Soon, the third state in the country to instate a Down syndrome abortion ban might be Ohio, opening the door to an intense debate on women’s reproductive rights. A bill criminalizing abortions performed after testing reveals a fetus may have Down syndrome has passed through the Ohio state legislature and is now headed to Gov. John Kasich’s desk for final approval.
Ohio House Bill 214 easily passed through the state’s Republican-led Senate Wednesday in a 20-12 vote, moving the state one step closer to enacting the anti-abortion legislation. The bill would make it a felony for a doctor to abort a fetus if they know the procedure is being sought as a result of a fetal Down syndrome diagnosis or positive screening test. Moreover, it does not require a concrete diagnosis but rather would prohibit abortion in cases where the fetus “has or may have Down syndrome.” Legislators behind House Bill 214 claim the legislation is not an attempt to restrict women’s reproductive rights but rather a move to end discrimination.
“I believe that life begins at conception and that abortion should never be considered an option,” Rep. Sarah LaTourette, the legislator who introduced the bill, said earlier this week, as CNN reported. “However, regardless of if you agree with me or not, I hope that you can see that this is not an issue about abortion; it is an issue of discrimination — discriminating against a person, not allowing them their God-given right to life, simply because they mighthave Down syndrome.”
Opponents of the bill, however, have criticized the legislation as a move to impede women’s choices and pit the disability rights community against the reproductive rights community.
“Yet again, Ohio lawmakers are trying to disguise their attempt to push abortion further out of reach in our state,” Gary Daniels, Chief Lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, said in a statement released Wednesday. “This bill does nothing to improve the lives of people with disabilities, nor increase their access to health care or other services, nor does it educate a woman and her family about having a child with a disability. It only further restricts a woman’s ability to make a decision about ending a pregnancy.”
The Center for Reproductive Rights called the bill “a dangerous attempt by anti-choice politicians to pit the disability rights community against the reproductive rights community” in a tweet posted Friday.
Should the bill be signed into law anyone who performs an abortion in such a situation could face time in prison and have their medical licenses revoked. However, women who obtain an abortion in such circumstances would reportedly not be penalized or face criminal charges under the bill.
Down syndrome is a genetic disorder often caused by an error in cell division, which results in a sperm or egg cell containing an extra or partial copy of chromosome 21 either at or before the time of conception. According to the American Pregnancy Association, Down syndrome occurs in one out of every 800 infants.
The bill had cleared the Ohio House of Representatives in early November. Gov. Kasich now has 10 days to sign or veto the bill. Although the governor has not explicitly said whether or not he will sign the bill, he’d previously said he felt the legislation was “appropriate.” Kasich’s press secretary told CNN the governor would take “a good hard look at the bill.”
Similar laws have been passed in Indiana and North Dakota in recent years, although the Indiana bill was blocked by a federal judge earlier this year after being challenged by the ACLU. The North Dakota law, which was enacted in 2013, has not been challenged.
The confusing response she got was part of a bigger pattern in the Trump administration.
Supporters of birth control access rally outside the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, March 23, 2016. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Members of the Trump administration have long conflated abortion and birth control. Now it seems the administration is doing the same thing in emails to constituents.
A woman who sent the White House an email as part of a campaign to counter measures by the administration to curb access to birth control was surprised to receive a reply within hours — but even more surprised that the response had nothing to do with birth control, and instead touted President Trump’s anti-abortion stances.
Charissa, who asked that her last name not be used, had used an online form to send an email to the White House protesting the administration’s recent weakening of an Obama-era requirement that most employers offer copay-free insurance coverage for birth control. The emailed response, she said,didn’t specifically mention birth control at all. And she wasn’t alone.
The Keep Birth Control Copay Free campaign, launched in May and funded by the Women’s Equality Center, offers a form email that users can send to the White House. “I demand you keep birth control copay free,” the message begins. “Why? Because it’s absolutely critical to women’s health, equality and empowerment.”
When Charissa used the website to send the message, she got the following response from the White House:
Thank you for taking the time to express your views regarding abortion.
The right to life is fundamental and universal. As your President, I am dedicated to protecting the lives of every American, including the unborn.
As I have made clear, organizations like Planned Parenthood should not receive Federal funding if they perform abortions. For that reason, I was proud to sign into law a bill that allows States to prioritize how they spend their Federal family planning grant money, including the choice to withhold taxpayer funding from organizations that insist on performing abortions.
I am also dedicated to ensuring that America does not fund abortions abroad. That is why one of the first actions I took as President was to reinstate and modernize the Mexico City policy, which ensures that American taxpayer dollars are not used to fund organizations that perform abortions in foreign countries.
At the same time, I am deeply committed to investing in women’s health and support Federal funding for programs that provide world-class services for women, such as cardiovascular care, breast and cervical cancer screenings, family planning and gynecological care, and obstetrics and prenatal care. I will continue to advocate for policies that promote better healthcare for women.
Thank you again for your suggestions. As President, I am committed to protecting the right to life and supporting women’s health services. Please visit www.WhiteHouse.gov to read more on how I am delivering on these issues for the American people.
The message was electronically signed by Trump (see the image below). Vox used a method recently outlined by ProPublica to authenticate the email’s ARC signature, a way of determining that it was not tampered with by the recipient.
Courtesy of Charissa
As it turns out, Charissa wasn’t the only one to receive this message — other users of the Keep Birth Control Copay Free website have as well, according to a spokesperson for the campaign.
The White House has not yet responded to questions from Vox about the message Charissa received. But in the past, the Trump administration has spread faulty information on contraception — and one influential member of the administration has argued that many types of birth control are actually forms of abortion.
“I was really confused and frustrated with the response,” Charissa said. “If American people take the time to voice their opinions about something,” she added, it’s important “that they’re at least getting an accurate statement back.”
The Trump administration has a history of promoting misinformation on contraception
The message Charissa got wasn’t the only response received by users of the email form at Keep Birth Control Copay Free. According to the campaign, some users received the following instead, also electronically signed by the president:
Thank you for taking the time to express your views regarding religious liberty.
I have signed an Executive Order entitled “Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty,” which is based on the fundamental principle, enshrined in the First Amendment of our Constitution, that the government should not discriminate against or punish Americans or their organizations simply because of their religious beliefs. It is improper for the government to make religious organizations, such as schools, churches, hospitals, and charities, choose between violating their religious beliefs and closing their doors.
I firmly believe that America is stronger when people of faith and their organizations can exercise their religion freely. These people and organizations are often government’s most effective partners in caring for the sick and elderly, assisting the poor, educating the young, and showing love and compassion to all. America’s tradition of welcoming faith into the public square is a source of our strength.
