Abortion – Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information

The Trump administration had one job on Wednesday: to deliver John Roberts’ vote for onerous abortion restrictions.

Pro-choice advocates rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court during arguments in June Medical Services v. Russo.
SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

There is no good reason why U.S. Deputy Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall should have been defending a Louisiana abortion restriction at the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday, but there he was.

And his participation in oral arguments in June Medical Services v. Russo shows that the Trump administration has few priorities of greater significance than eroding abortion rights whenever and wherever it can.

June Medical Services involves a challenge to Act 620, a Louisiana law that mandates abortion providers maintain admitting privileges at hospitals within 30 miles of the clinic where they provide abortions. Attorneys from the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) challenged Act 620 on behalf of providers in the state, while the Louisiana solicitor general’s office has defended the law for the five years the litigation has been pending.

Yet on Wednesday, Louisiana Solicitor General Elizabeth Murrill stepped aside after 20 minutes of defending Act 620 so that Wall, on behalf of the Trump administration, could do the same.

There are two central issues the Supreme Court must answer in June Medical Services. First, do abortion providers have legal standing to challenge certain types of abortion restrictions? And second, did the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals get it wrong when it ruled Act 620 could take effect?

First the qualified good news: It appears that there aren’t five votes on the Supreme Court to rule that abortion providers can’t sue on behalf of their patients in cases like this. Justice Samuel Alito was the most focused on the standing question, aggressively questioning attorney Julie Rikelman from CRR. That suggests that at least he is willing to upend over 40 years of case law holding abortion providers have legal standing to challenge abortion restrictions on behalf of their patients.

But are there the five votes needed to actually reverse that precedent? That’s unclear. Neither Justice Neil Gorsuch nor Chief Justice John Roberts asked a question related to standing during Wednesday’s arguments. In fact, neither Justice Clarence Thomas nor Gorsuch asked a single question during the entire hour of arguments.

But Roberts’ silence on the standing issue was the most curious. Gorsuch is unlikely to veer from his fellow conservatives in June Medical Services, including on the question of provider standing. And Roberts is considered somewhat of a standing hawk. During his time as chief justice, Roberts has consistently voted to limit legal standing, so it’s reasonable to think he’s at least tempted to do the same in June Medical Services.

“This case is about respect for precedent,” Rikelman said as she opened her argument for ruling against Louisiana’s anti-abortion law.

That respect for precedent includes the precedent of third-party standing in abortion cases. As Justice Stephen Breyer noted, the Supreme Court has recognized the rights of abortion providers to sue on behalf of their patients in at least eight cases. A vote against standing in June Medical Services is a vote against precedent. It’s a vote for a radical reinterpretation of abortion rights law that might be too much for Roberts to endorse in this case.

That’s especially true when the Supreme Court could end up crafting a decision that effectively guts the other precedent at issue in this case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. That brings us to the bad news portion of Wednesday’s arguments, since the results of such a decision would be disastrous, for both Louisiana and abortion access nationwide.

In 2016, the Supreme Court struck as unconstitutional parts of a Texas admitting privileges law identical to the Louisiana law at issue in June Medical Services. In upholding the Louisiana requirement, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in September 2019 ruled that Whole Woman’s Health is basically limited to the facts and circumstances of Texas. The effect of that decision is to make it functionally impossible to strike as unconstitutional entire categories of abortion restrictions—a point Justice Brett Kavanaugh picked up on during his only line of questioning Wednesday.

Does Whole Woman’s Health mandate that all admitting privileges requirements are unconstitutional, or is it possible that those medically unnecessary requirements could be unconstitutional in one state, but constitutional in another?

The answer to this question also rests with Roberts, his fidelity to precedent, and his willingness to accept the mountain of lies Louisiana served up in defense of Act 620. In Whole Woman’s Health, the Supreme Court found that admitting privileges laws serve no medical benefit and that the rule would force many clinics to close, substantially burdening abortion rights. The Supreme Court declared the Texas requirement unconstitutional, but did that decision declare all admitting privileges requirements unconstitutional? We’ll find out that answer when the Court releases its decision later this year.

And it’s the chief justice’s potential pliability in this case that best explains Wall’s participation in oral arguments Wednesday. We all know the Trump administration is vehemently anti-choice. Trump campaigned on a promise to appoint judges that would overturn Roe v. Wade, and he’s made good on that promise. It’s not uncommon for the U.S. Department of Justice to weigh in on cases when it’s not a party.

But it’s not routine. So we should ask why this case and why now.

We should ask why the DOJ is also chiming in to defend other state-level abortion restrictions like Ohio’s abortion ban. In that case, the Trump administration said it wants to participate in oral arguments and help defend Ohio’s ban because “the United States has an interest in the scope of the Supreme Court’s undue-burden standard applied in the context of abortion regulations and has participated in cases involving state abortion laws.”

That statement signals we should expect to hear more from the Trump administration as litigation challenging extreme abortion bans works its way through the federal courts.

On Wednesday, Wall was before the Supreme Court to get the justices used to the fact that they will likely be hearing a lot from the Trump administration on abortion rights in the coming years. Wall played cleanup for Murrill, making a substantive defense of Louisiana’s law and attacking the rights of abortion providers. But he was making that argument almost exclusively for Roberts’ benefit. Wall told the justices that they could rule in favor of Louisiana without overruling Whole Woman’s Health, giving a nod to the lingering concern Roberts may have about the damage his reputation would take if the Supreme Court reverses course on abortion rights after less than five years.

Wall told the justices that this was the first time the Court had been faced with the kind of allegations of conflicts of interest between abortion providers and patients like the kind lobbed by Louisiana and anti-choice activists here. That gives the justices a fresh opportunity to revisit legal standing precedent, Wall said, again speaking almost exclusively to Roberts.

Wall added nothing substantive to Wednesday’s arguments. His job was all political—to deliver the chief justice’s vote for anti-choice activists and to make it clear that the Trump administration would spare no resource in attacking abortion rights. We’ll know later this summer if it worked.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2020/03/04/the-trump-administration-defended-louisianas-clinic-shutdown-law-will-it-sway-john-roberts/

States have largely relied on nullification to uphold white supremacist and patriarchal systems.

If conservatives spent the decades since Roe v. Wade chiseling away at abortion access, they’re now going for the jugular with these bills.
Shutterstock

Since the start of the new year, anti-choice state legislators have introduced bills to abolish abortion in their states by invalidating—or nullifying—federal law. If the decades since Roe v. Wade were about chiseling away at abortion access, these bills are now going for the jugular.

