Abortion – Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information

COLUMBIA — With a Senate showdown looming over a measure to essentially outlaw abortions in South Carolina, a Democratic lawmaker wants to make sure women who would be forced to bring unwanted pregnancies to term are compensated for them.

State Sen. Mia McLeod on Wednesday prefiled legislation arguing that women compelled to give birth against their will are “gestational” surrogates who have a right to be paid for their services.

“Clearly the state has indicated it has a vested interest in this issue, so if that is the case, and if we are about to do what would be required under the fetal heartbeat bill, then surely there would be some provisions made for the women and girls who are forced to carry these babies to term,” McLeod said of her South Carolina Pro Birth Accountability Act.

Last month, the Senate Medical Affairs Committee voted 9-6 along party lines to advance a bill that would prohibit abortions as soon as a heartbeat is detected by ultrasound — sometimes as early as five weeks into a pregnancy.

Providers who violate the law or fail to determine whether a heartbeat is present before ending a pregnancy could be jailed for two years or fined $10,000. Lawmakers included exceptions for victims of rape or incest up to 20 weeks pregnant with verification from law enforcement.

House approval for the bill, H. 3020, came in April, and Gov. Henry McMaster has said he’ll sign it with or without the exemption for crime victims.

Eight states have similar laws on the books, but all of them are facing legal battles due to the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that legalized abortion. McLeod said her proposal is the first of its kind in the nation.

The financial impact of her proposal isn’t yet clear, but she said it likely would run into the millions of dollars.

Under her bill, compensation would take several forms, including automatic eligibility for public assistance programs, income and other tax credits; health insurance until a child turns 18; and state paid funeral and burial expenses if a woman or the fetus die during the gestational period, labor or delivery.

“It’s not a tongue-in-cheek kind of bill. It took a lot of thought and a lot of preparation because no other state has introduced anything remotely similar and it certainly warrants a very thoughtful and deliberate discussion and debate, and I hope that we’ll have that,” McLeod of Columbia said. “Every year, there is some bill that seeks to take from women. This is a way to give them a real chance at life.”

Ann Warner, CEO of Columbia-based Women Rights’ Empowerment Network, said McLeod’s measure is a byproduct of unnecessary legislation.

“This bill makes the point that legislators are not only wasting our precious time and resources with these extreme abortion bans; they will also create multiple new problems for people in South Carolina,” she said.

The concept of gestational surrogacy is not unique to McLeod. During House deliberations last year, several reproductive rights groups and advocates, including former gubernatorial candidate Marguerite Willis, said such a provision should be enacted alongside the “fetal heartbeat” bill.

“As a matter of constitutional law, a state may not force a citizen to serve in any capacity without fair payment or to take a citizen’s property without just compensation … a woman’s uterus is not unlike rental property, as a commissioning couple agrees to pay a gestational surrogate certain compensation for carrying a fetus to term and giving birth to a child,” McLeod’s bill says.

McLeod’s bill also targets absentee fathers by allowing jail terms of up to three years for men who accrue more than $5,000 in missed child support payments.

State Rep. John McCravy, R-Greenwood, and lead sponsor of the fetal heartbeat bill, said he wouldn’t support McLeod’s proposal if it comes to a vote in the House.

“There are many crisis pregnancy centers across our state that already offer help and assistance with prenatal, adoption and/or child care,” McCravy said, referencing the CrossRoads Pregnancy Center in his district.

“Not only is material and spiritual help already out there, but I believe most people recognize the infinite blessing of life given by our Creator,” he said.

McLeod, who underwent two high-risk pregnancies, said the bill is personal for her.

“We have no regard for the children born in this state, regardless of whether abortion is an available option and we don’t often think about the impact on the mom. If the fetal heartbeat bill were to have passed, I could have easily been one of those women who might not be around right now,” she said.

Source: https://www.postandcourier.com/politics/sc-lawmaker-wants-payment-for-women-deprived-of-abortion-right/article_a4ea14e4-1dc8-11ea-9c78-0bf0937ce9c8.html

A Minnesota pharmacist said he could not give Andrea Anderson the emergency contraceptive because it goes against his “beliefs,” a lawsuit claims.

A Minnesota woman is suing a former local pharmacist and CVS for allegedly refusing to fill her prescription for a morning-after pill.

Andrea Anderson filed the suit on Monday in Aitkin County District Court claiming she was denied the drug ella because of a pharmacist’s beliefs and was then lied to and misled when she tried to get the medication at another location.

On Jan. 21, 2019, Anderson, a mother of five, called her doctor and had a prescription for an emergency contraceptive sent to the Thrifty White Pharmacy in McGregor.

But she was told by the pharmacist “that he would be unable to fill her prescription,” the complaint states. The pharmacist, George Badeaux, said he could not give her the medication due to “personal reasons” and his “beliefs,” and he also tried to discourage her from trying to obtain the drug at another store.

“He did not clarify what his beliefs were or why they interfered with his ability to perform his job as a medical professional,” according to the complaint.

Andrea Anderson, a mother of five, had to drive more than 50 miles in a snowstorm to have the prescription filled at another locationEllie Leonardsmith

Ella is an emergency contraceptive that is to be taken as soon as possible or within five days of unprotected intercourse or a known contraceptive failure, according to a FDA data sheet.

Knowing that such medications work best the sooner they are taken, Anderson called a CVS in Aitkin to try and have the prescription filled and was told that the store did not stock the drug. The CVS pharmacist also told Anderson that she had called a nearby Walgreens but that it also did not have it in stock.

Anderson, however, called the Walgreens herself and was told that it did have ella in stock and could fill the prescription. She had to drive more than 50 miles in a snowstorm the following day to obtain the medication, according to the suit. Anderson did not become pregnant.

She is claiming sex discrimination and is seeking damages.

CVS Pharmacy said in a statement Friday that it is “committed to providing access to emergency contraception, whether it is at the pharmacy counter for patients who have a prescription for it, or in our store aisles where we have sold over-the-counter emergency contraception for several years.”