Unfortunately, we have occasionally lost sight of the importance of religious freedom. Changes to the Federal tax code made by the Johnson Amendment, for example, prohibit churches and religious organizations from participating or intervening in certain types of political campaigns. This law inhibits our faith leaders from speaking freely about moral and other issues without fear of retribution.
Only Congress can repeal the Johnson Amendment, but I have done everything in my power to limit its infringement on critical First Amendment rights. My Executive Order helps ensure that churches and religious organizations are able to take public positions on moral and political issues without undue Government interference.
My Executive Order also addresses harmful Obamacare regulations that require employer-provided healthcare plans to cover certain items and services that may violate their religious or moral beliefs. These regulations force such organizations to choose between following their consciences and facing severe penalties. The government should not force law-abiding organizations to make this choice.
Thank you again for writing. Our First Amendment right to practice our faith freely, without government penalties, must be defended. As President, I am committed to protecting religious liberty for all Americans.
“The Trump administration’s response just shows they have a single, sweeping reproductive health agenda: putting basic, essential care, including birth control and abortion, out of reach for millions of Americans,” said Amy Runyon-Harms, the coordinator of the Keep Birth Control Copay Free campaign, in a statement to Vox.
It’s not clear why the White House sent these particular emails in response to messages about birth control, but the fact that multiple users received each one suggests that the responses were intentional, not a mistake. And the Trump administration has been spreading anti-contraceptive messages — and conflating birth control with abortion — for some time. In particular, the administration has used misinformation about the effectiveness and safety of birth control to justify moves that would reduce access to the medication.
In October, the Trump administration released new rules allowing any employer to seek an exemption from the birth control coverage requirement for moral or religious reasons. Included in the rules were misrepresentations of the science around birth control, as Vox’s Julia Belluz has noted.
The administration questioned whether birth control really works to reduce unintended pregnancy, despite clear evidence that it does. In one 2014 study, for instance, researchers provided a group of teenagers with free birth control and followed them for three years; their rates of pregnancy — and abortion — were less than half those of other American teens.
The rules also suggested that a birth control coverage mandate could “affect risky sexual behavior in a negative way.” This claim is not supported by research, as Belluz notes. It also harks back to arguments used by anti-contraception advocates as long ago as the 1870s.
Several people working on health care policy in the Trump administration have expressed both anti-abortion and anti-contraception views. Notably, Matthew Bowman, a lawyer at the Department of Health and Human Services who was reportedly a key author of the new birth control regulations, wrote in 2011 that the Obama administration’s contraceptive coverage mandate included “several drugs or devices that cause the demise of an already conceived but not yet implanted human embryo, such as certain intrauterine devices (IUDs). Likewise in that category are many birth control methods that potentially prevent embryos from implantation, such as ‘the Pill’ and ‘emergency contraception.’” Bowman also referred to the contraceptive coverage mandate as “the HHS abortifacient mandate.”
Opponents of birth control have long argued that many forms should be considered abortifacients because they can prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. In fact, daily birth control pills, IUDs, emergency contraception, and other hormonal methods work primarily by inhibiting ovulation, fertilization, or both — not by stopping already fertilized eggs from implanting. Scientists say that the morning-after pill, a subject of controversy in recent years, does not prevent implantation of fertilized eggs. In some cases, a copper IUD inserted after sex can act as emergency contraception, and may inhibit implantation — but studies suggest this is relatively uncommon. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is clear: “FDA-approved contraceptive methods are not abortifacients.”
Though the Trump administration’s new rules on birth control went into effect immediately, they are not technically final, and the Health and Human Services Department accepted public comments on them until December 5. More than half a million Americans wrote to the administration to protest the broad exemptions offered by the new regulations and to ask HHS to protect birth control access. The rules have also been challenged in court, and a judge has blocked them from being enforced nationwide until the case is heard.
Charissa decided to join those writing to oppose the new rules because of how much the contraceptive mandate meant to her. “I remember the first time picking up my birth control prescription and not having to pay for a copay,” she said, “and it was just this incredibly validating feeling knowing that the Obama administration cared about women.”
Copays can be a real economic obstacle for many women, she added. “I wouldn’t want us to go back to that.”
Sadly, there’s overwhelming evidence to suggest that the short-term future will be, at best, challenging for the pro-choice movement. For one, President-elect Donald Trump has taken many hostile stances on abortion access for women, including a promise that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who undergo the procedure. After heavy backlash, he walked back the statement, redefining himself as “pro-life with exceptions.”
Regardless of Trump’s personal views, there’s mounting evidence that so-called pro-life activists are emboldened by Trump’s Electoral College victory. In the last two weeks alone, Texas passed a law requiring the burial of aborted fetuses, and an Ohio law that would ban abortion at six weeks, with no exceptions for rape and incest, was approved by its state legislature. In Trump’s America, it seems, women’s reproductive rights will constantly be under attack. This grim procession of new abortion restrictions appear to decidedly ignore a woman’s constitutional right to control her own body, which was affirmed in 1973’s Roe v. Wade, and they often rely on emotional pseudoscience. With that in mind, I’d like to propose that we stop using the term “pro-life” once and for all and start calling that position what it really is: anti-choice.
The term “pro-life” is a dishonest phrase designed to manipulate emotions instead of clarify a difference of opinion. People who are pro-choice are not anti-life. Many pro-choicers believe that life begins at birth, not conception. Others are personally opposed to abortion, but believe that women should have the right to make that decision for themselves.
SOURCE: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
Tim Kaine, for example, personally opposes abortion, as do many Catholic Democrats. But Kaine is pro-choice because he understands that the issue of choice is separate from his personal beliefs about the procedure. Moreover, Kaine wants to reduce the number of abortions in the United States, but seeks to do so though “education and access to health care and contraception rather than criminalizing women’s reproductive decisions.”
He’s right. Abstinence-only sexual education actually increases teen pregnancy rates, according to a 2011 study. Researchers Kathrin W. Stanger-Hall and David W. Hall of the University of Georgia concluded that the available data showed the “increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates.” Comprehensive sex ed, on the other hand, has been shown to decrease teen pregnancy rates by 50 percent, according to a study published in The Journal of Adolescent Health, cited in a 2008 ABC News article.
You know what else reduces abortion? Planned Parenthood. According to Slate’s William Saletan, Planned Parenthood promotes the most effective methods of birth control and accurately empowers women to use them. “Planned Parenthood is the world’s leading provider of birth control,” he wrote in 2015, when some Republicans in Congress were threatening to defund the organization. “By undercutting this work, Republicans are threatening to cause an increase in the number of unintended pregnancies. And that, in turn, would lead to more abortions.”