Abortion rights are being attacked on a federal level in the June Medical Services v. Russo U.S. Supreme Court case. Meanwhile, some Republican lawmakers are attempting to criminalize abortion in their states—domestic terrorist Washington Rep. Matt Shea (R-Spokane Valley) of Washington and Rep. Heather Scott (R-Blanchard) of Idaho who’s white nationalists are trying for the second time—by combining fetal personhood with the Confederate-era theory of nullification.

Bills like HB 2154 in Washington, HB 1089 in Indiana, HB 361 in Idaho, SB 13 in Oklahoma, and HB 1075 in Colorado have all been introduced in the first 60 days of this year seeking to override Roe. These nullification bills can look like pure political theater as they have little legal foundation—but they’re actually deviously clever. Because neither access to abortion nor a definition of life is explicitly referenced in the U.S. Constitution or federal law, the sponsors of these bills make their case that states have the power to legislate both, per the Tenth Amendment‘s granting of state authority.

Nullification as a tactic is not new. David S. Cohen, an associate professor at Drexel University and a gender and constitutional law expert who’s contributed to Rewire.News, said that Republican lawmakers who have proposed these recent bills are “keeping the company of the worst in this country’s history in terms of slavery and segregation.”

As far back as the Founding Fathers, some state lawmakers have fought for states’ rights to decide what is constitutionally valid within their state’s borders. States have largely relied on nullification to uphold white supremacist and patriarchal systems. Leading up to the Civil War, Southern state lawmakers used the argument of nullification to try to kick Native Americans off their land, to refuse to enforce federal tariffs, and secede from the Union. Southern states also used the nullification argument in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education in an attempt to avoid racially integrating schools.

So how did these tactics make a comeback? Over the last decade, alongside the rise of the Tea Party movement, nullification enthusiasts have organized in states’ rights groups like the Tenth Amendment Center (TAC), as well as far-right extremist groups like Oath Keepers. Since its formation in 2007, TAC has emerged as the thought leader on modern-day applications of nullification. The group’s model legislation has informed recent nullification bills, like those introduced during the multistate legislative campaign to reject the Affordable Care Act, and the ongoing wave of bills to thwart federal gun regulations.

For these self-described tenthers, nullification acts as a cudgel against any federal law they don’t want to uphold, judicial review and federal supremacy be damned.

To apply nullification to abortion regulations, state lawmakers have to get around the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled access to abortion as a constitutional right with Roe v. Wade.

Each of the five bills introduced this year do so in the following ways:

1. assert that states have a compelling interest in protecting the right to life of the unborn;
2. provide that the life of unborn begins at conception;
3. make a Tenth Amendment claim to deem any federal law that contradicts what is written in the bill as “null, void, and unenforceable”; and
4. provide some sort of threat of retaliation should the federal government choose to enforce federal law in those states.

“It’s a really important strategy for them,” Jessica Mason Pieklo, Rewire.News‘ vice president of law and the courts, said. “In order to get around abortion rights precedent, these bills have to do a few things… They have to clearly assert a source of state power, [show that the state] has a compelling interest [in passing the law], and that the restriction has to substantially further that compelling interest… and still pass that undue burden test.”

The level of constitutional scrutiny for abortion regulations has been whittled down from “strict scrutiny” in Roe, to “compelling scrutiny” and an “undue burden” test in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and then Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. By using the nullification language and asserting Tenth Amendment authority, “these laws are trying to … restart that conversation and change the terms of it,” Mason Pieklo said. Under these new terms, “abortion isn’t a fundamental right, so states only need a rational basis—not a compelling interest—to legislate around it. The point of these laws is to say … the federal laws don’t apply here,” she added.

Yasmine Ergas, director of the gender and public policy specialization at Columbia University, described the novelty of these bills like this: “In the third trimester, there’s a compelling state interest in the life of the fetus. But that trimester framework gets changed in Casey. Nonetheless, women’s rights are predominant,” and the undue burden test, if applied to these bills, would remain the same, “although what [these bills are] saying is, ‘We don’t care about your test.’”

Even if the state lawmakers concede that their bills are in fact subject to the type of constitutional scrutiny determined by the Court, they maintain they “have a compelling interest in litigating on behalf of the unborn,” according to Pieklo Mason.

But how can a state assert a compelling interest in protecting the life of the unborn under the 14th Amendment when neither the Court nor federal law has agreed that a fertilized egg is a person? Nullification, of course.

While anti-choice lawmakers have long claimed that they must protect the inalienable rights of the “unborn” from the time of conception via fetal personhood bills, tenthers assert that state lawmakers get to define what constitutes a “person.”

Oklahoma’s SB 13 states that “a living human child, from the moment of fertilization… is entitled to the same rights, powers, privileges, justice and protections as … any other human person.” Idaho’s HB 361 aims to make abortion illegal, “regardless of any contrary or conflicting federal statutes, regulations, executive orders, or court decisions.”

Sometimes, the bills go even further and criminalize people who infringe on the rights of fetuses they deem as people. Indiana’s HB 1089 goes as far as to threaten federal agents who enforce the Constitution within Indiana’s borders: “A federal officer or agent who arrests any Indiana government official for compliance with this article … shall be subject to arrest by Indiana law enforcement.”

We have already seen states criminalize pregnant individuals—disproportionately women of color—who experience pregnancy loss. The state lawmakers who want to use nullification and fetal personhood to ban abortion want to prioritize the rights of a fertilized egg over the pregnant person carrying it.

“Women have a right to life, and a right to health … doesn’t life imply a certain amount of health?” Ergas said. “Certainly life is not simply a positive heartbeat.”

If these bills became law, the only recourse for pregnant individuals in those states would be federal law enforcement intervention, which is exceedingly unlikely given the current state of our federal executive and judicial branches.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2020/03/09/anti-choice-state-lawmakers-want-to-criminalize-abortion-through-nullification/

© Greg Nash

This week the Supreme Court for the second time in four years considered a case that will national implications for abortion providers and their patients. The core question — whether state laws that impose medically unnecessary restrictions on clinics and force them to shut down pose an undue burden to the constitutional right to abortion.

In 2016, it was an independent abortion provider Whole Woman’s Health that initially took this fight from Texas to the highest court in the nation. With this year’s case — June Medical Services v. Russ — it’s an independent abortion clinic Hope Medical Group for Women going to bat to protect abortion access for the entire country.

Whether it’s fighting for their patients in local communities, state legislatures, or all the way to the Supreme Court, independent abortion providers — or, “indies” as so many of us lovingly refer them — have been taking on these fights for years as attacks targeting them and their patients continue to ramp up.

Independent abortion providers in Georgia fought back tirelessly last year against that state’s six-week ban. Year after year, in addition to serving their state as the only abortion provider in Kentucky, EMW Women’s Surgical Center is also fighting for their patients in court, challenging the onslaught of state restrictions intended to push care out of reach entirely.