The company continued: “We have policies and procedures in place to help ensure that customers seeking emergency contraception receive prompt service. We will review and investigate the allegations made in the complaint.”

A woman who answered the phone at Thrifty White Pharmacy told NBC News that Badeaux was “no longer employed there” and declined to comment further.

In a statement, Anderson accused the pharmacists of ignoring her health needs.

“Like anywhere, there are challenges to living in a rural area,” she said in a statement posted on her attorney’s website. “But I never expected that they would include the personal beliefs of our local pharmacists, or that they would hold — and wield — such enormous decisionmaking power over my life.”

Her attorney Jess Braverman, legal director of Gender Justice, a Minnesota-based nonprofit, said in a statement that the Thrifty White pharmacist denied Anderson her prescribed medication because of “his own personal beliefs about emergency contraception – which he decided are more important than our client’s health, and more important than her own right to decide if and when she gets pregnant.”

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/woman-s-doctor-prescribed-morning-after-pill-pharmacists-refused-fill-n1101586?fbclid=IwAR2ypQqAqNKRGpU837fOQpA9v1w2-_bm-szcHupgrKLVBZnAg5r8LESqAAg

Independent abortion clinics lack the visibility, institutional support, and financial resources of other providers, like Planned Parenthood.

A new report details the crucial role independent abortion clinics play in ensuring access in parts of the country most hostile to abortion rights—and the struggle for them to stay open.

Anti-choice state-level restrictions have led to a decrease of over 32 percent in the number of independent abortion clinics in the United States since 2012, according to the Abortion Care Network report. As of November, 26 independent abortion clinics have closed this year—double the number that closed in 2018.

Independent abortion care providers represent about 25 percent of facilities offering abortion care nationwide, yet they provide a little more than half of abortion procedures, according to the report. Three out of five people in the United States who receive abortion care do so at an independent clinic, and these facilities provide about 58 percent of all abortion procedures, compared to 37 percent at Planned Parenthood, 3 percent in hospitals, and 1 percent in private physician’s offices.

In some states, including Wyoming, Louisiana, and Alabama, independent abortion clinics are the only sources of abortion care. Six states have only one abortion provider, and independent providers operate the last clinic remaining in four of those states—Kentucky, Mississippi, North Dakota, and West Virginia. Planned Parenthood operates the only clinics in the other two states, Missouri and South Dakota.

“Meaningful abortion care in the United States truly depends on independent abortion care providers,” Nikki Madsen, executive director of the Abortion Care Network, told Rewire.News. “Independent abortion providers have been providing the majority of care since Roe was established. The vital role they play in making abortion access a reality in this country is really an untold story.”

Though 88 percent of abortions are performed in the first trimester, barriers to accessing abortion care, like forced waiting periods, bans on insurance coverage of abortion, or needing to travel to receive care, can cause people to seek abortion care later in pregnancy, said Alison Dreith, deputy director of Hope Clinic for Women, an abortion clinic in Granite City, Illinois. For those needing abortion care after the first trimester, many turn to independent clinics, which operate 62 percent of clinics that provide abortions after the first trimester.

“Patients seeking care have to face so many burdens to get to us, whether it’s travel or arranging child care—add the rising cost of their procedure as they get later in pregnancy, and continuing to have to save up that money because it is not covered by insurance,” Dreith said.

Independent clinics represent 69 percent of all clinics that provide care at and after 16 weeks of pregnancy and 77 percent of clinics providing care at and after 19 weeks of pregnancy, according to the report. In Arkansas, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Georgia, the only providers of surgical abortion are independent clinics, and without them, abortion access in these states would be limited to medication abortion within the first ten to 11 weeks of pregnancy.

“When there are increased barriers, people need more access to later care,” Madsen said.

Increased state regulations on abortion providers since Republicans came into power in state legislatures a decade ago have forced many clinics to shut their doors, Madsen said. This year alone, state legislatures in the South and Midwest have passed 58 abortion restrictions, and lawmakers in five states have passed near-total abortion bans, though none are in effect.

Medically unnecessary targeted regulations on abortion providers, or TRAP laws, hit independent clinics especially hard because they are not financially able to make the changes necessary to comply, Madsen said. Lawmakers in 11 states have banned private insurance coverage for abortion except in cases of life endangerment, so independent clinics are working to keep costs low for their patients, while also dealing with increased costs of security in hostile regions where protesters often harass patients and staff.

“It’s a combination of factors, and it’s not simple, but it is a targeted effort by politicians and extremists to close clinics,” Madsen said.

Independent abortion providers also lack the visibility, institutional support, and financial resources of other providers, like Planned Parenthood. While Planned Parenthood health centers are 501(c)(3) nonprofits, which allows them to engage in some lobbying efforts, 85 percent of independent clinics are not, which limits their ability to influence policy decisions.

“All of our staff are front line staff,” Dreith said. “They are seeing patients every day, and so we oftentimes don’t get to talk about our unique experiences to legislators. Then when it comes to these new policies, we are first to shut down, because we also can’t raise the funds to offset the cost of fixing our building or otherwise complying with that law.”

Because they lack the resources of other, larger providers, independent clinics rely on volunteers and community support to stay open.

“This is why we need the public and communities to get involved because they really need their community’s support,” Madsen said.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2019/12/11/untold-story-independent-abortion-clinics-are-closing-at-a-rapid-pace/

A federal appeals court ruled against the ban, which would have restricted abortion after 15 weeks.

A federal appeals court blocked Mississippi’s 15 week abortion ban on Friday, simultaneously affirming abortion access in the state, and paving the way for further legal challenges to current federal abortion regulations.

Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the only abortion clinic left in Mississippi — sued the state in 2018 to block the law banning the procedure; a judge ruled in the clinic’s favor that year.

Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals supported that ruling after the clinic argued that no medical evidence shows a fetus would be viable 15 weeks into a person’s pregnancy, causing the ban to violate the US Supreme Court cases Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, both of which say states can’t ban abortion before a fetus is viable; Planned Parenthood puts viability at about 24 weeks.

Mississippi argued the law was a regulation and not a ban, and therefore not subject to the Supreme Court rulings. But the court found the law placed an undue — and therefore unconstitutional — burden on women’s right to an abortion before viability. Appeals court judges wrote:

In an unbroken line dating to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s abortion cases have established (and affirmed, and re-affirmed) a woman’s right to choose an abortion before viability. States may regulate abortion procedures prior to viability so long as they do not impose an undue burden on the woman’s right but they may not ban abortions. The law at issue is a ban. Thus, we affirm the district court’s invalidation of the law.

The ruling on the law, which did not include exceptions for cases of rape or incest, means that Mississippi’s current abortion regulations will stay in place for now. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that focuses on reproductive health and rights, the state currently requires ultrasounds be taken before an abortion, that those seeking an abortion wait at least 24 hours and be counseled before the procedure, and that there be a medical need for abortions after 18 weeks.

The ruling will affect not just Mississippi, but Louisiana as well, which passed a 15 week abortion ban that would take effect only if Mississippi’s law was upheld.

And although the state of Mississippi has lost its appeal, it could petition for the Supreme Court to hear the case, setting the stage for another direct challenge to Roe v. Wade.

Gestational bans are part of a longer term anti-abortion strategy

The loss for Mississippi comes on the heels of a federal judge blocking an even more restrictive abortion law in the state — a so called “heartbeat bill” that bans abortions at six weeks, around when fetal heartbeats can generally begin to be detected.

Mississippi is just one of a number of states to pass restrictive abortion bans — others include Ohio, Georgia, Kentucky, and Alabama. By November of this year, state legislatures had enacted 58 abortion restrictions; 25 of those would ban some or most abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute. None of the gestational age bans enacted by nine states this year have taken effect, however, as all have been blocked or stayed by the courts.

This, as Vox’s Anna North and Catherine Kim have explained, is by design: anti-abortion activists hope a challenge to one or more of these laws will be heard by the US Supreme Court. Under President Donald Trump, that court’s conservative majority has been strengthened by the additions of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and state lawmakers are passing abortion bans with the explicit goal of the Supreme Court gutting or overturning Roe v. Wade.

In Iowa, Rep. Shannon Lundgren, acknowledged a 2018 abortion ban she was managing on the Iowa House floor ran in opposition to settled law, but said, “It is time for the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue of life.”

And the conservative allies of lawmakers like Lundgren have been equally candid. Last year, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a nonprofit that has opposed abortion and LGBTQ rights, told an Evangelicals for Life Conference in Washington DC that it is focused on gestational age ban legislation to start legal battles that could eventually end Roe v. Wade.

“I can guarantee you that they will not be able to ignore a 15-week limitation, which is in essence limiting abortion to the first trimester,” Denise Burke, senior counsel at ADF said at the time. “We’re kind of basically baiting them, ‘Come on, fight us on turf that we have already set up and established.’”

Thus far, these efforts have been unsuccessful: but in October, the Supreme Court signaled it is willing to hear cases that challenge settled abortion law. It plans to hear June Medical Services v. Gee, a case that centers on a Louisiana law mandating abortion providers have admitting privileges at a local hospital.

While the case does not address gestation, it could also undo Roe v. Wade and severely restrict abortion access. Should justices uphold the law, whether abortions are banned at 15 weeks would become irrelevant, as there would be few — if any — legal providers available to conduct the procedure at any stage of pregnancy.

Source: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/14/21021658/mississippi-abortion-ban-15-weeks-appeals-supreme-court

Feminists are winning the war of ideas, but Republicans still hold power and keep stripping women of their rights

o understand the baffling, chaotic times we live in, one can do no better than to look at the disconnect in the U.S. between polling on what are often deemed “women’s issues” and the actual state of play in the world of politics. Feminist ideas are increasingly popular. But, because Republicans have wildly disproportionate amounts of power, women are actually losing rights.

Abortion rights are more popular than ever, with 77% of Americans in an NPR/PBS poll saying they want Roe v. Wade to be preserved.

But, by this time next year, it’s  likely Roe v. Wade will be toast. With Brett Kavanaugh replacing Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, it was just a matter of time. Kennedy was the deciding vote in 2016’s Whole Woman’s Health vs. Hellerstedt, in which the court ruled that states can’t ban abortion by drowning clinics in medically unnecessary and impossible-to-meet regulations. But in shameless and unprecedented fashion, the court is retrying that same abortion ban (though in a different state) in March. By June, it’s almost certain that the court will allow states to shut down all their abortion clinics, for the first time since 1973.

Similarly, support for birth control is rising, with an all-time high of 92% of Americans supporting its use and 71% believing the government should require insurance companies to cover contraception. But the Trump administration has been quietly undermining women’s access, using federal red tape to shut down birth control grants to nearly 900 public clinics, and attempting to redirect that money to groups that argue abstinence is the only legitimate birth control. The administration has also tried to roll back rules requiring insurers to cover contraception.

The #MeToo movement, which was started by activist Tarana Burke in 2006 but really blew up after Donald “Grab ‘Em by the Pussy” Trump was elected and Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual abuse was exposed, is also relatively popular, with polls consistently showing more than half of Americans support it.

Yet Republicans — who control the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House — see it very differently. In fact, Republicans are growing increasingly hostile towards the #MeToo movement. In 2018, a majority of Republican voters agreed that “women who complain about harassment often cause more problems than they solve,” casting the victims as the victimizers.

This helps explain how Kavanaugh got confirmed to the Supreme Court in the  first place, despite more Americans believing the woman who accused him of attempted rape, Christine Blasey Ford, than believing his denials. Republicans control the Senate and know full well their voters are inclined to lash out at women who have the courage to stand up to abuse, rather than supporting them.