Perhaps neither anti-choicers nor Sen. Kaine would choose abortion for their own families, but only anti-choicers seek to eliminate the option for abortion instead of examining the systemic causes of unplanned pregnancy. Kaine knows that women should make that decision themselves.
SOURCE: Andrew Burton/Getty Images News/Getty Images
The term “pro-life” also highlights a major question about that movement: Which lives are they in favor of, exactly? Women who lose access to abortion sometimes try to self-induce, according to The Huffington Post, by using misoprostol, which can be “life-threatening”without medical supervision.
Furthermore, when anti-choicers move to defund Planned Parenthood, they risk the lives of thousands of women who rely on its other health services. By detecting early-stage breast and cervical cancer through the exams it offers, Planned Parenthood saved the lives of 88,000 women between 2012 and 2013. An additional 900,000 American women received low-cost cancer screening at Planned Parenthood locations in 2015, according to the organization’s reports.
I cannot call a group “pro-life” if its efforts contribute to jeopardizing the life of an adult woman, whether it’s a woman attempting to terminate a pregnancy without medical help, a suffering would-be mother whose wanted pregnancy has gone horribly wrong, or a woman who relies on Planned Parenthood’s easy access to cancer screenings.
Simply put, risking the lives of American women is not pro-life. It’s anti-choice.
On Monday a federal judge found that the Trump Administration cannot block two more undocumented teens from accessing abortions. But the fight is not over; the ruling was issued with a 24-hour stay so that the administration could appeal the ruling. Just after the decision came down, the government appealed the ruling to the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and the Supreme Court.
US District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan addressed the situation of the women who are currently in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the government agency that’s in charge of resettling refugees and undocumented minors. She wrote that her ruling was necessary to protect the women’s “constitutional right to decide whether to carry their pregnancies to term.”
Their situation is very similar to another woman, given the name Jane Doe, who was initially denied an abortion while under the supervision of the ame agency. She was able to have one, but only after a month’s wait and many rounds of appeals. Chutkan was the same judge to initially hear that case.
In a statement to Bustle, Brigitte Amiri, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project and a lawyer working on the case, painted the ruling as a win, noting that “justice prevailed”:
The ACLU further detailed what they claim is troublesome new policy by the Office of Refugee Resettlement . Not only have the women been denied access to abortions, but they have forced them to attend religious anti-abortion centers to receive counseling that pressures them to continue their pregnancies as well as have unwanted sonograms. They’ve also kept them from medical appointments, the ACLU contends.
Bustle reached out to the Office of Refugee Resettlement and its director Scott Lloyd for comment through the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), the area of the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) that the agency falls under. The ACF responded with the following statement:
Lloyd has, according to the ACLU, even contacted some of these women personally, urging them to carry their pregnancies to term. Shelters who are contracted by the Office of Refugee Resettlement are not to allow women to see attorneys or otherwise seek to get an abortion unless Lloyd personally approves.
Last week the Administration for Children and Families did comment to the Associated Press about the women. “The minors in this case — who entered the country illegally — have the option to voluntarily depart to their home country or find a suitable sponsor. If they choose not to exercise these options, HHS does not believe we are required to facilitate the abortion,” the statement provided to the AP read.
Those fighting the Trump Administration have found allies in 12 state attorneys general who have pushed the federal government to allow the women abortion access. The group, led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneidermanreleased a statement in support of the women:
If a further stay is not granted, the woman should be able to access abortion as soon as Tuesday. It is unclear what states they’re being held in, but one is almost 22 weeks pregnant. In many states abortion is no longer a legal optionafter 22 or 24 weeks. The woman does not have time for endless appeals.
With a Friday deadline looming, a fight over health care funding and abortion could shut down the government. House Republicans are demanding that Obamacare measures in the spending bill — which would avert the shutdown — must include Hyde Amendment language to prevent federal money from funding abortion procedures.
The drama begins with the GOP tax bill that passed the Senate yesterday on a purely partisan vote of 51 to 48. One of the key Senate votes was Susan Collins, the Republican from Maine. She made a deal with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to vote for the tax plan only if a few other bills passed, including extra funds to stabilize the health care markets.
But now those other bills are at risk because anti-abortion activists want to carve out an exception explicitly in the spending bill that would prevent the federal funds from paying for abortion. The Hyde Amendment already does that, but this would strengthen the language and could result in private insurance plans, partially paid for with government subsidies, not covering the procedure.
Collins’ main hesitation to vote for the tax bill seemed to be its inclusion of the individual mandate repeal — that’s essentially the failed skinny repeal of Obamacare from earlier this year that kills the requirement for people buy insurance. Repealing the individual mandate would result in premiums rising, and Collins expressed concern that the premium increases would eat away at any potential tax cut that middle-class Americans saw. So she had McConnell promise her that they would pass other bills to stabilize the insurance markets.
Now it’s time to pass the bills he promised — one measure would give insurance companies stabilization funds to provide discounted deductibles and copays to poor consumers, and another would award states billions of dollars to help cover patients in high-risk pools. But many GOP members in the House won’t vote for these measures unless there’s this abortion carveout.
“It needs to have Hyde,” GOP co-chairman of the Pro-Life Caucus Rep. Chris Smith told The Hill.
Matters become even trickier when these measures are added to the stopgap government funding bill that would keep the government open past Friday, the shutdown deadline. Now both Democrats and Republicans are digging in on both sides of the abortion fight.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told The Hill that adding Hyde Amendment language to the bill would “kill it altogether.” At least eight Democratic or Independent votes are needed to pass the bill in the Senate. Senate Republicans might support the bill even without the abortion language, but the House is another story.
Sen. John Thune of South Dakota told The Hill that it’s likely to come down to a fight in the House.
Several GOP representatives suggested that the House Speaker Paul Ryan would not yield on the matter. Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma told The Hill it would be unlikely to pass without the wording being added.
Ryan himself has not spoken out on the matter, but he and McConnell will need to come to some sort of arrangement — one that garners eight votes from across the Senate aisle — if they want to avoid a shutdown.
Vasquez’s supporters in El Salvador and internationally see these events as a referendum on the ability of Salvadoran courts to serve the interests of justice, especially for women living in poverty.
In 2007, 24-year-old Teodora Vasquez was working in the cafeteria of a school in San Salvador. Vasquez, who was the mother of a 3-year-old boy, was pregnant and awaiting the birth of her second child when she miscarried in a bathroom. Oscar Rivera/AFP/Getty Images
Evidence provided to Congress by state attorneys general and health departments proves that abortion is both extremely safe and highly regulated. Searchable by state.
On the morning of December 13, Teodora Vasquez entered a courtroom in El Salvador, where abortion is banned in all cases, hoping she’d be going home with her parents and son that evening for the first time in a decade. Vasquez had already served ten years of a 30-year prison sentence for aggravated homicide following a stillbirth.