In Ohio, where clinics have been closing at an alarming rate for the last decade, anti-abortion extremists regularly harass patients and staff. When protesters dramatically vandalized Preterm, an independent provider in Cleveland, the community rallied around the clinic and its staff, showing an outpouring of love and support amid the threats.

And although these providers are as resilient and courageous as ever, the constant and persistent extremism they face to protect our basic human rights feels particularly salient in this current moment.

Since 1973 when Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the United States, politicians have been relentless in attacking the constitutional right to abortion. Though abortion remains legal in all 50 states, nearly 1,200 laws restricting abortion rights have been enacted on the state and federal levels: more than a third of these laws have been enacted in the seven years between 2011 and 2018 alone. Unsurprisingly, many of these laws have targeted clinics specifically, especially in the South and Midwest.

Less often discussed but equally important is the fact that independent clinics and their patients are disproportionately impacted by these attacks. Across the U.S., independent clinics provide the majority of abortion care — providing care to three out of five people who have abortions — but they continue to close at alarmingly high rates. Since 2012, the number of independent clinics has declined by more than 32 percent, and the ones that remain operate in some of the most politically hostile regions in the country.

In four of the six states with just one abortion clinic remaining, that last clinic is independent, and providers are often targeted by the most aggressive protesters and anti-abortion legislation in the nation.

Clinic closures are often the result of anti-choice legislation that imposes medically unnecessary regulations on abortion clinics, many of which lack the resources to meet these onerous requirements.

However, these regulations — as well as the extremist legislators who impose them — ignore the fact that abortion is safe, and as clinics close, more and more patients are forced to travel outside of their communities for care, often taking on additional expenses like hotel stays and transportation.

In my almost five years as executive director of the Abortion Care Network, over and over, I’ve watched independent providers across the country rise to the challenge. When the stakes are high and the political landscape is stacked against them, indies stand their ground and refuse to let anything stop them from putting their patients first.

Independent clinics play an integral role in ensuring everyone has access to the reproductive health care they need to thrive and be healthy and to make the choices that are right for them and their families.

Now is the time we all must show appreciation for abortion providers. Reach out to the clinic in your local community. Volunteer, or support in whatever way is needed. Be an advocate for providers and patients as the threats to abortion access escalate.

Source: https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/486188-unnecessary-restrictions-on-abortion-pose-undue-burden-to-womens?fbclid=IwAR1Bk4vY_fhZLyLyNJX-_ltHGgqvrcosxmeI2GbHARKRmclcNO99A15mia8

A longtime Minnesota legislator was one of many members of Congress to throw their support behind Joe Biden this week.

In February, Biden received endorsements from a Louisiana state senator who voted for a near-total abortion ban and a Texas lawmaker who voted to fund a program run by anti-choice activists. JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

Longtime abortion rights opponent backs Biden 

Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), among the last anti-choice Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, this week endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nominee, calling him “a strong voice for rural America in the White House.”

Last April, Peterson was one of three House Democrats to join Republicans in pushing for a vote on legislation based on the myth that abortion providers routinely commit infanticide during “failed” abortions. He has the backing of Democrats for Life of America (DFLA), a group that supports anti-choice Democrats.

Peterson, who represents a part of rural Minnesota that’s solidly Republican, also opposed the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, and later voted against both articles of impeachment.

Peterson, a congressman since 1991, is the latest anti-choice legislator to back Biden’s presidential campaign. In February, Biden received endorsements from a Louisiana state senator who voted for a near-total abortion ban and a Texas lawmaker who voted to fund a program run by anti-choice activists.

This week, Biden also received a number of endorsements from pro-choice legislators, including U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), a pro-choice stalwart.

How Super Tuesday candidates fared among people of color, LGBTQ people

Exit polling from Super Tuesday states showed voters of color were largely split between Biden and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who won 513 and 435 delegates, respectively, in Tuesday’s primaries.

Fifty-eight percent of Black voters supported Biden on Super Tuesday, while 17 percent backed Sanders, according to exit data based on median support complied by the Washington Post. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who ended her presidential bid on Thursday, received 5 percent of the vote from voters who are Black. Biden dominated among voters who named race relations their top issue.

Sanders won 35 percent of the vote from people who are Latino on Super Tuesday, 9 points higher than Biden’s share. Forty-two percent of Asian voters backed Sanders, and 17 percent voted for Biden.

Biden won the largest share of voters who identified as female in the exit poll, with 37 percent. Sanders drew 25 percent, and 15 percent voted for Warren.

While exit poll data from LGBT voters wasn’t available on a national scale, state-by-state statistics showed LGBT voters supported Sanders in large numbers. In Texas, they backed Sanders over Biden, 49 percent to 21 percent, according to exit polling compiled by the New York Times. Sanders won 36 percent of the vote from LGBT voters in California’s primary to Biden’s 16 percent.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2020/03/06/biden-gets-support-from-one-of-the-last-anti-choice-congressional-democrats-campaign-week-in-review/

Virginia’s General Assembly passed a bill that repealed many of the State’s restrictions on abortion on Wednesday.

House Bill 980, also known as the Reproductive Health Protection Act, received final passage from the House of Delegates and was sent to Governor Ralph Northam for final approval on Wednesday. HB 980, which had initially passed the House of Delegates on a 52-45 vote, passed the Senate through Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax’s tie-breaking vote after it had been amended, and, on Wednesday, received final passage after the House of delegates adopted the Senate’s amendments.

The bill effectively revokes many of Virginia’s restrictions on abortion. It expands who can perform first trimester abortions by allowing physician’s assistants, nurse practitioners and certified nurse midwives to perform them and removes the 24-hour mandatory waiting period imposed on women before getting an abortion. It also removes the requirement that women receive an ultrasound and counseling before getting an abortion.

Driven by Virginia’s democrats, the bill seems to be the lawmakers’ direct response to the many cases challenging Virginia’s laws on abortion.

Moreover, the General Assembly’s decision to pass the bill comes at a time when pro-choice groups are worried about the possibility that the US Supreme Court could overturn or significantly repeal Roe v. Wade, a 1973 case which established that the right to abort fell within a woman’s fundamental right of privacy and that a State’s undue restrictions on that right were unconstitutional .

Pro-choice advocates have praised the passage of the bill. As Senator Jennifer McClellan, sponsor of a similar bill originating in the Senate, said: “if ever there was a time to protect a woman’s bodily autonomy, that time is now.”

Pro-life advocates, on the other hand, have expressed their disapproval for the bill, arguing that the bill has lowered the standard of care and is thus dangerous for women.

Source: https://www.jurist.org/news/2020/02/virginia-lawmakers-pass-bill-repealing-abortion-restrictions/

Buying abortion pills online can be the most affordable way to get care. Waiting for them can be agony.

