Abortion – Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information

Seen as the “gold standard” in many areas of medical research, fetal cells are widely used in coronavirus vaccine research.

Wikimedia Commons / Via en.wikipedia.org

On Friday, a Trump administration panel erected to judge the ethics of federally funded research relying on human fetal cells met more than a year after it was first announced. Just hours before the meeting, the panel was revealed to be stacked with abortion opponents hostile to such research.

Human fetal cells are widely used in medical research to develop vaccines — notably in at least a half dozen current candidate coronavirus vaccines — as well for studying diseases including AIDS. The National Institutes of Health Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Board was initially announced in June of last year, putting a hold on grant applications for medical research involving human fetal cells. It followed the Trump administration’s moves to cancel related federal research contracts and audit human fetal cell research.

“The committee was carefully constructed to block funding,” bioethicist R. Alta Charo of the University of Wisconsin Law School, who spoke during the one-hour open session of the meeting, told BuzzFeed News by email. The next five hours of the meeting will be closed to the public to review federal grants.

The ethics panel will review all NIH medical research grant applications already approved for possible funding that include use of fetal cells, reporting directly to Department of Health and Human Services head Alex Azar, and bypassing NIH chief Francis Collins. The first meeting was quietly announced earlier this month in the Federal Register, and its membership was not made public until 8 a.m. on Friday morning.

The panel will be headed by bioethicist Paige Comstock Cunningham, interim president of the evangelical Taylor University in Indiana, the home state of Vice President Mike Pence, widely seen as the leading abortion opponent in the Trump administration. Its 15 members include David Prentice of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, known for his opposition to human embryonic stem cell research during the Bush administration, and other opponents who have previously testified against fetal cell research to Congress.

NIH official Lawrence Tabak, who opened the meeting, noted that the committee’s role was not to review the science of the proposed research, which had already been approved for NIH grant funding, but to comment on its ethics for Azar. The board is not required to come to a consensus in its views.

The yearlong wait for the ethics board meeting had stalled research on HIV, Down syndrome, and diabetes, the Washington Post reported in January. The cells, grown from induced abortion tissues collected decades ago, serve as a “gold standard” in research, according to a Wednesday statement signed by more than 90 major medical universities and scientific organizations.

“Research using human fetal tissue has been essential for scientific and medical advances that have saved millions of lives, and it remains a crucial resource for biomedical research,” said the letter.

During the coronavirus pandemic, the use of fetal research tissue has emerged as a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s handling of the epidemic, noted Stanford University researcher Irving Weissman, who spoke during a public comments session. NIH blocking fetal cell research has already shut down academic research aimed at testing coronavirus vaccines and treatments in mice grafted with human fetal lung cells, he said. That notably could include intranasal inoculations that could block coronavirus infections in the mouth, nose, and throat.

“They are withholding therapies for the rest of us, including their own families,” Weissman told BuzzFeed News.

In April, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and other abortion opponents told the Trump administration that it should “incentivize” the development of coronavirus vaccines made without human fetal cells, but did not oppose two “Operation Warp Speed” vaccines that did. Whether coronavirus vaccine research proposals would be reviewed by the ethics board on Friday was unknown, due to confidentiality rules.

Abortion opponents are split on the ethics of the Moderna mRNA vaccine, whose Phase 3 clinical trial launched on Monday is the first US vaccine to undergo wide testing in people. While the vaccine itself does not involve fetal cells, some of its development work may have involved them, John Di Camillo, an ethicist with the National Catholic Bioethics Center, told BuzzFeed News.

The balance of the ethics panel’s membership, whether research supporters or abortion opponents, will largely determine what opinions are delivered to Azar, added Di Camilo. By its charter, the board is required to contain a balance of viewpoints, but during the group’s introductions, numerous members of the panel identified themselves by affiliation with a religious institution or faith while describing their scientific or medical credentials.

Source: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/trump-fetal-cell-ethics-panel-abortion

The Missouri Republican senator tipped conservatives’ hand in an interview on Sunday.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said any future Supreme Court nominee would have to be willing to publicly disavow Roe v. Wade before gaining his support.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

There are less than 100 days before the November election, and Republicans are very worried about the outcome.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) let that fact slip Sunday in an interview with the Washington Post. To be clear, Hawley didn’t actually say out loud that Republicans are worried President Donald Trump won’t get reelected or that Democrats will take control of the U.S. Senate. Instead, Hawley, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that any future U.S. Supreme Court nominee would have to be willing to publicly disavow Roe v. Wade—and thus the constitutional framework for legal abortion altogether—before gaining his support.

Hawley’s statement is equal parts saber-rattling and conservative truth-telling, and while it’s easy to dismiss his comments as the usual bluster from the fringes of the legal conservative movement, doing so would be a grave mistake.