During the new trial in the country’s Second Court of Appeal last week, two expert witnesses testified that no crime had been committed and that the death was from natural causes. Still, the three-judge panel—Judges Alejandro Guevara, José Luis Giammattei, and María del Pilar Abrego—reaffirmed their original decision. Vasquez was sent back to prison to serve out the remaining 20 years of her sentence.
Vasquez’s supporters in El Salvador and internationally see these events as a referendum on the ability of Salvadoran courts to serve the interests of justice, especially for women living in poverty.
In 2007, the 24-year-old Vasquez was working in the cafeteria of a school in San Salvador. Vasquez, who was the mother of a 3-year-old boy, was pregnant and awaiting the birth of her second child. According to repeated testimony she has given over the years, while at work she began to feel intense pains, and knew it was time to go to the hospital. She made several phone calls to the police, who frequently provide emergency transportation in El Salvador, but, she says, they never responded. During the long wait, she felt the need to use the bathroom. There, she says, she felt something fall from her body. She fainted, came to for a few moments, and fainted again.
Eventually, she emerged from the bathroom. When other workers saw the blood from her severe hemorrhaging, they called police. This time, the police arrived and arrested Vasquez, who had lost consciousness again. When she awoke, she says, police were questioning her about why she killed her baby. She was taken to the hospital, and then to prison. In 2008, she was sentenced to 30 years for aggravated homicide.
While in prison, Vasquez became part of the group known as “Las 17,” women convicted of aggravated homicide after experiencing obstetric complications and precipitous births without medical attention. With support from the Agrupación Ciudadana por la Despenalización del Aborto (Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion) in El Salvador, the 17 women each requested a pardon from the Salvadoran government. All but two requests were denied, including Vasquez’s.
Morena Herrera, Agrupación president, said at a press conference the day after Vasquez’s hearing that the group knows of at least 28 women currently serving sentences similar to Vasquez’s. Two more, she said, are still awaiting trials.
In seeking to gain Vasquez’s freedom, the Agrupación and Vasquez’s attorney, Victor Hugo Mata Tobar, requested a revision of the original conviction. The criminal law branch of the Salvadoran Supreme Court granted the request, but named the same three-judge panel that had convicted Vasquez ten years ago to hear the case. Mata Tobar appealed and asked to have those judges recused, but the higher court insisted the judges could be impartial.
Still, Omar Flores, an attorney with the Salvadoran legal foundation FESPAD, noted his concern at the press conference that, as far as he saw it, “The proceedings gave preference to the prosecutor’s case while ignoring the scientific evidence and studies that demonstrated Teodora’s innocence.”
That evidence included testimony from two witnesses—a Salvadoran OB-GYN and a Guatemalan forensic medical specialist and attorney—who explained that asphyxiation connected to childbirth is not caused by some type of mechanical strangulation carried out by a person, which is what the prosecution accused Vasquez of doing. Rather, this medical phenomenon can happen due to natural causes before, during, or after birth and involves no criminal activity.
After the judges ruled against Vasquez a second time, civil society organizations denounced the double standard under which the judicial system operates in El Salvador. They argued that accused aggressors are “treated with indulgence,” and often allowed to wait for trials out of prison, while women like Vasquez are treated as guilty from the beginning.
Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, qualified the decision not to release Vasquez as an outrageous step backward for justice.
Although Vasquez was convicted of aggravated homicide and not abortion, a chorus of national and international bodies argued that the country’s anti-abortion law helps create a social and legal climate that leads to the imprisonment of women who have pregnancies that end in the death of the fetus, even when there is no evidence of criminal activity. Many of these organizations renewed their calls for the Salvadoran government to take action to end the practice of prohibiting all abortions and of using the anti-abortion law as part of a mechanism to criminalize women living in poverty who have obstetric complications.
A December 15 press briefing from Liz Throssell, spokesperson for the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, noted that “El Salvador’s Penal Code disproportionately affects women living in poverty, such as Teodora. We have not seen women from wealthier backgrounds jailed under similar circumstances in El Salvador.”
It urged the Salvadoran government to “review all cases where women have been detained for abortion-related offenses. If it is found that these cases were not compliant with international standards, the women should be immediately released.” As the Agrupación announced, the European Parliament had issued a similar resolution on December 14 specifically noting Vasquez’s case, along with that of Evelyn Beatriz Hernandez Cruz.
Throssell concluded, “Basically they are being convicted for being women, for losing a child, and for being poor.”
According to Herrera, the Agrupación is already working with partners such as the Center for Reproductive Rights and Amnesty International to investigate other possible legal avenues to secure Vasquez’s release from prison, both through the Salvadoran courts and through the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR). The IAHRC has already admitted—meaning accepted and will have hearings for—other cases of Salvadoran women with similar convictions.
Vasquez stated before the hearing that she had confidence that the court would “rectify the error” because “I know I am not guilty.”
The Agrupación will also continue exploring legal options for the other women behind bars. As Herrera told Rewire, “The citizenry of this country—but above all those who live in situations of poverty—do not have their rights protected when facing the judicial system.”
Anti-choice Trump administration officials are again standing in the way of immigrant teens seeking abortion care.
Outside of The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, activists rally in support Jane Doe on October 20.
Lauryn Gutierrez / Rewire
UPDATE, December 19, 9:13 a.m.: A federal judge on Monday issued a temporary restraining order barring Trump administration officials from preventing the two teenage immigrants from seeking abortion care. The administration said it would allow one of the teens to receive abortion care, but requested a stay for the other teen, the Los Angeles Timesreported.
After losing its fight to keep Jane Doe—a teenager whose abortion care was delayedbecause of court proceedings—from making her own reproductive health-care decisions, the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is once again attempting to block unaccompanied immigrant minors from accessing care.
Little is known about the two teenage girls, known as Jane Roe and Jane Poe,requesting access to abortion. Minors in ORR custody are often asylum-seeking young people from Central America. Many young women are escaping gender-based violence. Brigitte Amiri, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Reproductive Freedom Project, told Rewire in Octoberthat many of the girls and women in ORR’s care are pregnant as a result of being raped on their journey to the United States. Amiri said the stats for unaccompanied immigrant minors are similar to those of other migrant women. An estimated 80 percent of Central American women crossing Mexico en route to the United States are raped along the way, according to a 2014 report from Splinter.
Amiri was in court Monday, requesting an emergency order to prevent the Trump administration from denying the teenagers access to care based on a new ORR policy devised by anti-choice advocates.