Tara* has health insurance. Her health insurance even covers abortion—something of a rarity, considering that 11 states have laws restricting coverage of the procedure in private insurance plans, and 26 states restrict coverage in plans sold under the Affordable Care Act.

But when she found out she was pregnant, she realized she still wouldn’t be able to afford the cost of an in-clinic abortion: Since she hadn’t met her $1,500 deductible, she would have to pay for the entire procedure out of pocket, which would cost several hundred dollars.

“On paper I look like someone who could afford an abortion, which is weird to say. I make money, but I have to pay for rent, car payments, student loans, and health insurance—I don’t have the expendable income to just drop $600,” Tara told VICE.

She thought it over for a week—she could miss a car payment, or pay her rent late, but neither of these options were acceptable to her. Then she remembered she had read about Aid Access, a website run by a doctor based in the Netherlands who prescribes abortion pills for just $90. After one last attempt to scrape together the funds for an in-clinic procedure, she contacted the site.

Buying pills through Aid Access is designed to be simple and straightforward: First, Rebecca Gomperts, the doctor who started the service, has a consultation with U.S. patients over email to make sure they’re eligible to use the method. Then she writes a prescription for the pills, which patients email to a pharmacy she works with in India. Gomperts gives her patients instructions for how to use the medication, and when the pills come in the mail, they can take them at their convenience—but typically only during the first trimester. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved medication abortion for use up to 10 weeks in pregnancy.

Gomperts started Aid Access to help people overcome the many obstacles to abortion care in the U.S., considering it her duty as a doctor to help people access the procedure. But because of the FDA’s restrictions on mifepristone, one of two drugs found in the abortion pill regimen, the service Aid Access provides is considered a violation of federal law, which is why Gomperts has an international—not a U.S.-based—pharmacy ship the pills. That means the drugs must go through U.S. Customs, which can delay them for an unpredictable amount of time: Some people receive their package in just a few days, but others may wait weeks for theirs to arrive. (Customs did not return VICE’s multiple requests for comment about whether it is targeting packages from Aid Access.)

Tara belonged to the latter group: She watched the medication sit in Customs for 16 days, an agonizing period of time during which she was growing more worried about whether she was still going to be able to end her pregnancy using the method she wanted.

“Those were the longest 16 days of my life,” she said.

Aid Access is currently considered the most reputable resource for self-managing an abortion. While there are several sites where people can buy abortion pills online, Aid Access is the most affordable—other websites charge anywhere between $115 to $430—and the only one operated by a licensed physician. On Plan C, a website that ranks online abortion pill retailers in a “report card,” Aid Access is the only site to receive an A.

One online abortion support group is filled with people’s accounts of using Gomperts’ service: Anyone who posts about not being able to access a clinic, be it for reasons of cost or distance, can expect to receive at least one response recommending Aid Access. The experiences detailed in this group are overwhelmingly positive. (VICE is not including the names of the online forums so as not to make them a target for shuttering.)

But while Aid Access may be the best option for people who find themselves needing—or preferring—to end their pregnancies on their own, the restrictions on mifepristone can put them in an impossible situation.

While three women VICE spoke to who used Aid Access were all ultimately successful in self-managing their abortions with pills from the site, some women online have described panicking about the wait time for the pills and going to a clinic after all, even if they still couldn’t afford it. And others—including one of the women in this story—said that they had used the abortion pills past the recommended time frame due to shipping delays.

The women who told VICE about using Aid Access said they don’t have any regrets about choosing the service, but their experiences were still characterized by feelings of stress and anxiety when days of waiting for a package of pills to arrive turned into weeks.

“Those were the longest 16 days of my life.”

This is not a situation of Gomperts’ making; rather it is the result of the many restrictions on medication abortion, which doctors and reproductive health experts say are medically unnecessary.

“You’re in quite the nerve-wracking situation if you don’t find out you’re pregnant until six or seven weeks, and that’s often around the time when someone who isn’t planning for a pregnancy will find out,” said Abigail Aiken, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who studies self-managed abortion. “If you have to wait three weeks for pills, you risk bumping up against that [10-week] cut-off point.”

Taking abortion pills past 10 weeks of pregnancy—and especially past 13 weeks—can mean heavier bleeding and raise the chances of an incomplete abortion, requiring patients to seek medical care afterward. Though such cases are rare, these caveats make the wait for abortion pills to arrive in the mail feel like a race against the clock.

“On top of the stress and anxiety of dealing with a pregnancy that’s not wanted, you have the added stress and anxiety of getting the pills,” Aiken said, not just because patients want to end the pregnancy as quickly as they can, but because they want to do it in the safest way possible.

Gomperts warns patients about the potential wait time for the pills: In the first email she sends people who request pills from her, she estimates the package will take seven to 21 days to arrive, and informs them that there is no faster shipping method available. She also urges patients to make their decision about whether they want to move forward with Aid Access as soon as possible, since she only treats patients who are less than nine weeks pregnant.

When Alex, who asked that VICE withhold her last name as a legal precaution, ordered abortion pills through Aid Access, she was about four weeks and five days along. Had the medication arrived in the estimated seven to 21 days, she would have been well within the 10-week window. But instead, her package remained in Customs for a full month; Gomperts ended up writing her a second prescription for the pills, but the first package arrived sooner: Alex took the pills when she was nine weeks and three days pregnant.

“I’d had a medication abortion once before with a clinic, but I was only about five weeks along at that time,” Alex said. “So I was kind of nervous [this time] because even though they say you can take the pills up to 13 weeks, things can get more complicated after the 10th week, and I didn’t want to complicate things.”

If the pills hadn’t come by the 13-week mark, Alex said she would have used the advance on her tax return to pay for an in-clinic procedure, even though she had been saving the money for a birthday gift for her three-year-old son.

“I had promised my son that we would redecorate his bedroom for his birthday,” she said. “It made me upset to think that I wouldn’t be able to do that, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to raise another kid by myself.”

Once patients have decided to end their pregnancy with Aid Access, they’re committed to seeing it through: Their back-up plans—like paying rent late in order to afford an in-clinic abortion—aren’t satisfactory to them because they weren’t satisfactory in the first place.

Even though Tara didn’t receive her pills until the 11-week mark, she was undeterred by the warnings about taking the pills past 10 weeks. She researched medication abortion past 10 weeks, looked up the signs of infection, and read about the experiences of other people who had been in a similar situation. She knew if she had any complications to just tell doctors that she had a miscarriage, to avoid possible criminalization for self-inducing an abortion.

“I was prepared for the worst outcome,” she continued. “I couldn’t have a baby so there wasn’t any other choice—no matter how long Customs made me wait I wasn’t having this baby and I didn’t have $600 to pay the clinic.”