It is clear that Trump’s criminally negligent mishandling of the COVID-19 outbreak and his administration’s violent response to police violence protests across the nation threaten to derail his reelection bid and cost Republicans control of the Senate.

Democrats could be on the verge of a power sweep, and that means Republicans need their base to show up and vote in November. And there is no issue conservatives more reliably show up for than abortion rights and the Supreme Court. Quite simply, Republicans needed someone to chum the waters to make sure the base showed up to support Trump and down-ticket Republican races. And on Sunday, Hawley offered up fresh meat to conservatives in the form of a Washington Post interview designed to light up the discourse on Twitter. Predictably, it did just that.

Hawley’s interview does more than just give legal journalists and pundits a new outrage for the week. It very intentionally moves the goalposts for Republicans on judicial nominations. If the other Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee disagree with Hawley, then it’s now on them to say so publicly. Failing to do so will allow Hawley’s hard-line to become the party default.

Let’s be frank. Hawley just said the quiet part out loud when it comes to Republicans, judges, and abortion. A political mission of appointing judges to overturn Roe v. Wade is the default position of the Republican Party, but one they’ve largely hidden behind a veneer of platitudes about deference to precedent. But with 200 Trump-appointed judges and counting on the federal bench, many of whom won’t even say Brown v. Board of Education—the case that ended legal racial segregation in public education—was rightly decided, that veneer is fading fast.

Sunday’s chest-thumping from Hawley on judges and abortion should also sound familiar to anyone who has followed his political career. As Missouri attorney general, Hawley was a vocal abortion rights opponent who made pledging to confirm Supreme Court justices opposed to Roe v. Wade into a hallmark of his Senate campaign. Hawley has built a pretty successful name for himself in conservative circles by attacking reproductive autonomy. To that end, the interview with the Post was just more of the same from him.

But while it may be same old, same old from Hawley, his comments reflect a dangerous escalation by conservatives in their war on legal abortion.

There is no reason to think that Trump would ever nominate anyone to the federal bench—let alone a potential Supreme Court justice—who was supportive of abortion rights. After all, Trump ran on a pledge to nominate judges who would recriminalize abortion. And many of Trump’s appointees would likely have no problem making the kind of public disavowal of widely accepted principles of constitutional law that Hawley demanded in his Post interview, except for the fact that such behavior is considered gauche and unseemly for a federal judge. Hawley’s interview Sunday signals to those more radical Trump appointees that they have the political cover they need to start upending abortion rights in the lower courts. And with at least a dozen abortion rights cases lingering in the appellate courts right now, we could see real soon if any of those Trump judges will take Hawley up on his offer for political cover.

Finally, Hawley’s statements help to shift away from the legal academy’s idea that overturning Roe simply kicks the question of legal abortion back to the states. That’s not what Hawley told the Post, and frankly it’s not what this new generation of conservative thinkers believe. They want a decision that outlaws abortion at the state and the federal levels. And on Sunday, Hawley let the public know those are the only judicial candidates he is willing to consider.

Does Hawley speak for the other Republican senators on the judiciary committee? That’s a good question, especially after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent announcement that she was undergoing another round of cancer treatment. Ginsburg has said she has no plans on retiring any time soon, but it’s clear Republicans are gearing up for the possibility that Trump gets to appoint a third Supreme Court justice. On Sunday, Hawley fired the first warning shot to let us know that if a vacancy happens, Republicans plan to make it into a referendum on legal abortion.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2020/07/27/republicans-are-worried-about-november-so-sen-josh-hawley-is-talking-about-abortion/?fbclid=IwAR1pGgDwsm2557S5nGCegjCMqw3LG333_Ue3IbhlLcAVQkGbJQfzB7MQ13E

Anti-abortion activists and lawmakers view medication abortion as the new frontier of abortion access—and are targeting the FDA’s regulation of abortion pills.

As anti-choice activists adjust their strategy to focus on the FDA and medication abortion, their opponents believe they are gaining ground in the fight to expand access.
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As medication abortion becomes more popular and a global pandemic makes telemedicine not just appealing, but necessary to minimize the risk of spreading COVID-19, the anti-choice movement has honed in on a new target: the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Over the last several months, anti-abortion activists and lawmakers have escalated a campaign aimed at the federal agency, asking it to crack down on websites selling abortion pills online and ignore calls to lift the restrictions on the abortion drug mifepristone.

In May, dozens of anti-abortion groups signed a letter to the FDA singling out Aid Access, a telemedicine site run by a doctor based in the Netherlands, which received a warning letter from the agency last year for prescribing mifepristone to patients in the United States. They joined more than 100 anti-choice lawmakers who sent a similar letter to the FDA last year. And large anti-abortion organizations like Students for Life and Live Action are urging activists to focus more heavily on restricting medication abortion and using the issue to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cause.