The Trump administration in March implemented a revised policy “that allows [shelters] to wield an unconstitutional veto power over unaccompanied immigrant minors’ access to abortion,” according to court documents. This directive prevents unaccompanied immigrant minors in ORR’s care from obtaining abortion care by prohibiting federally funded shelters from taking “’any action that facilitates’ abortion access to unaccompanied minors in their care without ‘direction and approval’” from ORR Director Scott Lloyd. Advocates charge that Lloyd is a religious fanatic unqualified for his position as ORR director. He is considered by advocates to be an ideological pick by the Trump administration.
Lloyd has gone to great lengths to coerce immigrant teens to carry unwanted pregnancies, including using taxpayer funds to fly to shelters to “counsel” teens about their choices, despite admitting to having no counseling or medical experience. Lloyd has a well-documented history with so-called crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), or fake clinics, which provide people with false information to dissuade them from seeking abortion care. These clinics compose almost all of the approved counseling centers listed by ORR for minors requesting abortion care. An investigation by Reveal found that this list came from the anti-abortion advocacy group Heartbeat International, whose mission is “to make abortion unwanted today and unthinkable for future generations.”
The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Administration for Children and Families, the agency that oversees ORR, is arguing that because Jane Roe and Jane Poe entered the United States without authorization, they can “voluntarily depart to their home country or find a suitable sponsor,” according to the Washington Post. If the girls choose not to return to their countries of origin or cannot find a suitable sponsor, “HHS does not believe [it’s] required to facilitate the abortion.”
The government made the same arguments in Jane Doe’s case. During an October hearing, Amiri said that if Jane Doe was an adult in an immigrant detention center overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or was an undocumented adult in prison for committing a crime, her abortion care would not have been delayed. But because she was a minor in legal custody of ORR—and ORR maintains an interest in “fetal life and child birth”—the teen was forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy.
When asked by the court to clarify why Jane Doe could access abortion care as an undocumented adult in detention or prison but not as an undocumented minor detained in a shelter, the government’s counsel said the difference was that Jane Doe has the option of “voluntary departure.” Voluntary departure means that Jane Doe, who fled an abusive home in Central America where her teenage sister was beaten by her parents for being pregnant, could have self-deported to her country of origin, where abortion is illegal. The government argued that presenting voluntary departure to Jane Doe as her primary option did not constitute an undue burden.
Sponsorship is not easy to come by for immigrant girls seeking abortion care in ORR custody. Jane Doe has been in ORR custody for months and has had multiple sponsors denied by the agency. In November, Amiri told Rewire she doesn’t know the reason the teen is still in custody. A federal appeals court on October 20 gave the teen until October 31 to secure a sponsor so that she could access abortion care, and the federal government said it could find Jane Doe a sponsor by that date. But as of November 30, Jane Doe was still without a sponsor. This means that had Jane Doe’s attorneys not continued to fight for her to access care sooner than the October 31 deadline, she would have passed the 20-week mark and been forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy; ultimately, she was able to secure abortion care. Part of the reason Jane Doe may not have secured a sponsor is because the government is fighting for the ability to inform any potential sponsor that Jane Doe has accessed abortion care, a violation of her rights.
An ACLU spokesperson told Rewire they are anticipating a decision regarding the emergency order for Jane Roe and Jane Poe “within hours” of today’s 10:30 a.m. ET court hearing. The ACLU is expecting the federal government to “immediately appeal” the decision, with the possibility of the case quickly heading to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We were incredibly critical of how the Obama administration expanded detention and deportation, but the biggest difference under the Trump administration is what appears to be a total lack of concern for the welfare of immigrants in custody.”
By holding pregnant women, ICE is in direct violation of its own memo and of “accepted medical standards and practices concerning pregnant women,” according to the organizations behind a complaint. John Moore/Getty Images
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in August 2016 issued a policy recommending that pregnant people “generally not be detained.” Aside from incidents of mandatory detention or extraordinary circumstances, ICE followed that strategy.
But there are indications that the federal immigration agency has revoked that policy and is now detaining pregnant people “at the rate of one per day,” according to advocates.
These are women like Sara, a 27-year-old Honduran woman, and Emma, who migrated to the United States from El Salvador with her five-year-old son. Both were detained at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, one of the nation’s three family detention centers. After being raped, Sara fled Honduras with her 8-year-old daughter. After experiencing violence and receiving death threats in El Salvador, Emma was raped and tortured in Mexico while en route to the United States. Upon being taken into custody, both women informed immigration officials that they were pregnant, yet they remained detained by ICE. Sara was released after a week, while Emma and her child were detained for at least 20 days.
Cases like Sara’s and Emma’s have been detailed in an administrative complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on behalf of pregnant people detained by ICE. The organizations behind the complaint assert that ICE has failed to implement its policy limiting the detention of pregnant people, while subjecting them to inhumane conditions and inadequate medical care. These organizations include the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Immigration Council (AIC), the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the Center for Refugee and Gender Studies, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), and the Women’s Refugee Commission.
Emma, in the complaint, details her fears concerning her pregnancy and her experiences in the U.S. immigration system after presenting herself as an asylum seeker at the port of entry, in accordance with asylum law:
I wanted to explain to the immigration officer who processed me about my rape and show him that my fingernails were missing [as part of the torture inflicted on her], but he said, “No, don’t tell me anything. You all say the same thing.” I told the immigration officials at the border that I might be pregnant but that I was bleeding. They took me in a car to a hospital. I was given two ultrasounds: one of my stomach and one of my vagina. The doctor told me that I was pregnant and that my pregnancy was high risk. He told me that I have an infection, and gave me pills.
I was taken back to the border, where we slept in the cold on very thin mattresses. Most people were given only aluminum blankets but I as given a real one. I still could not sleep, however, because there were so many children crying. I could not eat because the smell of food makes me want to vomit.
All of these experiences have been very traumatizing for me. I have not heard any news of my four children, but am afraid to try to contact them because of my husband. I also know that my husband will kill me if he ever finds out that I got pregnant by another man. At the same time, I do not want to have this baby, and especially not from rape. However, I am from a Christian church and know that it would be a sin not to have the baby and am afraid of having a miscarriage due to my big-risk pregnancy. It is very stressful for me to be in detention while going through all of these difficult emotions, and not feeling well.
Katie Shepherd, the national advocacy counsel for the Immigration Justice Campaign at AIC, said ICE detaining pregnant women on a daily basis becomes “more significant” if the context is understood: Many of the women are pregnant as a result of rape. Eighty percent of Central American girls and women crossing Mexico en route to the United States are raped along the way, according to a 2014 report from Fusion.