Women like Tara and Alex face a difficult choice: wait an indeterminate amount of time for abortion pills to come in the mail, or find a way to get the pills from a clinic and suffer the financial consequences.

“I couldn’t have a baby so there wasn’t any other choice—no matter how long Customs made me wait I wasn’t having this baby and I didn’t have $600 to pay the clinic.”

There are other possibilities. Some of the sites that appear on Plan C’s report card have much faster ship times because they operate as online pharmacies rather than full-scale telemedicine services like Aid Access that require a consult. And because they sometimes ship from within the U.S.—flouting FDA rules—there’s no Customs checkpoint to hold up the packages. But pills from these pharmacies are more expensive, and don’t offer the comforts that come with having a licensed physician walk you through the process.

“It’s a bit of a trade off,” said Elisa Wells, the founder of Plan C. “Aid Access offers a really good price, physician support and excellent ongoing support in terms of instructions and answering questions. But there is this issue that the pills ship from overseas and they take longer to get to you. It’s not perfect, but people have to decide what’s important to them.”

Paige, who also asked VICE to withhold her last name, decided to make this compromise when contemplating how to end a recent pregnancy. The last time she’d gotten an abortion, she’d had a difficult time getting scheduled at a clinic, and ended up driving out of state for the procedure—when taking travel costs into account, she’d spent a total of $900.

“When it came to this recent pregnancy, I said, ‘Fuck that,’” Paige said. “I was learning more and more about self-managed abortion online and I didn’t to fight with the limitations of clinics again.”

She ordered the pills from one of the online pharmacies reviewed by Plan C for about $250, which she paid according to the instructions of a man who called her.

“It was kind of a sketchy work-around, but I knew it was legit from the Plan C report card, and [the pills] were in my mailbox in four days,” she said. “No waiting for weeks, no waiting for an appointment. Waiting in my experience was the worst part of being pregnant when you don’t want to be. The waiting is torture.”

Giving yourself a medication abortion doesn’t have to include weeks of waiting for a package to arrive in the mail, reproductive health advocates say: If the FDA lifted the restrictions on mifepristone, services like Gomperts’ would be free to operate in the U.S. And indeed some already are, through a clinical trial operating in 10 states, which exempts researchers from the FDA regulations.

“Aid Access really is demonstrating a way forward for safe and effective and convenient access to abortion services for the U.S.,” Wells said. “It’s a model we need to see made available here through regular medical channels so we don’t end up having the delay.”

In the end, neither Tara nor Alex had any complications passing their pregnancy—and they both described feeling happy and immensely relieved not to be pregnant anymore.

“It took a huge weight off of my shoulders,” Tara said. “I felt present for the first time in three weeks.”

Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/884v7b/aid-access-abortion-pills-stuck-in-customs?fbclid=IwAR2uScWtwpyHijEG8jiFFIAfAzSkHhWsGBe8CX9omi7xjR2i6C4cOlNEl5M

States that have seen clinic shutdown laws struck down could reintroduce the measures if Supreme Court conservatives side with Louisiana in June Medical Services v. Russo.

The Court will hear arguments Wednesday in June Medical Services, a case about the constitutionality of Louisiana Act 620, an admitting privileges law identical to the Texas law the Court struck down four years ago in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt.
Rena Schild / Shutterstock.com

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of Louisiana in June Medical Services v. Russo could mean nightmare scenarios for abortion access not just in Louisiana, but in states across the country with Republican-held legislatures.

The Court will hear arguments Wednesday in June Medical Services, a case about the constitutionality of Louisiana Act 620, an admitting privileges law identical to the Texas law the Court struck down four years ago in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt.

Even though the Court ruled in Whole Woman’s Health that there was no scientific evidence to support Texas’ claim that laws requiring abortion providers to maintain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital advance and protect the health of pregnant people, Louisiana lawmakers soldiered on. And because the Fifth Circuit went rogue and ignored the extensive lower court findings that the Louisiana law, like the Texas law, provide no medical benefit and that providers in Louisiana were finding it almost impossible to obtain admitting privileges, June Medical Services found itself in the curious position of petitioning the Supreme Court to strike down a law that the Court had already struck down.

Should conservative justices on the Court uphold Louisiana Act 620 by either limiting to Texas the principles set forth in Whole Woman’s Health or reversing Whole Woman’s Health outright—which is what congressional Republicans who filed an amicus brief have asked the Court to do—the repercussions will reverberate across the country. A decision in Louisiana’s favor would reduce what should be a broad ruling that admitting privileges laws are an undue burden—because, as the Court said in 2016, they have no health or safety benefit—to a state-by-state inquiry into whether a particular law in a particular state has any benefit and whether requiring physicians to comply with the law constitutes an undue burden.

And it will give anti-choice lawmakers across the United States the green light to resurrect admitting privileges laws that were either struck down by lower courts or abandoned in the wake of the 2016 Supreme Court decision. A ruling in favor of Louisiana would give anti-choice legislators an opportunity to make the case that in their state, admitting privileges laws provide medical benefits and the burdens on pregnant people are minimal.

But first, Louisiana needs to convince the court that the circumstances in Louisiana are different than those that prompted the Court to strike down Texas’ law four years ago.

In order to skirt the ruling in Whole Woman’s Health, attorneys for Louisiana are arguing that those factual findings are limited to Texas and have no bearing in Louisiana. Just because the Court found that HB 2 burdened abortion rights in Texas, they argue, doesn’t necessarily mean that Act 620 burdens abortion rights in Louisiana.

Sure, the laws are identical and, sure, lawmakers in Louisiana passed Act 620 because they saw how effective HB 2 was in closing clinics in Texas, but what does that matter? The abortion rights landscapes in Texas and Louisiana are different and, according to Louisiana’s attorneys, the impact of HB 2 in Texas says nothing about the impact of Act 620 in Louisiana. (In one respect, Louisiana’s attorneys are right: The abortion rights landscape in Louisiana is worse, given the lower court’s findings that Act 620 would close every clinic in Louisiana but one, leaving only one provider in the entire state.)

A ruling favorable to Louisiana would provide an opening for other states to make the case that admitting privileges laws don’t burden abortion rights in their state. They could argue, for example, that even though the Court found that providers in Texas were finding it nearly impossible to obtain admitting privileges—and therefore demanding that they do so unduly burdens abortion rights—that’s not necessarily the case in every state.

In the wake of Whole Woman’s Health, several states dropped lawsuits defending their admitting privileges laws. But if the Court sides with Louisiana in June Medical Services, it could breathe new life into those laws. In addition, states that have seen their laws struck down by courts could simply enact new laws.