Then there is perhaps the most dramatic example of all: In the 2016 election the first female major-party candidate for president, Hillary Clinton, won the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots cast. But, because the American electoral college system overweights the votes of people living in rural areas, Trump — a misogynist who bragged about sexual assault on tape — won the presidency anyway.

The gap between the popularity of feminism and the actual power of feminism was illustrated in January 2017, when the number of people who hit the streets of Washington for the Women’s March utterly swamped that of Trump’s inauguration the day before, drawing three times the number of people. And that’s not including the millions across the country who turned out for solidarity marches in other cities, leading to quite possibly the largest political demonstration in American history.

Feminists are winning the war of ideas. But feminists are losing in the halls of power, where “Mad Men”-era views that women should be silent and servile are winning the day.

It’s all a bitter pill, because, as these poll numbers show, the hard work of feminists over the past decade to move the needle of public opinion has really paid off.

Younger readers may not remember this, but back when I was a fledging feminist blogger in the era of the George W. Bush administration, things looked bleak for women both in the world of politics and in the national discourse. Feminist rhetoric was often timorous, afraid to speak too bluntly about issues like abortion or rape for fear of running off moderates. Younger women felt sidelined by the major organizations, and there were frequently articles in the mainstream press in which older feminists accused younger women of not caring about their own equality. Meanwhile, progressive politics was in thrall to the “What’s the Matter with Kansas” theory that Republicans only pretended to oppose women’s rights in order to win the votes of benighted rubes, and would never actually act on it.

I’d like to think I played a role in changing that, being an early adopter of feminist blogging that took a different approach of being both cheeky and confrontational — and also by taking sexism seriously. While male pundits clucked over feminists who thought Republicans would taking reproductive rights away, feminists bloggers raised the alarm over the Bush administration’s all-out assault on women having non-procreative sex. We raised awareness of rape culture and introduced ideas like “affirmative consent” as a way to counteract it. We insisted that it wasn’t that women holding themselves back in the workplace, but that discrimination was still a live issue. We bashed sexist dating manuals and those who claimed that women don’t make as much money as men because we don’t work hard enough.

We were laughed at and trolled and abused and ignored, but we kept plugging away. And by 2009, we were winning. Feminist blogs were wildly popular. Democrats started to be unapologetically pro-choice. The first woman to become speaker of the House managed to do what Democrats had failed to do for decades — pass a comprehensive health care bill, which mandated that contraception be covered by insurance. Feminist bloggers published a manifesto against rape, titled “Yes Means Yes,” that would reshape the national conversation on consent. The idea that “abstinence-only” was a legitimate ideology had turned into a joke. The idea that young women were indifferent to politics was dying. And the feminist bloggers who had once been relegated to the fringes were getting mainstream jobs, at such a pace that, over the next decade, the blogs would be shuttered, victims of their own success.

It would be a lie to say that we were surprised by the backlash. If there’s one book that every Generation X and millennial feminist has read, it’s probably “Backlash” by Susan Faludi. We knew what to expect. Plus, those of us who had blogs spent ungodly amounts of time dealing with unhinged trolls — men whose desire to control women manifested in online stalking — so we weren’t unaware that a lot of men really, really did not like the idea of women’s equality.

(We also were aware of the liberal men who pooh-poohed our experiences and said trolls were just a handful of guys and nothing to worry about, a line that held right up until those trolls elected a president.)

Sure enough, the backlash came — and it was brutal. Arguably, the anti-feminist backlash of the teens was the single most important reactionary movement of the time, the one that did more than any other to lay the groundwork for the election of a confessed sexual assailant to the White House.

Maybe the first sign was the sudden surge of attacks on reproductive rights. Women gave Barack Obama his 2008 win — 53% of women voted for Obama vs. only 49% of men — and unsurprisingly, Republicans in state legislatures decided to take their anger out on women. Starting in 2010, Republican-controlled states went nuts restricting reproductive rights, passing laws to block women from getting abortions and deprive women of affordable contraception access. In some parts of the country, abortion clinics were shuttered at an alarming rate, leaving huge numbers of women in “abortion deserts” that required lengthy drives to the nearest clinic.

The war on contraception, which many of us hoped would be over with the election of Obama, only heated up in this frenzy of misogyny. On multiple occasions, congressional Republicans had a standoff with Obama, threatening to shut down the government to try to force him into cutting Planned Parenthood off government grants for affordable birth control.

Things also got ugly over the Obamacare rule requiring insurance companies to cover contraception. Even though government-mandated insurance coverage of birth control had previously been uncontroversial, the right-wing media swung into action in 2012 on this rule in the Affordable Care Act to suddenly and dishonestly pretend the government was asking taxpayers to bankroll hot young sluts to have sex with men who clearly aren’t the Fox News demographic. That’s no exaggeration — for days on end, Rush Limbaugh railed about how Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown law student who had testified in support of the new rule, was a “slut”  who wanted “to be paid to have sex.” He even demanded  that Fluke provide him with videos of her private life as masturbation material.

Limbaugh’s tone was emblematic of what the anti-feminist backlash of the teens looked like. The face of misogyny was no longer pious Christians claiming that feminism was a threat to “the family.” Now it was vulgarians who gleefully used sexist slurs and didn’t even bother to pretend they wanted women on their knees for Jesus. It was a Trumpian kind of sexism.

So even as traditional anti-choice forces tried to pass off their latest bans on abortion as done in the name of “protecting” women, the actual right wing was in a full-blown lady-hate uproar, culminating in utterly false accusations that women were getting abortions as part of a scheme to sell “baby parts” on the open market. Unsurprisingly, there was also a rise in terrorism against abortion clinics over the decade, kicked off by the murder of Dr. George Tiller in 2009, with the deadliest incident being a 2015 shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado that left three dead.