Beginning in the fall of 2015, Shepherd spent nearly a year working as AIC’s managing attorney at Dilley. If members of AIC encountered a pregnant person in the detainee population, they would notify ICE if the agency hadn’t caught it during the medical screening at intake. Those people, almost immediately, would be transferred out of Dilley.
In November 2016, Shepherd noticed a shift. This was during the time when Haitian immigrants were being detained in large numbers and Shepherd experienced difficulty securing the release of a pregnant Haitian woman. In early 2017, pregnant people were “sporadically being detained,” but the national advocacy counsel said that in recent months there has been a “huge uptick” in the number of pregnant people detained. Shepherd says it’s her estimation that one new pregnant woman a day is being detained and unlike before, women aren’t being released until after they pass their credible fear interview. Pregnant people were once released immediately no matter where they were in the asylum process, which includes a credible fear interview with an asylum officer to determine if they have legitimate reasons to fear returning to their country of origin. If they fail this interview, they are deported.
“Not only have women experienced a lot of trauma from being raped, from the violence they are fleeing [in their countries of origin], but then they have the experience of being detained while pregnant and the pressure of having to pass this life-altering interview while enduring all of this. It can’t be overstated how these conditions have a negative impact on their case and impact their ability to present their case,” Shepherd said.
Amy Fischer, policy director at RAICES, told Rewire that ICE’s policy regarding pregnant people in detention likely came about because of the type of concerns advocacy organizations outlined in their complaint to DHS.
“As our complaint details, women are currently experiencing miscarriages because of terrible medical care, as well as complications to their pregnancy because of inadequate medical care. In 2016, ICE recognized there were dangers associated with detaining women who are pregnant. Its policy was an attempt to address this, but now we’re seeing them backtrack on it,” Fischer said.
Fischer, whose organization RAICES primarily works with women in family detention, said that until very recently, ICE had a clear policy on how it treated women in the detention system: Girls and women ages 10-56 were given pregnancy tests upon intake into a facility. If they were found to be pregnant, they were released from detention within 24 hours. The complaint details multiple instances in which pregnancy tests issued by ICE came out as negative, though the women were later found to be pregnant. Shepherd said this is illustrative of the care that people in detention receive, but nevertheless, when advocacy organizations who were working directly with women in detention suspected a woman was showing signs of pregnancy, she was referred to ICE, who issued another pregnancy test. If the results were positive, she was released.
“Everyone who is part of the complaint has had different experiences with ICE as it relates to its policy concerning pregnant women, but what we all had in common was the experience that getting a pregnant woman out of detention wasn’t hard. All of our experiences over the last couple of months seems to indicate that there may have been an internal memo or communication of some kind that informed staff ICE’s previous policy was being changed or revoked because the new approach of holding women who were pregnant until after they passed their credible fear interviews appears widespread. We’re seeing this at Karnes and Dilley [family detention centers] and at detention centers around the country,” Fischer said.
There has been a sizable increase in the detention of women migrants under President Trump. As of April 2016, around 4,829 women were detained in ICE facilities, including family detention centers, constituting 14.6 percent of the total detained population in ICE custody that day, according to information obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on file with the Women’s Refugee Commission. Immigration arrests of women increased by 35 percent in the first four months of 2017, compared to the same period in 2016, KUOW reported, and “292 pregnant women were held in ICE detention centers nationwide” during the first four months of this year.
ICE told Reveal that as of September 13, it was holding 33 pregnant people in custody.
Shepherd told Rewire that none of the pregnant people in detention she has encountered were subject to mandatory detention or being held because of “extraordinary circumstances,” which translates to being considered flight risks or having criminal histories. That means there’s no reason ICE should have held them after confirming they were pregnant, Shepherd said.
By holding pregnant people, ICE is in direct violation of its own memo and of “accepted medical standards and practices concerning pregnant women,” according to the organizations behind the complaint. But ICE is also in violation of larger standards of care, including the Performance Based National Detention Standards (PBNDS) addressing medical care for women and ICE Family Residential Standards.
Family Residential Standards are vague, saying only that “female residents will have access to pregnancy testing and specified pregnancy management services.” Under certain circumstances, abortion care is provided in the PBNDS, but abortion is not outlined in the Family Residential Standards that apply to family detention centers, which is where Central American asylum seeking women who migrated with their children are detained. In other words, the people most likely to experience rape migrating to the United States may not have abortion as an option once they are inevitably funneled into family detention.
Shepherd said ICE should immediately release anyone found to be pregnant, but if the agency is going to revoke its policy, the least ICE officials could do is offer specialized care and all of the services outlined in the PBNDS and Family Residential Standards, as well as counseling.
“One thing that’s not stressed enough in any of the standards is access to psychological services,” Shepherd said. “There is overlap between a person’s mental state and the physical symptoms they are experiencing, all of which translate to additional obstacles women face when presenting their cases.”
Shepherd has encountered numerous cases in which people in detention have had to ask for specialized care repeatedly, including when they were bleeding, experiencing back and stomach pain, or showing other signs of complications. In some instances, it was known by ICE that these people had high-risk pregnancies.
Advocates said ICE is attempting to justify detaining pregnant people by claiming it’s an effort to give them access to counsel. Fischer told Rewire that an attorney with RAICES working at Karnes, a family detention center in Texas, was told by ICE that pregnant people were being detained “to help them have their credible fear interview, because they were previously missing out on that process.” Anyone with a valid asylum claim can apply for asylum without ever being detained, so ICE’s assertion is “dishonest at best,” according to Fischer.
“One of my biggest concerns is that under Trump, the detention system will only expand and there has already been a lot of talk about reducing the standards in these facilities. We were incredibly critical of how the Obama administration expanded detention and deportation, but the biggest difference under the Trump administration is what appears to be a total lack of concern for the welfare of immigrants in custody,” Fischer said. “We’re already seeing a lot of in-custody deaths. Our fear is that no concern will be shown regarding the fact that ICE is detaining vulnerable pregnant women who have experienced a great deal of trauma already. Not only will they be detained, but they are being detained in facilities under inhumane conditions with substandard medical care, and they have very little recourse to hold anyone accountable.”
“Public health is one of these disciplines where nobody really thinks about it until there is a crisis,” says Caitlin Gerdts, vice president for research at Ibis Reproductive Health.
Though Fitzgerald’s most recent position was as Georgia’s public health commissioner, she also worked as an advisor on health care to Republican Newt Gingrich and mounted two failed Congressional campaigns in the early 1990s. Georgia DPH / YouTube
Abortion is among the safest medical procedures in the United States. Yet, myths about its safety abound. False Witnesses reveals the individuals behind these lies.
The Trump administration announced in early July that Brenda Fitzgerald, a Georgia OB-GYN and the state’s commissioner of public health, would head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), raising questions about the potential effects of politically-charged decisions by the critical agency.