Reproductive health advocates say the anti-abortion camp is beginning to view medication abortion as the new frontier of abortion access—and therefore as their next major battle to fight.

“I think they’ve been aware of it but maybe didn’t understand the degree to which it’s a transformative technology especially when combined with the internet and with our global commerce system,” said Elisa Wells, the cofounder of Plan C, a website that provides people with information about self-managed abortion with pills. “They’re clearly concerned because they see the promise of the [abortion pill] to make abortion accessible to those who need it.”

Focusing more heavily on the FDA’s regulation of medication abortion means anti-abortion activists may have to subtly change their strategy. The movement has long relied on abortion later in pregnancy to associate graphic and misleading imagery with abortion in general, and put clinics in the crosshairs of anti-choice legislation, protest, and violence.

Medication abortion “has the potential to move abortion away from a clinic-based service—which is where a lot of activity in the anti-abortion movement is focused—and move that to patients’ homes where it would be a much more private experience,” said Dr. Daniel Grossman, the director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), a research group at the University of California, San Francisco. “I’m sure that seems like a big threat to the anti-abortion movement.”

Anti-choice groups are likely to make more of an issue out of the FDA’s role in regulating abortion drugs after a federal judge’s ruling last week, which temporarily suspended the agency’s longtime mandate that providers dispense mifepristone from a hospital or clinic for the duration of the pandemic.

In the immediate aftermath, anti-choice groups condemned the decision, leaning on misleading claims about the drug’s safety. “The FDA regulation known as the Risk Evaluation Mitigation Strategy (REMS) is in place to ensure the drug is administered by an approved prescriber equipped to accurately assess pregnancy and the risks associated with ingesting the dangerous abortion drug regimen,” Lila Rose, the founder and president of Live Action, wrote in a statement.

For decades, the restrictions on how the medication can be dispensed have meant that patients could only obtain the pills in person, creating a significant—and medically unnecessary—barrier to medication abortion, which research has shown is overwhelmingly safe and effective.

As of 2017, nearly 40 percent of U.S. abortions were done with pills, according to a Guttmacher Institute report. The method of abortion—a two-step regimen involving mifepristone and misoprostol—is now much more common than it was 20 years ago, when it first became available. But in parts of Europe where the drug is not as heavily restricted, the rate of medication abortion can be as high as 90 percent.

The FDA placed these restrictions on mifepristone as soon as it approved the drug in 2000. The approval process was contentious, and reproductive health advocates argue that the agency favored anti-choice activists when it decided to implement several restrictions on the drug despite its safety record abroad.

Abortion rights supporters had hoped that medication abortion would dramatically expand abortion access, imagining that patients would be able to get the pills from primary care physicians or as an over-the-counter medication at pharmacies. Instead, medication abortion became just as difficult to access as other in-clinic abortion procedures.

“If we had made the pills available 20 years ago, medication abortion would have always been included in anti-abortionists’ strategies and public messaging,” said Cynthia Pearson, the executive director of the National Women’s Health Network. “But they won in the sense that they managed to keep access so limited.”

Pearson says abortion rights opponents are taking advantage of what they view as a politicized FDA that will eventually take their side in the fight over medication abortion access. The FDA resides within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, overseen by Secretary Alex Azar, who has pushed through President Donald Trump’s anti-abortion agenda and referred to HHS as the “Department of Life.”

“I think some form of some interference—or ‘wink-wink’ implied interference—is preventing the FDA from making a science-based decision,” Pearson said. “But the restrictions have been political from the start. They were political then, and they’re political now.”

As anti-choice activists adjust their strategy to focus on the FDA and medication abortion, their opponents believe they are gaining ground in the fight to expand access. Even before the federal judge’s ruling rolling back the in-person requirement on mifepristone, Plan C had been in talks with dozens of doctors across the country about mailing the medication anyway, arguing that the FDA rule is vague about whether a patient has to obtain the pills in person. Some have agreed to overlook the longtime interpretation of the rule and mail their patients abortion pills.

More people also appear to be using websites like Aid Access and abortionpillrx.com to buy abortion pills online—particularly during quarantine—and some are discovering that they prefer to self-administer the medication.

In the meantime, researchers and reproductive health advocates are hoping they can use this window of time to build an even more persuasive case for getting rid of the mifepristone restrictions permanently.

“In this current administration, everything is politicized,” Grossman said. “But I’m still optimistic that, in the long run, the evidence will be convincing.”

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2020/07/22/the-next-big-anti-abortion-fight-keeping-you-from-having-an-abortion-at-home/

Crisis pregnancy centers are “clinics” that aren’t medically regulated and actively work to deceive people about abortion. That deception is designed to delay or deny access to abortion, which leads to people getting abortions later in pregnancy or being entirely unable to access the care they need.

