.
Who should I prioritize?
Congress can do plenty to restrict abortion access, especially now that the Republican Party controls both chambers, but the reality is that the real damage is being done at the state level. As long as Roe v. Wade is in place, anti-choice state lawmakers can keep pushing restrictions and trying to regulate abortion before the point of fetal viability.
Bills that could either help or hurt abortion access are being discussed in the following states at the moment: Missouri, Rhode Island, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. If you live there, you should call your state representatives. For a complete database of pending abortion legislation, click here.
And if you oppose the Senate healthcare bill, there are certain GOP senators you should prioritize, as they’re on the fence about the legislation. If you live in their state, call: Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Shelley Moore Capito (W. Va.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Dean Heller (Nev.), Bill Cassidy (La.), Rob Portman (Ohio), Ted Cruz (Tex.), Mike Lee (Utah), Ron Johnson (Wis.) and Rand Paul (Ky). But if your representative isn’t listed, it doesn’t hurt to call your senators and tell them to oppose the bill.
Whether you contact your elected officials about local abortion laws or national legislation, it’s important to remind them there’s plenty of data proving most Americans support abortion access in some capacity. It’s time to get with the times and let women decide what’s best for them, full stop.
Move’s proponents argued decision is a medical one, not criminal – but opponents said decriminalisation may put vulnerable women at risk
Protesters march in support of legal abortion in Northern Ireland, and against a Tory coalition with the DUP, earlier this month Reuters
Abortion should be decriminalised, medics at the British Medical Association (BMA) have said.
Delegates at the BMA’s annual meeting in Bournemouth voted in favour of a motion calling for a change in the law.
This means the BMA will adopt this stance as formal policy and lobby ministers for a change in legislation.
At present the law permits abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy. But if there is a substantial risk to the woman’s life or foetal abnormalities, there is no time limit.
Two doctors must ensure that the requirements of the Abortion Act are met before an abortion can take place.
The topic received heated debate among the 500 medics at the meeting.
Some medics said that abortion is a medical decision and not a criminal one. They said a change in policy supports the rights of women.
But others raised concerns about decriminalisation putting vulnerable women at risk, sex-selective abortion and professional regulation.
Dr John Chisholm, chairman of the BMA’s medical ethic s committee, said that the motion was not about time limits, saying that the BMA supports current time limits on abortion.
Dr Coral Jones, who presented the motion, said: “We must respect women and have trust in women to make decisions for themselves and their families.”
The BMA said criminal sanctions for abortion should be abandoned but it should be regulated in the same way as other health procedures.
One delegate, Sarah Johnson, questioned whether it would be regulated in the same way as hip replacement or lip fillers – a cosmetic procedure not subject to stringent medical regulation.
The BMA said limits could still be set, but subject to professional and regulatory sanctions.
Other criminal laws which apply to other aspects of care would continue to apply to abortion – for instance supplying abortion drugs without a prescription would be a criminal offence under the UK-wide Human Medicines Regulation 2012.
Dr Chisholm added: “Abortion is currently a crime, with exceptions, throughout the UK. Following the debate the majority of doctors were clear that abortion should be treated as a medical issue rather than a criminal one.
“What must be clear is that decriminalisation does not mean deregulation. The debate today and the BMA’s new policy only relate to whether abortion should or should not be a criminal offence; the policy does not address the broader issue of when and how abortion should be available.¸
Speaking after the debate, Dr Clare Gerada, former chairwoman of the Royal College of GPs who is also a trustee of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (bpas), said: “Abortion is never an easy thing to do for any woman or for any man. But for abortion to be governed by criminal law rather than governed by healthcare regulation is nonsense.
“I think this is as powerful and as important as the 1967 Abortion Act. This will start now putting abortion where it really should be, which is regulated by healthcare and then improving women’s access to it, improving contraception and removing sanctions for women who might or might not buy their medicines online.
“BMA doesn’t make law but the BMA is a very powerful voice for doctors and it’s a very powerful voice for people of this country.
“And to be able to say that the BMA fully supports the decriminalisation of abortion I think is a very, very, very powerful voice to have.
“For the BMA to be coming out absolutely overwhelmingly for the decriminalisation of abortion, I think now politicians will have to stand up and listen and actually take action.”
She said she suspects that following the vote there would be a Private Member’s Bill put to the House of Commons.
In March, a Bill was introduced at the Commons calling for abortion to be decriminalised up to 24 weeks.
Former shadow health minister Diana Johnson introduced the Reproductive Health (Access to Terminations) Bill in a bid to get rid of “Victorian” abortion laws which contain criminal sanctions for both women and doctors if they do not meet certain requirements.
The Bill, which called to remove criminal sanctions in England and Wales and place regulation with professional bodies, received its first reading in March.
After gaining traction among MPs, it was scheduled for a second reading in May but Parliament was dissolved ahead of the General Election so the Bill fell.
Last year the Royal College of Midwives came out in favour of abortion being removed from criminal law.
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Protesters march in support of legal abortion in Northern Ireland, and against a Tory coalition with the DUP, earlier this month 
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