Researchers who track the relationship between public health policy and reproductive rights said a CDC chief’s actions can have wide-reaching consequences.
“Public health is one of these disciplines where nobody really thinks about it until there is a crisis,” says Caitlin Gerdts, vice president for research at Ibis Reproductive Health.
Gerdts, a reproductive epidemiologist, told Rewire that while many don’t consider the importance of public health until there is “some kind of disease outbreak or a public health system failure … we are all, every single day, living with the benefits of centuries now of important public health interventions—anything from refrigeration, to vaccination, to sanitation has all come from public health.”
That is just one of the reasons why the work the CDC does is so important. Among its public health initiatives are programs that focus specifically on reproductive health research. According to Gerdts, “paying attention to and advancing the science around preventative health care and reproductive health, and access to reproductive health, is a critical function of the CDC.”
Lawrence B. Finer, vice president for domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute, told Rewire that the CDC’s work “makes contributions to not just health treatment, but health research in a very broad range of areas,” including reproductive health. Citing the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) as an example, Finer explained that the program functions as “an incredibly important source of information on data on health in the U.S., specifically with regards to reproductive health.”
The NCHS collects data used to drive policy, and one of those data sets—the National Survey of Family Growth—is “probably the most important survey of reproductive health behaviors” in the country, Finer said.
That survey is “the best source of information in the U.S. on sexual activity, contraceptive usage, behavior and pregnancy intentions, pregnancies and their outcomes—the full range of reproductive health behaviors in the U.S.,” he said.
The CDC also houses a division that oversees reproductive health and, according to its website, “provides technical assistance, consultation, and training worldwide to help others identify and address male and female reproductive issues, maternal health, and infant health issues.”
While these programs exist within the agency, how they function and are prioritized can change at the discretion of presidential administrations. Gerdts pointed to the CDC’s work on abortion under the Reagan administration as an example. In the aftermath of Roev. Wade, there was “a push towards monitoring of abortion and … a great deal of interest in tracking maternal mortality throughout the country,” including the “negative health effects of unsafe abortion in our country,” she said.
“During the Reagan administration, that work really came to a halt because the administration was anti-choice and it was not a priority.”
In 1989, a congressional committee alleged that the Reagan administration had “suppressed research on abortion because they opposed the procedure,” according to an article published that year in New Scientist. The magazine reported that David Grimes, who had worked as chief of the Abortion Surveillance Branch at the CDC, testified about the work the Republican administration had done to push its anti-choice agenda:
According to Grimes, in 1983, the White House wanted Willard Cates, then in charge of the reproductive health division of the CDC, to be fired or transferred because he appeared to back abortion. Cates was demoted and moved to the section on sexually transmitted diseases.
Grimes also told the committee that the CDC censored two articles he had written for medical journals, one because it mentioned the word abortion twice in a manuscript of approximately 5000 words. In 1985, the CDC assembled a group of experts to write guidelines to prevent transmission of AIDS from mother to fetus. ‘It was tacitly understood by everyone present that the word ‘abortion’ could not appear in a federal document during the Reagan administration,’ Grimes told the committee. The published guidelines made no mention of abortion as an option for a pregnant woman infected with HIV.
Even under pro-choice administrations that have primarily relied on evidence-based decision-making, how the president handles abortion and reproductive health can have an outsized effect on CDC policy. “I think it is particularly challenging to be a CDC employee in a country where, you know, they are charged with advancing science but there are laws on the books—I can think specifically of the Helms Amendment—that can often be misinterpreted,” said Gerdts.
Though President Barack Obama largely supported abortion access, he never clarified if the Helms Amendment, which bans foreign assistance for abortion, applied to cases of rape, incest, and life endangerment.
“While [the Helms Amendment] is really meant to prevent any funding from going to provide abortions, many of the federal agencies interpreted it as sort of a muzzle, and really shy away from even talking about scientific evidence around abortion,” said Gerdts. “So the Zika advisory and sort of guidance the CDC issued for clinicians really didn’t include pregnancy options counseling.”
Under an administration hostile to abortion and evidence-based science, things could get even worse—a major concern given the Trump administration’s embrace of anti-choice activism and disregard for science on abortion and contraception.
A science-averse CDC director could “bring back into the public eye sort of sham science,” Gerdtz said. “You can think of in the reproductive health realm …. connections between abortion and breast cancer, which have been highlighted by ‘scientists’ who are anti-choice and who review things not using rigorous methods but who are advocating for propagating these sham connections as a way of stoking fear in the public around the safety of abortion.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price in a press release announcing her appointment said he believed Fitzgerald would bring her knowledge of medicine to the CDC.
“Having known Dr. Fitzgerald for many years, I know that she has a deep appreciation and understanding of medicine, public health, policy and leadership—all qualities that will prove vital as she leads the CDC in its work to protect America’s health 24/7,” he said.
Fitzgerald discussed her vision for the future of public health in an interview this year with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “A strong, capable, and fully functional public health system is essential for this country to have a sufficient and effective healthcare system,” she said. “Public health does those things that the private sector simply does not, and quite possibly cannot, do.”
Though Fitzgerald’s most recent position was as Georgia’s public health commissioner, she also worked as an advisor on health care to Republican Newt Gingrich and mounted two failed Congressional campaigns in the early 1990s.
A 1994 news report describing Fitzgerald’s position on abortion said she believed “the federal government should not fund abortion and opposes the freedom of choice act, but says the ultimate decision should be made by a woman in consultation with her doctor.” The Freedom of Choice Act, introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1993, said that states “may not restrict the right of a woman to choose to terminate a pregnancy” before fetal viability or “if such termination is necessary to protect the life or health of the woman.”
During her unsuccessful 1994 bid for the GOP nomination to represent Georgia’s 7th Congressional District in the U.S. House, Fitzgerald’s position on abortion rights became a contentious issue. Though Fitzgerald reportedly advocated for some abortion restrictions at the time, she did not endorse an “effort to outlaw abortions through a constitutional mandate,” leading several anti-choice groups to target her by distributing thousands of voter cards saying she was opposed to a “sanctity of life amendment,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
One of Fitzgerald’s opponents in the race suggested that she had performed abortions in her capacity as an OB-GYN, another article from the Journal-Constitution reported. Fitzgerald reportedly denied the claim.
Fitzgerald worked in private practice before being tapped by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R) to serve in the state’s health department. While working as health commissioner, Fitzgerald launched an anti-obesity program in partnership with Coca-Cola.