Alabama and Tennessee 

Alabama and Tennessee were both in the process of litigating the constitutionality of their admitting privileges laws (HB 57 and HB 3808) when the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Whole Woman’s Health. Citing that ruling, both states promptly dropped their lawsuits, noting that their state laws were nearly identical to Texas’ and there was therefore no need to continue litigating them.

In court documents filed with the 11th Circuit Court in Planned Parenthood Southeast v. Bentley, attorneys for Alabama noted, “Because Alabama’s law is identical in all relevant respects to the law at issue in Whole Woman’s Health, there is now no good faith argument that the law is constitutional under controlling precedent.”

Tennessee stopped defending its admitting privileges law, in Adams & Boyle, P.C. et al. v. Slatery. Attorneys for Tennessee noted that Whole Woman’s Health had applied the undue burden standard to Texas’ admitting privileges law and found that it constituted an undue burden to access, and that because Tennessee’s law was so similar, it would be a waste of resources to continue litigating it.

Oklahoma 

In 2014, Oklahoma’s Republican-held legislature passed an admitting privileges law that was challenged in Burns v. Cline. The Oklahoma Supreme Court struck down the law, rejecting argument that “the impetus for this legislation was to advance and protect women’s health,” noting that “[a]s in Hellerstedt, we reject defendants’ argument and find that SB 1848 places a substantial obstacle in the path of women seeking a lawful abortion. We further find this legislation causes a significant reduction in abortion providers, creating an onerous burden to women of child-bearing age.”

Mississippi

Mississippi’s admitting privileges law, HB 1390—which was enacted in 2012 and which the Fifth Circuit struck down in Jackson Women’s Health Organization v. Currier—could be resurrected should the Supreme Court decide that a state-by-state inquiry into whether admitting privileges are an undue burden is required.

Unlike in Whole Woman’s Health, where a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit upheld the Texas admitting privileges law (before the Supreme Court struck it down), a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit struck down Mississippi’s law in part because upholding the law would have shuttered Mississippi’s last remaining abortion clinic, unlike in Texas where a handful of clinics remained in the wake of HB 2’s passage. (Mississippi finally gave up defending the law in 2017. Attorneys for the state told the court that they could not “identify any meaningful distinction between the Texas admitting privileges law struck down in Hellerstedt and the admitting privileges requirement of HB 1390.”)

Here’s where it gets alarming: The judges conceded that if it were permitted to take into account the number of abortion clinics available in neighboring states, their calculus might have changed. However, they were constrained by a 1938 Supreme Court decision, Gaines v. Canada, which held states can’t discriminate in the distribution of state services by relying on the availability of similar services in nearby states. “Gaines simply and plainly holds that a state cannot lean on its sovereign neighbors to provide protection of its citizens’ federal constitutional rights, a principle that obviously has trenchant relevance here,” the court wrote.

But given that Supreme Court conservatives don’t seem to value precedent, should the Court be compelled to revisit Gaines, states like Mississippi will no longer have to ensure that at least one clinic remains in their state if they can rely on neighboring states to provide abortion care that Mississippians can access.

Then the question becomes: How far does a pregnant person have to travel before it is considered an undue burden? If a pregnant person cannot access abortion in a neighboring state, what about forcing them to travel two states over? Three states? What if laws shuttering all clinics in one state don’t pose an undue burden as along as at least one state in the country offers abortion care?

These are questions that could become critical if the Court sides with Louisiana and declares that whether or not admitting privileges laws are an undue burden depends on the circumstances in a given state.

Texas and Wisconsin 

A ruling that the constitutionality of these laws is a state-by-state inquiry that involves examining whether admitting privileges laws actually provide a medical benefit could even give states that have seen their laws struck down another bite at the apple.

Texas, the state at the center of the 2016 decision that Louisiana seeks to undermine, and Wisconsin—which saw its admitting privileges law struck down by the Seventh Circuit in 2013 in a case called Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin v. Hollen—could feasibly introduce new admitting privileges laws and learn from Texas’ mistakes in Whole Woman’s Health. Lawmakers in both states could shore up evidence that these laws promote health and safety and that they don’t pose an undue burden. (One way they could do this is by keeping their mouths shut about how gleeful they are that the laws are closing clinics.)

It’s unclear what circumstances in Texas or Wisconsin could have changed so that the admitting privileges laws no longer unduly burden abortion rights. But Republicans have taken over the courts, and the newly Trumpified federal judiciary may be the only change necessary for states like Texas and Wisconsin to try to pass another admitting privileges law, especially if courts are willing to allow state lawmakers to pass the abortion care buck to a neighboring state.

What is clear is that admitting privileges laws provide no medical benefit. They are a solution looking for a problem.

First, they are predicated on a “country doctor” style of medical care that existed at a time when people lived in small communities and had one general practitioner who handled all of their health-care needs. That kind of care doesn’t exist anymore.

Second, admitting privileges are hard to come by due to the stigma that abortion providers face (in part because of unfounded claims like those Louisiana has made before the Court that abortion providers don’t have their patients’ best interest at heart.) In Whole Woman’s Health, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the admitting privilege requirement would force clinics in Texas to shut down because they would be “unable to find local physicians in those communities with privileges who are willing to provide abortions due to the size of the communities and the hostility that abortion providers face.” Hospitals aren’t keen on granting admitting privileges to abortion providers due to that hostility, and in some cases due to the Catholic directives under which many hospitals operate.

Third, hospitals are profit-driven institutions that rely on hospital admissions to operate. In Whole Woman’s Health, the Court called it an “undisputed general fact” that “hospitals often condition admitting privileges on reaching a certain number of admissions per year.” And because abortion is so safe, abortion providers cannot guarantee a minimum number of hospital admissions.

That’s the great irony. Louisiana lawmakers insist admitting privileges laws are necessary to promote the health and safety of pregnant people. But abortion is so safe that many hospitals won’t grant providers admitting privileges.

It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is an abortion.

Source: https://rewire.news/ablc/2020/03/03/the-supreme-court-could-create-a-national-nightmare-for-abortion-access/

LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES – 2019/05/21: An activist seen holding a placard that says I Don’t … [+] LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES

In some ways, reproductive health and medicine are facing greater threats today than ever before, including a fast-approaching Supreme Court fight that could ultimately deny care to millions of US families. Meanwhile, experts in this field are also making major strides, including landmark research on abortion outcomes over time, which debunks numerous common anti-abortion claims.

In January, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) center published the third and final paper based on their groundbreaking Turnaway Study, which tracked the experiences of 1000 women who either received an abortion or were denied one, recorded at one week after the event and then semiannually for five years.

Overall, researchers found that women and their families saw long-term harms when they were denied wanted abortions, including dips in extant children’s developmental progress and women’s income and credit scores. They also concluded that some of the most popular arguments to restrict abortion — suggesting that women will regret their abortions, or that the procedure may be bad for women’s mental health — just don’t line up with the data.