Truth4Greeley, a group that focuses on the dangers of these fake health clinics, found that some clinics perform pregnancy tests but lie to people about how far along they are in their pregnancy. They also tell people to “wait it out” because 1 in 4 pregnancies will end in a miscarriage.

An investigator posing as a pregnant woman was told by a center volunteer that she shouldn’t panic because “[a]bortion is legal through all nine months of pregnancy, so you have plenty of time to make a decision,” according to a report from NARAL Pro-Choice America, a group that fights restrictions on abortion.

This is not true. The Guttmacher Institute, which tracks state laws on abortion, says that 43 states prohibit abortions at some point in pregnancy.

Later abortions are performed by a relatively small amount of providers and aren’t available in all states. In addition, any person who needs an abortion after 20 weeks might need to pay nearly quadruple the cost of one done earlier, and that doesn’t include travel costs or child care if it’s needed.

Beth Vial, who wrote about her later abortion for Teen Vogue, detailed the numerous lies a crisis pregnancy center told her. There were no nurses on staff at the center. She was sent to a different location to get an ultrasound, she was lied to about how far along she was in her pregnancy, she was told abortions were dangerous, and she was hassled at home by the crisis pregnancy center workers, who she said called her “day and night.” She didn’t learn she was actually 26 weeks pregnant until she went to a nearby hospital.

With these sorts of lies, the centers help push people into seeking abortion care at a later date. The Later Abortion Initiative, which focuses on the barriers and stigma around later abortions, reported that people who sought abortions at or after 20 weeks found those people were “much more likely to report logistical delays.”

Another study found that one of the logistical barriers reported by people who ultimately ended up needing to travel to have an abortion was that people first went to a crisis pregnancy center, which delayed their abortion care.

Reproaction is another group that has catalogued the lengths to which these anti-abortion health centers go in order to deceive people who are seeking an abortion, birth control, or reliable information about pregnancy. Some of these centers locate themselves close to real reproductive health care clinics and use a similar-sounding name or similar type of signage, hoping to deceive people into entering the wrong location.

The anti-abortion centers also try to frighten people out of abortions. They tell people that abortion is linked to mental health problems. That’s been debunked for years. Another persistent lie they use is that there is a connection between getting an abortion and later getting breast cancer. Planned Parenthood says such assertions “fly in the face of scientific evidence.”

The clinics also lie about how dangerous abortions are. The National Abortion Foundation notes that people are also told abortions are “painful, life-threatening procedures.” In reality, abortion is a very safe procedure, and complications are rare. That’s particularly true when abortion is compared to childbirth, which carries a risk of death roughly 11 times higher than that from an abortion.

Guttmacher also reports that people who end up going to crisis pregnancy centers are disproportionately young, poor, or lacking education. Colorlines, which reports on advancing racial justice, has also noted that the centers target people of color with advertising.

Notably, the same groups that praise the centers, such as Students for Life, are those that call for bans on abortions later in pregnancy. At a Senate hearing earlier this year, Patrina Mosley of the anti-choice Family Research Council said that later abortions are done because the clinics gain something financially. Jill Stanek, who heads the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, said that abortion providers who do late abortions are “deciding the life or the death of the baby.”

Crisis pregnancy centers distort information with the explicit goal of delaying or denying abortions. When they succeed in creating a delay, people have to seek care elsewhere, but they’ve already lost time in addressing a time-sensitive health concern.

Source: https://americanindependent.com/crisis-pregnancy-centers-abortion-access-health-care-reproductive-rights/?fbclid=IwAR07bZcrk3_1EBzvR-lOF95zs6smp2OTIgImG83VD1mpMnlzOVMsGd5RQCQ

We are in a moment of reckoning and transformation as a nation. Without a doubt, now is the moment to dismantle systems of oppression and take a stand against racist and discriminatory policies. Empty gestures are not enough. We must enact sweeping policy change and draft budgets that affirm the dignity and worth of all people, no exceptions.

Earlier this month, I was profoundly frustrated and disappointed to learn that the first-ever pro-choice majority in the House of Representatives would advance — for the second year in a row now — a Fiscal Year 2021 (FY2021) appropriations bill that will maintain the shameful legacy of the Hyde Amendment and continue to push comprehensive reproductive health care out of reach for our nation’s most vulnerable.

For more than four decades, the Hyde Amendment has banned access to abortion for low-income people who receive health insurance coverage through Medicaid. These abortion bans have disproportionately impacted Black, Latinx, Indigenous and other communities of color, perpetuating cycles of poverty and economic inequality.