Outside the reproductive rights debate, the anti-feminist backlash was equally bleak, with a well-funded right wing apparatus churning out a constant stream of shady articles and video segments mocking alleged rape victims and sympathizing with their accused attackers, cheering sexual harassment and claiming that men were under attack by a shadowy feminist conspiracy to emasculate them. Meanwhile, a growing online movement of misogynists, such as the “men’s rights activists” and “incels,” was becoming ever more radical and increasingly embracing fascism and white nationalism as the answer to their anger at feminist gains.

Gamergate was perhaps the most perfect distillation of what the anti-feminist backlash looked like in the past decade. There were efforts at the time to claim that Gamergate was merely an explosion of anger over “corruption” in the video game press (no, really, that’s what they said), in truth it was an eruption of virulent misogyny that started in the video game community and spread across the internet. Sexist video game players, assured in their belief that video gaming “belonged” to them, were furious at feminist critics for their articles and videos arguing that T&A-heavy games that presented women as bimbos and sex objects were misogynistic. Those gamers spent months — years,  really — raging endlessly online about it and subjecting those feminist critics to unreal amounts of abuse.

Breitbart and other right wing media glommed onto Gamergate because they knew that it wasn’t just about video games, but about this growing and boiling rage in many men over the fact that feminists were winning the argument. These were men who liked the prevailing system, where they could be condescending and cruel and treat women like objects and unpaid servants without consequence, and also knew they couldn’t defend that point of view any longer. Gamergate gave them another option: Give up trying to make coherent arguments, and instead resort to outright trolling, bad faith, harassment and other abusive tactics meant not to win with reason, but to exhaust your opponents into submission.

No wonder the 2016 election was dominated by the chant, “Lock her up!” A lot of men were angry as hell at women and wanted to bring them to heel, and didn’t really care how it was done any longer.

But you know what? Feminists didn’t give up. On the contrary, unlike during other backlash periods, feminists, armed with social media, were able to fight back, instead of being forced to cede ground to a male-dominated media that is inclined to side with the backlashers.

In the face of rising attacks on abortion rights, feminists started an online movement to “shout your abortion” and rallied around Texas legislator Wendy Davis, who became a feminist hero by filibustering a law meant to shut down most abortion clinics in Texas. Rather than being browbeaten into silence, anti-rape activists created headline-worthy performance art  and held hands while Lady Gaga sang at the Oscars. The #MeToo movement blew up and thousands of men were finally held accountable. Rather than let Trump’s win scare them into the shadows, Democratic women turned out in droves to run for office, making 2019 a record-setting year for women in Congress.

The backlashers, using profane language and trying to affect a derring-do trollish attitude, clearly thought they could make feminism uncool. At this, they failed. Beyoncé is a feminist. Practically every famous woman in Hollywood has joined hands under the #MeToo banner. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has the potential to be the next Obama-style political star. Feminist blogs may be gone, but that’s because we took the act mainstream. Trump may be president, but the place to be that January was the Women’s March.

In 2009, people made fun of feminists for supposedly not being cool. In 2019, anti-feminists are far more likely to lash out at feminists with the angry resentment the terminally uncool have for hipsters.

Still, there is no doubt that, thanks to an electoral system that gives far more voting power to rural, white-dominated areas than the more diverse, urban areas where most Americans live, we are a feminist-sympathetic country being ruled by a misogynist minority. The country may hate Trump, but he is still the most powerful man in the world. We’re all learning the hard way that feminists can do the work, make the case and win the people over — and still the patriarchy keeps on winning, because it holds a disproportionate share of power in a rigged system.

Source: https://www.salon.com/2019/12/14/the-2010s-in-feminism-two-steps-forward-and-a-big-shove-back/

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a court decision that dismissed as immaterial doctors’ ethical concerns and equated an embryo with a person.

It only takes four votes for the U.S. Supreme Court to agree to take a case. That’s it. Not even a majority of the justices have to sign on for the Court to hear a case. Just four.

That threshold took on a new significance Monday when the Court announced it was denying a request from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to reconsider an appellate court decision that let Kentucky’s forced ultrasound law, HB2, take effect. The decision was announced without an explanation, just a one-line denial in the list of orders the Court released that day. But the justices didn’t need to offer any explanation for why they turned the case away.

The denial spoke for itself.

The Court’s refusal to take up the challenge signals that the liberal block of justices decided it was better to let a devastatingly wrong decision stand and a lingering circuit court split on the First Amendment rights of abortion providers fester than to have the full Roberts Court weigh in. It also signals that the Court’s conservative block is content to allow appeals courts to egregiously misinterpret abortion rights jurisprudence so long as those decisions advance anti-choice causes. None of those signs are good for abortion rights and access.

The Kentucky law at issue is an especially terrible version of the forced ultrasound laws enacted by Republican-held legislatures nationwide. HB 2 requires doctors to perform an ultrasound on a patient 24 hours prior to an abortion, mandates the provider to describe the images of that ultrasound, and forces the patient to listen to fetal heart tones during the procedure. Providers must perform these “speech and display” requirements even if their patient objects. If the patient tries to cover their ears or turn their head, HB 2 directs providers to carry on with the state-mandated script describing the ultrasound image over those objections. Often providers are required to use a transvaginal ultrasound to get images with sufficient detail to meet HB2’s speech and display requirements. 

Medical groups opposed the forced ultrasound law on the grounds that it violates both medical ethics and standards of care. Forcing patients to see images and hear descriptions over their objections and the judgment of their doctors is not just bad medicine, the providers claim, it’s a free speech violation. But a panel of Sixth Circuit judges disagreed, and in a 2-1 decision explained that speech and display requirements are simply part of the process for a provider obtaining a patient’s informed consent to their abortion and not part of an anti-abortion message. Therefore, the panel of judges ruled, Kentucky’s law does not violate the free speech rights of abortion providers. Sixth Circuit Court Judge John Bush, a Trump appointee, cast the deciding vote and authored the decision. 