The team’s latest article tackles this point head-on: despite frequent popular rhetoric arguing otherwise, their longitudinal study found that women who received abortions overwhelmingly said that they primarily felt relieved, and continued to feel their decision had been right in the five years that followed.

“We found no evidence of emerging negative emotions or abortion decision regret; both positive and negative emotions declined over the first two years and plateaued thereafter, and decision rightness remained high and steady,” they explained last month in an article for Social Science & Medicine. “At five years postabortion, relief remained the most commonly felt emotion among all women.”

The negative emotions that women did experience seemed to correspond most to perceived levels of decision-difficulty and stigma in their communities, but also petered out over time. “These results add to the scientific evidence that emotions about an abortion are associated with personal and social context, and are not a product of the abortion procedure itself,” researchers wrote.

Dr. Corinne Rocca, the study’s first author and one of the Turnaway Study’s lead researchers, noted in a phone interview that women who were denied abortions reported raised levels of anxiety, but women who received them reported feeling the kind of positive-and-negative emotional mix you’d expect “during any big life event” (such as changing jobs, moving, or ending a relationship).

“Feelings were most mixed during week after, with some sadness, but also happiness and relief; relief was the most common,” Rocca said. “Experiencing negative emotions during a big life event is completely normal; I don’t find that concerning. What I would find concerning would be if that persisted, or if women looked back [months or years later] and felt tremendous guilt,” but that just wasn’t the case. “And a very-high-to-overwhelming proportion said they felt they made the right decision, which held out over five years.”

The data also showed that women’s consistent feeling of ‘decision rightness’ continued “even under difficult circumstances,” Rocca said — for example, if they had chosen to have a late-term abortion, or had self-reported that they live around abortion stigma. “Even they still felt this was the right decision.”

This kind of evidence about women’s emotions and perspectives after abortions hadn’t previously existed, Rocca said — for one thing, because it wouldn’t make sense to compare data on women who had abortions with that of women who experienced miscarriages, or who carried a wanted pregnancy to term.

Now that it is available, Rocca and her colleagues hope lawmakers will start taking this and other scientific evidence into account more often when legislating our reproductive health. In numerous states already, she said, “There have been multiple of these targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) laws — a family of them, really — all centered around the regret claim.”

Sometimes such laws will require patients to wait 72 hours before getting the procedure, or require two separate visits (one for ‘counseling,’ one for the abortion), or have ultrasound-viewing requirements. “They’re all really targeting the idea that women will regret abortion,” Rocca said.

“But data suggest those policies are wrong, and that those policies won’t work,” she continued. “My desire for this research is really that we just base our policies on evidence. These are needless policies, and probably create the outcome that they are claiming to protect people from.” In terms of providing meaningful support to pregnant persons in the moment of their decision-making, Rocca added, “A better idea would be to offer solutions for dealing with stigma.”

Regarding the oft-used argument that abortion is or may be bad for women’s mental health (or that they’ll come to regret it), Rocca commented, “I think in part it’s because people who are against abortion don’t want to be anti-women, and the claim that they want to protect women from this decision has seemed appealing.” It’s far from the only misconception (or misrepresentation) out there, however. And usually the problem isn’t that research hasn’t been done.

“Some of the biggest gaps in people’s knowledge about abortion, and in the public’s knowledge, aren’t things we haven’t answered yet. They’re things that are out there, and firmly established,” Rocca said.

According to Rocca, the biggest knowledge gap has to do with “just how safe abortion is,” she said. “Far safer than a colonoscopy, or many other common procedures that people routinely get.” That includes surgical as well as medication abortions, “despite [the latter] being heavily regulated by the FDA.”

“The second [gap] is how common it is: people think abortions are rare, but one in three or four women have them in their lifetime,” Rocca said. “People may think they don’t know somebody that’s had one, but they’re wrong.”

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2020/02/29/women-overwhelmingly-dont-regret-abortions-research-finds-but-denying-them-costs-a-ton/#5efd2c021604

Even though HB 481 has yet to take effect, Georgia clinics have been inundated with calls from people who worry abortion is illegal or that they’ll be criminalized for obtaining one.

Roxanne Sutocky, the director of community engagement at Atlanta Women’s Center, said the center has used the passage of HB 481 as an opportunity to educate the public on why abortion bans and abortion stigma are harmful and on how to get involved in protecting reproductive rights.
John Ramspott / Flickr

With a stroke of his pen, Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp incited anxiety, confusion, and fear in people who need abortion care in his state when he signed HB 481, a near-total abortion ban, into law in May 2019. The law would prohibit people in the state from accessing an abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before most know they are pregnant.

While HB 481 wasn’t slated to take effect until January 1, 2020, clinics that provide abortion services in Georgia were immediately inundated with phone calls inquiring if abortion was illegal. Despite a temporary injunction halting the ban from taking effect—thanks to a lawsuit to strike down the ban filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and Planned Parenthood on behalf of abortion care providers, advocates, and patients—the calls still haven’t stopped.

“When Kemp signed the law last summer, our call center got flooded,” Staci Fox, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Southeast (PPSE), told Rewire.News. “We had to set up a separate number in our call center just for information about where the law and the litigation stood so that patients and anyone, really, could stay informed.” (PPSE operates four health centers that provide abortion care in Georgia and is one of the lawsuit plaintiffs.)

Since HB 481, one of Fox’s priorities has been informing people who need an abortion in Georgia that the procedure is still safe, legal, and available up until a pregnant person reaches 20 weeks (later in special cases), mainly through social media and on-the-ground campaigns. She’s far from alone in this mission—many of PPSE’s fellow plaintiffs are undertaking similar efforts to ensure that people receive accurate information.

Kwajelyn Jackson, the executive director of Feminist Women’s Health Center (FWHC), told Rewire.News it was their duty to join the lawsuit as a reproductive justice-centered clinic that serves patients from marginalized communities. FWHC has been receiving the same nervous calls from abortion-seekers as PPSE.

“We made a banner shortly after the bill was signed to put outside of our clinic that said, ‘This clinic stays open,’ just so that people would have a visual representation of reassurance that we’re here, we’re open, we’re accepting appointments, we’re seeing patients every day—that we don’t have any plans on going anywhere,” Jackson said.

Roxanne Sutocky, the director of community engagement at Atlanta Women’s Center (AWC), another plaintiff, said that after an uptick in calls due to HB 481, their advocacy center staff began tracking the concerns of callers. They found that callers asking about Georgia’s ban were from both inside and outside the state and were generally afraid of being criminalized for accessing an abortion—including callers who’d already had one.