Make no mistake, access to healthcare and specifically abortion care is a racial justice issue. Our nation has created systems and structures of oppression that have exacted precise hurt and harm on women of color since the nation’s inception. Those structures have dictated who has access to critical healthcare, economic opportunity, and yes, who has bodily autonomy.

As our nation continues to grapple with connected crises — an unprecedented public health crisis exacerbated by systemic racism and the plague of police brutality disproportionately robbing us of Black and brown lives, the House Democratic majority has a critical responsibility to leverage our power and to speak out against and actively dismantle all racist and discriminatory policies — particularly those that rob people of color, low-income people, immigrants, transgender and gender non-conforming people of comprehensive health care and the right to make decisions over their own bodies.

In this moment where the Trump Administration and anti-choice politicians in legislatures across the country have made it clear that they will stop at nothing to ban abortion care, it is simply no longer enough to say that you are “pro-choice.” I need you to legislate and vote like lives depend on it, because they do.

As Democrats, we must proactively legislate racial and reproductive justice and meaningfully advance policies that affirm that abortion care is health care and that health care is a fundamental human right that must be guaranteed to all.

That’s why, today, along with my sisters in service Congresswomen Barbara Lee, Jan Schakowsky and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I filed an amendment to finally repeal the Hyde Amendment. Black and brown people cannot afford to wait another budget cycle for their humanity and dignity to be recognized.

In this moment of profound national reckoning, Congress must right the wrongs of the past and make reproductive autonomy a guaranteed right for everyone.

Source: https://medium.com/@RepPressley/its-past-time-to-defeat-the-hyde-amendment-55e651b4b59d

It is critical to confront willful ignorance and ensure that the discussion on abortion rights is based on truth and science.

Geographic location, socioeconomic class, race, and access to health insurance are among the key factors that can create barriers to receiving care.
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Waking up to agony in my abdomen was not how I expected to spend my last night visiting my family in California two years ago. After rushing to the emergency room in the middle of the night and getting my test results, I learned I was pregnant. Because the pregnancy was ectopic, I was rushed into emergency surgery.

At the time, I didn’t know what an ectopic pregnancy meant—that a fertilized egg had implanted outside my uterus, where it develops in healthy pregnancies. Most ectopic pregnancies implant in a fallopian tube and, if untreated, can cause the tube to burst, leading to internal bleeding and possible death.

The surgery, and the OB-GYN who performed my procedure, saved my life.

So I was dismayed when the Ohio General Assembly introduced two bills in 2019 that invented a surgery for my life-threatening pregnancy. According to these bills, if a pregnancy is ectopic, doctors can transplant the embryo into the uterus. This proposed surgery, however, does not exist.

Instead of consulting a doctor, the bills’ sponsor, Ohio Rep. John Becker (R), collaborated with an anti-choice lobbyist named Barry Sheets. After learning about two mentions of reimplantation in scientific journals from 1917 and 1990, Sheets, a policy consultant with a bachelor’s degree in political science, deemed the procedure medically sound and proposed it be written into law.

Any medical expert could have told him that the evidence was flimsy and unreliable: a two-and-half-page case report from a century ago, and a letter to the editor describing a surgery a doctor claimed to have witnessed ten years earlier. As Dr. Daniel Grossman told Rewire.News in 2019, reimplanting an ectopic pregnancy is “pure science fiction.”

Neither of the Ohio bills passed into law. But whether proselytizing or acting with sheer carelessness, the representatives went far beyond endangering women’s right to choose with their callousness—these two bills would hinder the only action that can save the life of someone with the kind of pregnancy I had.

I was lucky that I did not have to hesitate before going to the hospital. If I hadn’t had insurance, that night in the ER would have been very different. And I was lucky that my doctor didn’t have to hesitate before performing the surgery that saved my life. If the second bill in Ohio had been passed into law, a doctor there might have gone to prison for providing that same care. Geographic location, socioeconomic class, race, and access to health insurance are among the key factors that create barriers to receiving care.

My experience made an abstract discussion instantly tangible, and it changed how I think of abortion rights. I had never envisioned what it would be like to become pregnant. I trusted the advertised 99 percent effectiveness of my intrauterine device, marketed as among the most successful methods of birth control.

Whether by choice or necessity, ending a pregnancy can be excruciating for many people; it is not often a decision taken lightly. Having access to abortion does not force a certain option, but rather gives each person the independence to choose for themselves based on their own beliefs and circumstances. And access to abortion, as the U.S. Supreme Court decided nearly 50 years ago, is a constitutional right.

This spring, I watched with anger as state authorities once again ignored medical experts in order to deny countless people their rights, when anti-choice officials used a pandemic to create barriers to abortion care.