“The information conveyed by an ultrasound image, its description, and the audible beating fetal heart gives a patient greater knowledge of the unborn life inside her,” Bush wrote for the panel. “This also inherently provides the patient with more knowledge about the effect of an abortion procedure: it shows her what, or whom, she is consenting to terminate.” 

Bush’s opinion drips with this anti-choice paternalism that forced ultrasounds are necessary because patients don’t know what they are doing when they seek an abortion. His opinion cites the myth of “abortion regret” cooked up by former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to uphold the federal “partial-birth abortion” ban in Gonzales v. Carhart to further justify its conclusion that forcing patients to hear and see fetal images is both constitutional and sound medicine. 

As to objections the medical community had to mandate the disclosures over patient objections, Bush in his decision dismissed those objections not “material” to whether the disclosures should be considered part of informed consent. That’s right. According to Bush, the medical profession’s stated concerns that the Kentucky law actually perverts the informed consent process are not relevant and necessary for the court to deem HB 2 constitutional.

This is the decision the Supreme Court let stand on Monday, one that dismisses as immaterial doctors ethical concerns, one that equates an embryo with a person, and one that is at conflict with recent federal appeals court decisions on the topic. Letting this decision stand sends an ominous message about abortion and the Roberts Court. Quite simply, there is no fifth vote to affirm abortion rights. 

In March, the Roberts Court will hear oral arguments in June Medical Services v. Gee, the first abortion rights challenge to be argued before the Court with Justice Brett Kavanaugh on the bench. The case landed before the Court after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit went rogue and ruled a Louisiana admitting privileges law identical to a Texas anti-choice law the Roberts Court struck as unconstitutional three years ago in Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt should be allowed to take effect. 

The Fifth Circuit decision allowing the law to take effect is bonkers. Like the Sixth Circuit decision to allow Kentucky’s ultrasound law to take effect, it is a willful misreading of abortion rights precedent. That Chief Justice John Roberts wasn’t willing on Monday to join his liberal colleagues and hear the Kentucky challenge in order to correct the Sixth Circuit’s decision that is out of bounds from other precedent does not bode well for an outcome in June Medical Services that unequivocally affirms Whole Woman’s Health. 

This is what the future of abortion rights looks like at the Supreme Court with Kennedy gone. It’s an exercise by the liberal justices in harm reduction, a balancing of the damage done by allowing a wrong and dangerous opinion and policy to stand rather than grant their conservative colleagues an opportunity to weigh in and endorse it nationwide.

For the conservatives on the bench, it is an exercise in tempered acceleration. Conservative appeals courts stacked with Trump appointees have the ability to undermine abortion rights and access and the conservatives on the Supreme Court have no incentive to stop them.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2019/12/12/supreme-court-confirms-there-is-no-fifth-vote-to-protect-abortion-rights/

Clinics will offer birth control, STI testing and pregnancy counseling, but not abortion

Doulas not only support people having abortions but also demystify abortion in the wider world.

In the clinic, it goes like this: Call the patients by their first name only, or it’s a security risk. When they come to the door, introduce yourself. Show them into the room, explain how to put the gown on, draw the curtain, and wait. When you go back inside, the procedure will begin.

The person on the table says, “I have five kids. I just can’t have another.”

The person on the table says, “My mom said this would hurt so much, but this isn’t even as bad as my tattoo.”

The person on the table says, “Can I see my baby?”

The person on the table says, “Thank God.”

Officially, an abortion doula provides nonjudgmental emotional, informational, and physical support to people receiving abortions for unintended, wanted, or miscarried pregnancies. We refer patients to help lines, wipe away tears, and chat about their kids, their commutes, and, sometimes, what constitutes a living being. I’ve been an abortion doula for two years, supporting patients at abortion clinics in Connecticut and New York.

In the past ten years, abortion doula collectives have proliferated across the country. One group that tracks abortion and full-spectrum doula groups currently active in the United States counts 35, located in every geographical region and in many major cities. They sprout out of birth doula groups, sexual violence centers, and reproductive health clinics. The collectives skew toward youth and are largely composed of volunteers; there is little or no money in being an abortion doula. Still, the doulas come.

Abortion is one of the most discussed medical procedures in the United States today but remains strangled in stigmas, silences, and outright lies. Doulas work not only to support people experiencing the medical procedure itself, but also to let some light, air, and sound into the stale conversation about abortion. We do this partially by demystifying abortion in the wider world. When people find out that I’m a doula and have been present for more abortions than the average person sees in their lifetime, I am often asked to describe what a surgical abortion looks like (probably not how you’d expect), how long it takes (five to 10 minutes), and who gets abortions (mostly people who already have children). But the real work of the doula takes place in the clinic, in the time, however brief, that we spend with patients.

Go back inside.

The doctor comes in and introduces herself. She is plump and kind, brown hair pinned up in a braid above her clean white coat. She asks if there are any unanswered questions. She asks if we are ready.

When you train to become an abortion doula, you learn first about the Procedure. You learn to call it The Procedure instead of the Abortion, because words have power, and that one can make people uncomfortable, even the ones who call themselves pro-choice, even while they are on the table.

You learn the science of it, the history, the laws. You learn the most common questions about how it will feel, about pain, about the pressure of guilt and grief or the denial of it, just as corrosive. You learn ways to relax the lower body and encourage deep breathing.

You learn about the steps of the Procedure. This is how the doctor will deliver a painkiller and dilate the cervix. This is how she will apply suction, with a handheld tool called a vacuum aspirator, to remove the products of conception from the uterus, and release those products into a metal bowl. What comes out is a spill of tissue. That’s what it looks like in the first trimester: a small, flesh colored sac smaller than my thumb, like some deep-sea jellyfish.

During the Procedure, it’s common for people to get cold. It’s a cool room, and they’re not wearing much clothing, and stress plays a factor, as does anesthesia. I offer my hand to hold; my body runs hot, always has. “It’s not just for comfort,” I say with a smile, when I think it will help. “I have warm hands. And you can squeeze as hard as you want.”