As the Intercept reported, “Muhtar Kent, the chief executive and chairman of Coca-Cola Company, appeared with the governor and Fitzgerald to promote the initiative, along with a pledge of $1 million from his company to fund it. Clyde Tuggle, a Coca-Cola executive responsible for the company’s lobbying strategy, was initially appointed to the board overseeing the state anti-obesity strategy, including Fitzgerald’s SHAPE initiative.”
Unlike many other programs designed to curb obesity, “the Georgia SHAPE program notably eschewed another well-known step toward healthier living: curbing sugary beverage consumption,” the Interceptnoted.
Screenshots of Fitzgerald’s biography from the Georgia health department show she identified herself as having worked in “anti-aging medicine,” according to a report from Forbes. And in screenshots from 2010, the doctor’s medical practice boasts that along with “seeing traditional gynecologic patients, we see both men and women for hormonal, nutritional, and other anti-aging concerns.”
“I’m so disappointed that the first female OB-GYN picked to head the CDC is someone who embraces the unproven and anti-scientific claims of the so-called anti-aging movement,” Cindy Pearson, executive director of the National Women’s Health Network, told Forbes.
While she didn’t comment on Fitzgerald’s appointment, Gerdts told Rewire she has a “deep respect” for those who work at the CDC. “Ensuring that they are able to do the job that they are there to do, to help the public understand what science really is and how to advance public health, is so so important,” she said.
“And reproductive health is such a crucial part of that,” she continued. “I am hopeful that any new Trump [appointment] to the CDC also adheres to the long-standing principles” of the agency.
The reality is that 10 per cent of all Irish women will experience penetrative sexual violence in their lifetime and a proportion of them will become pregnant as a result
Demonstrators at The March for Choice in Dublin PA
I left Ireland at age nineteen, thinking that by the time I was “old” – that is in my thirties – abortion would have been made legal in the country. I am now in my thirties and it is still very much illegal.
However, things might be changing. Ireland is preparing for a referendum on abortion in May or June 2018. Yesterday, the terms were voted by the Eighth Amendment committee in favour of a motion to recommend making the termination of pregnancy lawful with no restriction up to twelve weeks. The terms will be published on 20 December.
Never more than now, the country will need the support to campaign for the clearing of the law on abortion.
Ireland to hold abortion referendum in 2018
As it stands, the 8th amendment of the Irish constitution equates the life of a pregnant woman with that of an embryo or foetus and criminalises any woman or doctor that will carry out an abortion. Abortion pills are illegal, termination is also not permitted if foetal abnormalities are detected, if the woman’s health is affected, or in cases of rape or incest. A woman who seeks an abortion after rape can face an equal or longer prison sentence than her rapist – up to 14 years in prison.
Many rape pregnancy survivor cases have been cast into the public eye. The Miss X case (1992), the Miss C case (1997), the Miss D case (2007), the Miss Y case (2014). These women, some teenagers, were either granted to travel abroad to terminate their pregnancy due to their threat of suicide, or forced to continue their pregnancy.
The reality is that 10 per cent of all Irish women will experience penetrative sexual violence in their lifetime and a proportion of them will become pregnant as a result. In 2013, 8 per cent of females attending a Rape Crisis Centre reported they became pregnant as a result of rape, representing 75 women.
The prohibitive culture against abortion in Ireland is further exemplified by the death of Savita Halappanavar and Bimbo Onanugam. Savita was a 31-year-old Indian dentist who was denied an abortion at Galway hospital, despite her miscarriage of an unviable foetus. The reason given: “Ireland is a Catholic country”.
Groups like MERJ (Migrants and Ethnic-minorities for Reproductive Justice) have brought to light the true discriminating character of Ireland’s abortion law. Emily Waszak, co-organiser, mentioned 40 per cent of birth deaths are migrant deaths. These are women born outside of Ireland, some of whom would have been denied travel due to their “status” as migrant ethnic minorities, such as the case of Nigerian born Bimbo Onanugam, who died at the Mater Hospital in 2010, due to a ruptured uterus caused by induced labour.
Catholicism has a lot to do with this law, but it’s not the only driver behind it – the situation is far more complex and full of contradictions.
Even when the World Health Organisation’s best practice on abortion states that abortion services must be regulated to prevent unsafe terminations, the pro-life side will condemn a woman for “killing babies”. This pro-life narrative has always been one of shame – the vocabulary is punitive, and years of this mindset has not made it easy for Irish people.
There is no consideration from the pro-life side for the trauma that women deal with in relation to unwanted pregnancy and the process of abortion – let alone pregnancies as a result of sexual assault and rape itself.
Of course, misogyny reigns, but considering the last Magdalene Laundry closed in just 1996, this does not come as a surprise. The laundries kept women confined in working institutions, some for their whole life, because of their “sins” – having children out of wedlock or prostitution. In some cases, these women were victims of sexual assault. Apparently that counted as a sin.
Travelling has been the other focal issue alongside health care. Women seeking medical assistance travel, ironically, to the country that brought in the law against abortion in Ireland in the first place in 1861 – Britain.
In 2016 only, 3,265 women have travelled from Ireland to the UKfor abortion services. And this number is an underestimation, as not all women will provide their Irish addresses at UK abortion clinics.
Travelling is a further financial, psychological and emotional burden. Women who need visas to travel abroad and re-enter Ireland may have to wait six to eight weeks for the necessary documents, or in some cases may not be able to travel. Asylum seekers must apply and pay for an emergency re-entry visa from the Department of Justice and a visa to enter the UK or the Netherlands. In this case, Brexit might only create a further barrier.
Nevertheless, as Ailbhe Smyth (Convenor of the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment), put very well, in the past 40 years Ireland has pulled itself out of a very traditional and patriarchal frame of reference when it comes to women.
Things are changing. The mobilisation of the last few years has seen up to 30,000 people take to the streets with an enormous increase in visibility compared to the last referendum in 2002, with #repealthe8th becoming the number one hashtag in Ireland in 2017. Organisations such as Strike 4 Repeal, the London Irish ARC and the Abortion Rights Campaign in Ireland are ready to campaign, canvass and mobilise people now more than ever to put an end to what is clearly a dehumanisation of women.
Women in Ireland are tired of being treated as second-class citizens. If abortion was to become safe, free and legal it would be an incredible win.
There are more factors to be implemented on the agenda, in my opinion. Psychological training will be needed for doctors who up until now, have had no preparation, as well as support for women having abortions. The country is still divided over the matter. Women might still have to face discrimination and shaming. The fight won’t stop at the legislation – we has to continue to build a safe culture for women who have been mistreated for centuries.
Traditionally, when Ireland wants a revolution, she gets one. Let’s hope this will be the next.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/58074037/GettyImages_517065448.0.jpg)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9890505/Trump_Response_to_BC.png)
Abortion - Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information 