In a dozen states, authorities suspended abortion under the guise of preserving personal protective equipment to fight the coronavirus. Doctors and medical experts agreed this was not only dangerous but unnecessary. Medication abortions, which rely on pills alone and do not require any masks or gloves, accounted for nearly 40 percent of all abortions in the United States in 2017, according to the Guttmacher Institute. And even procedural abortions require “very little personal protective equipment,” according to Grossman, an OB-GYN and public health expert.

Pregnant people seeking abortions in states with COVID-19 bans were forced to travel and risk exposure, or continue unwanted pregnancies. Dr. Bernard Rosenfeld of Houston Women’s Clinic, one of only 22 abortion clinics in Texas, said his clinic had to turn away many patients while the state’s ban was in place. Rosenfeld, an OB-GYN on staff at Texas Women’s Hospital and St. Luke’s Medical Center, told Rewire.News that the Texas abortion ban was “a disaster.”

Although entire categories of surgeries were postponed during the pandemic, “no state has singled out any other procedure that is to be considered elective,” said a midwife who works in an Iowa hospital and wished to remain anonymous due to privacy concerns. “State lawmakers would never tell an eye doctor what is considered essential. Abortion is the one procedure that is legislated to this extent, even when many professional organizations affirm that this is an essential service of women’s health care.”

Abortion care was eventually allowed to resume in Texas and other states, either due to court orders or because states lifted the suspensions. But with a new surge in COVID-19 cases across the country, I can’t be confident some states won’t try to reimpose the abortion bans. I think now of all the people in the middle of an already heart-wrenching moment who face further obstacles to fight for the care they need.

It is critical to confront willful ignorance and ensure that the discussion on abortion rights is based on truth and science, guided by the wisdom of medical professionals and those who have lived experience.

In the days and weeks after my surgery, I was surprised by how many neighbors, friends, and even friends of friends shared similar experiences. Through the hurt and the healing, we could seek solace in sharing our stories. By striving for justice together, we ensure we are not alone.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2020/07/17/how-my-pregnancy-loss-shaped-my-perspective-of-anti-choice-legislation/?fbclid=IwAR0Z78pqRSiDHnqsVo2RjCZ8O36gS6iSiB5UXo2KDFGagXc4mJ4aWZkZGiM

Last week, a federal judge in Maryland issued an 80-page decision temporarily suspending enforcement of an FDA restriction on the abortion pill, forcing patients to make an unnecessary trip to their health care provider just to pick up the medication and sign a form.

“The Trump administration can no longer force patients to incur unnecessary COVID-19 risks as the price of getting abortion care,” said Julia Kaye, staff attorney at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. (VAlaSiurua, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

U.S. District Court Judge Theodore Chuang ruled the FDA requirement of in-person visits during the pandemic imposes a “substantial obstacle” to abortion health care that is likely unconstitutional. Judge Chuang’s order allows patients to receive mifepristone from their doctors through the mail.

“Today’s ruling represents a victory for patients, who should not have to face the additional burden of increased COVID-19 exposure as a condition of receiving their prescribed mifepristone,” said Dr. Eva Chalas, MD, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which brought the suit on behalf of a coalition of medical experts, along with SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective.

Mifepristone is used in combination with another medication—misoprostol—to safely and effectively end early pregnancy. Plaintiffs in the case argued the FDA’s restriction meant patients must travel to a hospital, clinic or office just to pick up the medication—even when their physician had already evaluated them and prescribed mifepristone, and even though the FDA allows patients to self-administer the medication at home without clinical supervision.

The medical community has opposed these restrictions on mifepristone for years—as they have no medical basis.

“Mifepristone is a safe medication and FDA’s in-person dispensing requirements provide no medical benefit to patients. There is no basis for FDA’s decision to treat mifepristone differently than other medications. Requiring in-person dispensing of mifepristone needlessly threatens both patients and clinicians,” said Dr. Chalas.

The FDA approved mifepristone in 2000 for use within the U.S.—but due to anti-abortion political pressure, the agency restricted the medication under the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) drug safety program, despite the fact that mifepristone is very safe. The FDA prohibited pharmacies from selling the mifepristone, instead requiring patients to obtain the medication directly from registered physicians.

The COVID-19 pandemic, along with updated standards of care for medication abortion, spurred a challenge to the FDA restriction.

Until now, standard medical protocols recommended an ultrasound and Rh blood test before medication abortion was administered, both of which required office visits. These protocols limited the use of telemedicine abortion for medication abortion—so no one challenged the FDA restriction until recently.

But reproductive health providers are now advocating for better, science-based medical protocols that do not require in-person tests. ACOG issued guidance on March 30 stating that clinicians can perform an assessment, counseling and consent for medication abortion by video or telephone, and that an ultrasound and Rh testing is not necessary.