She touches my palm. “Oh, it’s hot!”

“Yep. Take as much heat as you need.”

She smiles at that, usually, and takes my hand.

Later, she might squeeze it, even if she wasn’t planning to.

Pregnant people have all kinds of reactions to working with a doula, just like they have all kinds of reactions to abortion. For some, the decision to have an abortion is a wrenching one. For many others, it’s not emotionally fraught—but when I explain to a patient that I’m a non-medical support person and that I’ll be with them throughout the procedure, I’ve never been turned away. Everyone uses our moments alone differently. I hear about the Netflix shows they’re binging and their parents’ deaths. One woman, her mascara smudged slightly, tells me she’s just left an abusive relationship. Another apologizes profusely that she hasn’t waxed.

Some compare their experiences at various clinics. “When I had my first abortion, it was totally different,” an older woman confided. “They were very professional, but it was a little bit—cold. There was nobody to talk to like this.”

Some don’t want to talk at all. Once a patient pulled a pair of Bose BlueTooth headphones out of her bag and said, “I get anxious, so I’m just going to listen to my own music, is that okay?”

I said of course it was, and once she was set up on the table, her eyes closed and her music turned up loud, I sat quietly, keeping an eye out and scrolling through my e-mail, until the doctor came. That woman didn’t ask for a hand to squeeze during the cramps; she didn’t ask any questions or list anxieties. Afterward, though, as she was leaving the recovery room, she stopped me, her headphones still looped around her neck. “Thank you,” she said. “It really helped that you were there.”

In popular imagination and media, abortions have often been represented as isolated and furtive. On TV, there are scenes where the abortion—in the rare cases one is pictured—consists entirely of patient and doctor. In real life, a surgical abortion has the following lineup: doctor, nurse, lab tech, often a resident, sometimes an anesthesiologist, and sometimes a doula, all gathered around the patient, who is in the center of the room, breathing now on my count. It takes a village.

The woman on the table says, “I want kids later, I do, but I just can’t right now, and I heard that getting this will hurt my chances.”

In 26 states, clinics are required by law to tell patients that abortion has a potential effect on future fertility. In four of these states, the information provided is medically inaccurate, by which I mean it is a lie. People are told that getting an abortion will mean their chances of getting pregnant later are significantly reduced. The truth is that scientists have found that an abortion performed by a trained medical professional is not associated with future infertility. Abortion is also a very safe procedure: The chance of major complications is only 0.23 percent—lower than the chance of major complications in pregnancy and birth.

In five states, clinics are required to lie and say that abortion is linked to breast cancer.

In six states, abortion clinic counselors are mandated by law to tell women that life begins at fertilization, which is a religious idea, not a scientific one.

I’ve had the privilege of doulaing in two states that provide medically accurate information, and by the time patients get to me, they’ve already made the decision to have an abortion, but still some ask for reassurance that they won’t get breast cancer or become infertile. Lies about abortion are our accepted frame of reference.

This is how to approach the clinic: Don’t engage with the protesters outside. Some of them don’t do anything but murmur Hail Marys over and over, but others are different. Wear your street clothes through the door and then change into your scrubs, for hygiene purposes but also so that the protesters will think you’re there to receive services. If they think you’re there to receive services, they say, Don’t kill your baby. If they think you’re providing the Procedure they slam on the glass doors and say, I’ll kill you, you fucking slut.

What they don’t teach you in training: how it will smell, wet and metallic. It is nearly the dark, rubbery smell of period blood, a smell that everyone with a uterus knows. This is that smell, but more so.

The woman on the table says, “Do you think God will forgive me?”

I don’t believe in any God who wouldn’t understand the choice you’ve made. Whether it’s because you have other mouths to feed or you don’t feel ready or this pregnancy is dangerous or you were raped or you’re not financially independent or you don’t want to be a parent right now or you don’t want to be a parent ever. I don’t believe in any God who wouldn’t understand that you have done nothing that needs forgiving.

The bones of my hand grate under her grip.

She is 39, 15, 25, 32, she is my age exactly. She is white, black, Latina, Asian. She wears a fuzzy sweatshirt, she wears a hijab, she wears black ballet flats, she wears a wedding ring. She is getting a ride home from her boyfriend, her best friend, her husband, her mother, she is here alone.

No. While she’s here, she is not entirely alone.

I change out of my scrubs and walked from the clinic to the parking lot. “Miss!” a man shouts, and I turn without thinking, without remembering where I am, and there he is, holding a sign with a picture of what is supposed to be a dead baby. It doesn’t look anything like what I’ve seen today.

“Don’t kill your baby,” he says. “It’s a sin. God won’t forgive you.”

In training, they teach you never to engage with the protesters because of the threat of violence to the clinic. I turn away and hear him whisper, “Devil slut.”

I keep walking, gathering silence about me like a cloak, or armor. I get into the car, turn the engine on, and sit for a minute, watching my rearview. The man has turned back to the clinic. He hoists his sign again, higher, like he’s already forgotten me.

Source: https://www.thenation.com/article/abortion-doula-clinics/

Doctors must perform ultrasounds and have women listen to fetal heartbeats before performing abortions.

The Supreme Court on Monday left in place a Kentucky law, mandating doctors perform ultrasounds and show fetal images to patients before they can perform abortions.

The high court declined, without comment, to hear an appeal brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the state’s lone abortion clinic.

The Kentucky law, which requires a doctor to describe an ultrasound in detail while a pregnant woman hears the fetal heartbeat, was passed in 2017.

It was signed by Gov. Matt Bevin, an anti-abortion Republican who lost his bid for re-election last month.

“This is a HUGE win for the pro-life movement!” the Kentucky GOP tweeted on Monday, thanking Bevin and Republican lawmakers. “This decision by SCOTUS to allow the lower court ruling to stand is a victory for the unborn!”