Callers also reported being given misinformation by anti-choice pregnancy centers (also known as “crisis pregnancy centers,” or “fake women’s health centers”). These organizations, of which there are 91 in Georgia, intentionally confuse pregnant people, claiming to offer “abortion pre-screenings” that are really ploys to persuade people from terminating their pregnancies.

“In our call tracking, we actually did talk to folks who said they went to crisis pregnancy centers and were told that because the fetus had a heartbeat, they would go to jail if they got an abortion. So crisis pregnancy centers are absolutely manipulating and taking advantage of folks and their level of understanding of the law and where it stands,” Sutocky said.

When people visit AWC’s website, the first thing they see is a banner: ‘’Yes, abortion care is still legal in Georgia.” This message is all over the center’s social media, as well as on posters and in handouts at the clinic. AWC has used the passage of HB 481 as an opportunity to educate the public on why abortion bans and abortion stigma are harmful and on how to get involved in protecting reproductive rights, Sutocky said.

The anti-abortion measure has inadvertently resulted in opportunities for abortion care providers: PPSE has attracted more clinicians to their staff who provide abortion care. Meanwhile, FWHC has partnered with medical schools to introduce residency programs for a new generation of family planning physicians to be trained to provide abortions. Due to an influx of donations following the signing of the law, their clinic has been able to expand their capacity by hiring new nurses, nurse practitioners, and administrators.

Last week, lawyers for American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and Planned Parenthood filed a motion for summary judgment in their lawsuit, asking the judge to permanently block the abortion ban.

The abortion care providers Rewire.News spoke with believe that they will win—“both in the long-term and in the short-term,” Jackson said. She noted that every pre-viability abortion ban (a ban against abortions before a fetus is developed enough to survive outside the uterus) in the United States has been deemed unconstitutional and struck down. Jackson said she deeply believes in the brilliance of the reproductive health, rights, and justice activists who are fighting the abortion ban, and also in the expertise of the attorneys fighting bans and other anti-choice legislation in Georgia and across the country, sentiments echoed by both Sutocky and Fox.

Still, clinics that provide abortion care in Georgia are working together to develop a contingency plan and are part of a national strategy to assess which states are most at risk of losing access to abortion care and which states have the fewest abortion restrictions in case people aren’t able to get the services they need in their home state.

They’re also focused on both national and statewide elections this year, since Republican state legislators were the architects and champions of the ban.

“Let’s be honest: We would not have this abortion ban if it were not for voter suppression tactics. We would have had a different governor in the governor’s mansion who would have vetoed this bill,” Fox said.

Georgia’s abortion care providers are looking forward to being able to focus on issues beyond the ban, such as the state’s high maternal mortality rate. Fox lamented that PPSE wouldn’t be able to devote its full attention to actual reproductive health crises until Republican lawmakers stop “playing politics with people’s lives.”

“They act and say words like ‘we care about women,’ ‘the safety of women,’ and ‘we’re pro-life,’ but their actions do not reflect that,” Fox said. “They’re wasting tax dollars, and they’re wasting Georgia’s time while they’re not focused on real problems.”

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2020/02/26/how-georgias-blocked-6-week-abortion-ban-is-already-affecting-clinics/

I know from personal experience that it’s already very hard to get an abortion in Louisiana. The Supreme Court could make things even worse.

Protesters march down Bourbon Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans, in 2019, to protest a proposed anti-abortion bill. Emily Kask / Getty Images

Next month the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that could leave just one abortion clinic open in the entire state of Louisiana and pave the way for anti-abortion politicians in other states to do the same — effectively abolishing the protections of Roe v. Wade, 47 years after the case was decided.

I had just started working my first job with a decent salary and benefits in 2015 when I discovered I was pregnant. When I told my boyfriend, he apologized and said he needed to focus on his future, and this would mess that up. He offered to send money to compensate me.

I made two decisions after that. First, if I was to go through with this pregnancy, I would do it on my own. Then I thought about my future and what the best choice was for me. That’s when I made my second decision. I decided to get an abortion.

In Louisiana, that’s easier said than done.

First, I wasted three weeks going back and forth, an hour each way, to what I believed was a health center that could help me get an abortion. It turned out to be an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center — one of more than 2,500 across the country, multiplying while abortion providers are being regulated out of existence. There, I was asked deeply personal questions, made to sit through two ultrasounds, watch a video of complete lies tying abortion to breast cancer and other health risks, and told multiple times that if I just came back for one more appointment, they could schedule my abortion. At one point, someone told me that I wasn’t “the type to get an abortion.”

One in four women in the US has an abortion in their lifetime. There is no type.

The state of Louisiana is trying to paint abortion providers as not having their patients’ best interests at heart. In reality, abortion providers were the only people I found who weren’t manipulative and coercive.

It wasn’t until I went to Planned Parenthood that I finally got the information I needed. I was told where I could get an abortion and what the process would be like. I traveled 250 miles each way to Hope Medical Group in Shreveport, home to one of the three remaining abortion clinics in the state: once for state-mandated counseling, and once for my procedure.

Both times, the doctors and staff at the health center made me feel supported, not judged. I was asked multiple times to confirm that this was what I wanted and that I was not being pressured into ending my pregnancy. They empowered me to make my own decision. Unlike the crisis pregnancy center. Unlike the state government.

In early January, 207 anti-abortion politicians wrote an amicus brief to the Supreme Court regarding the upcoming Louisiana case, arguing that the right to abortion is “unworkable.” The threat has never been more clear.

As a woman in Louisiana, my opinion should carry more weight than these 207 mostly male politicians who are not women in Louisiana (That’s right: None of the brief’s signers are Louisiana women who would be affected by the ruling. And only 13 of them are women.)

What I know from personal experience is that it’s already very hard to get an abortion in Louisiana. The state has put up a series of hoops women must jump through — including state-mandated counseling designed to convince you not to have an abortion, and a waiting period designed to put you in time out and make you travel back and forth to multiple appointments. I jumped through their hoops and more. I don’t wish my experience on anyone.

Like most women, I do not regret my abortion. I was able to keep my livelihood, without worrying about whether having a child would make me an undesirable employee or about how I would make ends meet. Today I am still working in that job, helping low-income residents with housing.

There are 1 million women of reproductive age in Louisiana. Our choices about our bodies and our futures are individual decisions.

Politicians in Washington and in Baton Rouge can write their opinions about abortion in legal briefs, in newspapers, in speeches to their donors. They’re entitled to those opinions. But they are not entitled to use their position to make my decision for me.

Source: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasminerivers/let-louisiana-women-decide-abortion-supreme-court?fbclid=IwAR2UCakrP6UAtsGnVMcp4Shbtpv5BNmkXfFDjyCqesAT5tMsgU_GWIn3B6U