Similarly, the Reproductive Health Access Project has issued a “no-touch” medication abortion protocol, eliminating the need for in-person visits and tests. Tests are often not necessary because patients can reliably tell their doctors when their last period began (to determine gestational age) and their blood type.

These changes, along with the increase of telemedicine during the pandemic, led to the legal challenge to the FDA restriction on mifepristone.

“It is unconscionable that the FDA is subjecting women of color, who are disproportionately represented among patients seeking abortion and miscarriage care, to life-threatening viral risks as a condition of obtaining these urgent reproductive health services,” said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective.

“Because of longstanding disparities in access to and quality of health care and other manifestations of structural racism, Black and Brown people are more likely to have preexisting health conditions that increase the likelihood of severe illness and death from COVID-19.”

Judge Chuang’s injunction will remain in place until at least 30 days after the end of the federal government’s declared public health emergency, which the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has indicated it intends to renew later this month.

“Today’s decision means that the Trump administration can no longer force patients to incur unnecessary COVID-19 risks as the price of getting abortion care,” said Julia Kaye, staff attorney at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, which represents the plaintiffs and has filed another case challenging a broader range of FDA restrictions on medication abortion care.

“We look forward to a day when federal reproductive health care policy is grounded in science, not animus, and this medically baseless requirement is lifted once and for all.”

Source: https://msmagazine.com/2020/07/21/the-abortion-pill-mifepristone-just-became-easier-to-get/?fbclid=IwAR2wUcsEHe3CifBu8QLz-LdtpAzSZ4rlmOPhA7EuhcvMRrLpCm_25yT3X8w

Monday’s ruling could be the first step in making medication abortion easier—and safe—to access.

Efforts to block medication abortion have nothing to do with patient safety and everything to do with discouraging robust public health policy regarding pregnancy and abortion. Phil Walter/Getty Images

Medication abortion access just got a little easier and safer for patients during the COVID-19 crisis. It’s about damn time, and it should stay this way forever.

A federal judge in Maryland issued an order on Monday blocking the Trump administration from enforcing a restriction that prevents patients from accessing medication abortion without a doctor’s visit, on the grounds that it likely unduly burdens abortion rights in the middle of a pandemic.

The ruling has the potential to radically shift the medication abortion landscape. Here’s how.

When the COVID-19 pandemic was first taking hold in this country, anti-choice lawmakers did not see the virus, which has now killed over 135,000 people and counting, as a crisis. They saw an opportunity to use one public health crisis to create another by attempting to restrict abortion access. So did members of the Trump administration who, early in the pandemic, refused to suspend restrictions the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) imposes on mifepristone, one of two drugs used together as medication abortion to end pregnancies and as miscarriage management.

FDA guidelines require patients who are prescribed mifepristone to travel to a hospital, clinic, or medical office to pick up the medication rather than fill the prescription by mail. Of the more than 20,000 drug products the FDA regulates, mifepristone is the only one that must be picked up in person but can then be self-administered at home without clinical supervision.

When used for purposes other than terminating a pregnancy, the FDA permits mifepristone to be mailed directly to a patient’s home.

Doctors from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) urged the FDA to lift the in-person restrictions on mifepristone. Despite the fact that the FDA had suspended similar restrictions on other medications (ones not related to abortion), the agency refused. So advocates sued. On Monday, a federal judge told the Trump administration it must make the medication available by mail for patients using it for an abortion, and blocked the FDA from enforcing its in-person requirement. 

U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang concluded that the “in-person requirements” for patients seeking medication abortion care impose a “substantial obstacle” to abortion patients and are likely unconstitutional during a pandemic.

“Particularly in light of the limited timeframe during which a medication abortion or any abortion must occur, such infringement on the right to an abortion would constitute irreparable harm,” Judge Chuang wrote in the 80-page decision that accompanied the preliminary injunction.

The decision does not apply to mifepristone for miscarriage management.

“The FDA’s medically unjustified requirement has long stood in the way of communities of color getting the reproductive health care we need—and now, during the pandemic, it is putting us at unnecessary risk for COVID-19,” Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, said in a statement following the decision.

“Today’s ruling recognized the simple truth that people should not be forced to choose between getting the care they need and protecting their health. This Administration should stop spending its time trying to make it harder for people of color to get the medical care we need, and instead trust us to make our own reproductive decisions and remove barriers that violate or prohibit our human right to self-determination.”

The decision is a critical first step in removing those barriers, perhaps for good. Monday’s injunction will stay in place for 30 days after the COVID-19 public health emergency declaration from the Trump administration expires.