The ACLU had argued that the Kentucky statute had no medical basis and was designed only to coerce a woman into opting out of having an abortion. Defenders of the law said it represented a straightforward attempt to help patients make a well-informed decision.

The high court’s action let stand the law which had been upheld by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a statement Monday that the high court had “rubber-stamped” Kentucky’s interference in the “doctor-patient relationship.”

“By refusing to review the Sixth Circuit’s ruling, the Supreme Court has rubber-stamped extreme political interference in the doctor-patient relationship,” according to Kolbi-Molinas.

“This law is not only unconstitutional, but as leading medical experts and ethicists explained, deeply unethical. We are extremely disappointed that the Supreme Court will allow this blatant violation of the First Amendment and fundamental medical ethics to stand.”

Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues manager for the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that backs abortion rights, called the Kentucky law a “shaming tactic.”

“By upholding a requirement that provides conduct an ultrasound before an abortion, what they’re really doing is establishing that the state can interfere with medical health practice and create a stigma,” Nash told NBC News on Monday. “It’s a shaming tactic.”

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/supreme-court-upholds-kentucky-abortion-law-mandating-ultrasounds-n1098181?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma&fbclid=IwAR1Y8CvUJOJH6t1uZfdk8epTKnhP_O1Feng4Zqq5iOaNW1tMQ8JWeKesqDY

UC Davis Health ended a study early after researchers found a risk of “serious blood loss” when patients stopped in the middle of the medication abortion protocol.

The first-ever randomized clinical study on the medically unproven “abortion reversal” treatment being pushed by anti-choice advocates has ended early as a result of safety concerns for participants, according to UC Davis Health, the academic health center where the research was being conducted.

The study sought to enroll 40 pregnant people who were planning to have a medication abortion and test the effectiveness of progesterone as a way to “reverse” an abortion. At the time of its conclusion, only 12 participants had enrolled. Of those, one participant who had received progesterone and two who had received a placebo experienced severe bleeding that required ambulance transport.

The discovered risk of “serious blood loss” when patients stop in the middle of the medication abortion protocol led principal investigator Professor Mitchell Creinin at UC Davis Health and his colleagues to end the study early. As a result, there remains no established scientific evidence that “abortion reversal” is possible.

“Women who use mifepristone for a medical abortion should be advised that not following up with misoprostol could result in severe hemorrhage,” Dr. Creinin said in a statement for UC Davis Health.

Medication abortion relies on two drugs—mifepristone and misoprostol—to terminate a pregnancy. The pregnant person first takes a dose of mifepristone, which blocks progesterone receptors and stops the pregnancy from continuing to develop. Twenty-four to 48 hours later, they take a dose of misoprostol, which causes the uterus to contract and empty itself.

In recent years, anti-abortion activists have alleged that injecting a pregnant person with progesterone after they’ve taken mifepristone, but before they’ve taken the misoprostol, will allow the pregnancy to continue and therefore “reverse” the abortion.

This progesterone regiment is not FDA-approved, and it’s never been studied with rigorous scientific procedures such as those undertaken by Creinin’s team. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has fully denounced the practice. But that hasn’t stopped the anti-choice movement from launching a full-blown “abortion reversal” misinformation campaign and offering the “procedure” at crisis pregnancy centers across the country.

Those pushing “abortion reversal” rely on an unscientific report involving seven anecdotes of people who had undergone the reversal regiment. The report was published by anti-abortion doctors Dr. George Delgado and Dr. Mary Davenport in 2012. Of the seven subjects, two had complete abortions and one ended their participation without a response.

The anecdotes of four doctors who treated four people are the beginnings of this myth. In 2018, Delgado published more cases from his network of anti-abortion doctors who are apparently spending their time experimenting on pregnant people. The journal that published the report recalled the paper shortly after publication because an ethics board never fully approved Delgado’s research, which also had no control group. Both are very serious research failures.

Here’s the problem with relying entirely on anecdotes and calling it scientific research: You can’t establish any semblance of a causal relationship. That matters in this case because science has already established that taking mifepristone and failing to take misoprostol results in anywhere from 8 percent to 46 percent of pregnancies continuing normally with no abortion occurring. The pregnancy outcomes recorded by Delgado could be entirely attributed to the lack of misoprostol and wholly unrelated to the progesterone injections; there’s no way to know because there was no control group.

But four anecdotes and a recalled paper are apparently more than enough for conservative politicians across the country to codify what looks a whole lot like medical malpractice. In at least eight states, legislators have passed laws forcing abortion providers to trick their patients into believing that abortion reversal is a real medical procedure that’s available and effective. In 2019 alone, five states have passed these mandatory deception laws, and Ohio is moving another right now. Several of these laws have already failed legal tests, with a federal judge opining that North Dakota’s defense of its abortion reversal legislation was “Devoid of scientific support, misleading, and untrue.”

Medication abortion is becoming an increasingly common and accessible way to safely end a pregnancy, and abortion opponents and their allies in state legislatures are aggressively responding by pushing these restrictions. In 2017, nearly 40 percent of abortions in the United States were medication abortions. Spreading lies about abortion reversal is just the right’s latest strategy for denying bodily autonomy.

The myth of abortion reversal is particularly attractive to the anti-abortion cause because it centers itself on the false premise that people who have abortions often regret them, a stigmatizing belief that simply isn’t grounded in fact. Different people feel different emotions after having an abortion, but regret is almost never one of them. In fact, 95 percent of people who’ve had an abortion reported feeling that abortion was the right choice for them. Abortion reversal practitioners are targeting pregnant people at a time when they are often emotionally vulnerable and using their bodies to further an ideological agenda with little concern for the potential effects.

These new findings from UC Davis Health are further evidence that abortion reversal can be dangerous—both as a fictitious narrative and as a medical practice.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2019/12/06/abortion-reversal-is-not-only-b-s-but-is-dangerous-too/