More importantly, if that emergency declaration expires while the lawsuit remains pending in federal court—a distinct possibility given the slog of litigation—then ACOG and the other parties can petition the court to extend its preliminary injunction. That would mean that the FDA could continue to be barred from enforcing its in-person restrictions governing mifepristone. And the longer patients have access via mail to mifepristone for abortion care, the harder it will be for the Trump administration to persuasively argue that patients must be forced to pick up their mifepristone prescriptions in person.

The fight over medication abortion during the pandemic is far from over, though. Conservative states like Indiana and Louisiana have already tried to intervene in this lawsuit to defend the administration and the FDA restrictions; Judge Chuang issued a separate order effectively telling attorneys general from those states to pound sand. And I expect the Trump administration to appeal this decision immediately, which opens the door to the possibility a panel of Trump judges could reverse it.

For now, however, the decision stands. And it’s a good one—except for the fact that it doesn’t extend to patients experiencing a miscarriage. Those patients still have to face exposure risk from traveling to a doctor’s office or clinic to pick up medication in person during a pandemic.

What Monday’s decision really drives home, though, is that the fight over medication abortion is entirely a political battle. Medication abortion is safe. It’s effective. Efforts to block it have nothing to do with patient safety, and everything to do with discouraging robust public health policy regarding pregnancy and abortion. There’s no reason why patients shouldn’t be able to access mifepristone for abortion or miscarriage care via mail, both during this pandemic and once it’s over. Judge Chuang’s decision is the first step in recognizing that truth.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2020/07/15/medication-abortion-access-is-about-to-radically-change/?fbclid=IwAR2sJB_4sEcpMFTCus1_ygep6bqNN23HFFTc3Sfwxi5_KdWIlc99uxKLhOw

Attacks on reproductive freedom have the greatest effect on communities that already face significant barriers to accessing health care.

Last year, I went to Georgia after Gov. Brian Kemp signed a six-week ban into law and heard from women who had to make the most heartbreaking decisions to end life-threatening pregnancies.
John Amis/AFP via Getty Images

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the implementation of a law that would have left just one clinic and one doctor authorized to perform abortions in Louisiana, a state of more than 4.5 million people and 50,000 square miles.

Even though four justices ignored the Court’s own precedent, the ruling in June Medical Services v. Russo gave reproductive health, rights, and justice supporters across the country the chance to breathe a sigh of relief. But as we began leafing through the pages of the opinions, cracks started to appear, reminding us that our freedom remains up for grabs and our fight is nowhere near over.

Chief Justice John Roberts made it clear his critical deciding vote was not an endorsement of the right to access to abortion care, but of following the Court’s precedent. In June Medical Services, Roberts cited the precedent set by Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, a case about an identical Texas law. That ruling prevented Texas from making it nearly impossible to access abortion services, and Roberts specifically noted that he “continue[s] to believe [it] … was wrongly decided.”

In his opinion, Roberts also highlighted the fact that “neither party ha[d] asked us to reassess the constitutional validity” of the undue burden standard set in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Advocates view this statement as an open invitation for future challenges to Casey, an already limited upholding of the ruling in Roe.

Roberts’ message was clear: Because the Louisiana law was too similar to the law in question in Whole Woman’s Health, he could not deliver the ruling anti-abortion activists wanted. But that doesn’t mean he won’t in a future case about a different state law.

And states will try again. Republican lawmakers across the country continue to introduce TRAP (targeted restriction on abortion providers) laws and laws that ban abortion as early as six weeks—before many people even know they are pregnant. And they will continue attempting to pass other laws that restrict access to essential reproductive health care.

Last week, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed a bill that bans abortion at nearly every stage of pregnancy. Almost immediately after it was signed into law, advocates were able to block it temporarily, but that fight is not over.

And in Georgia, after a federal judge struck down the state’s horrifying and discriminatory six-week abortion ban, Gov. Brian Kemp immediately vowed to appeal the ruling. Last year, I went to Georgia after Gov. Kemp signed that bill into law. In the state capitol, I heard from women who had to make the most heartbreaking decisions to end life-threatening pregnancies. Their stories forcefully rebutted the duplicitous arguments behind these laws: that a state would know better than a woman what the ramifications of her choices are.

For those who fight against these draconian laws, these recent court rulings were well-earned victories. But the fact that we are still fighting these battles, and that the Supreme Court just undercut access to contraception, reminds us how much is still at stake.

On July 8 in Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court ruled that employers could limit employees’ access to birth control coverage under the Affordable Care Act by citing religious or moral objections. That decision could leave more than 125,000 women without contraceptive coverage from their employers. It’s outrageous. No one’s boss should be able to decide whether or not they can access any medication.

Abortion and contraception are health care. Abortion is as common a medical procedure as a knee replacement, a tonsillectomy, or LASIK. Doctors provide contraceptive prescriptions and devices as frequently as they prescribe blood thinners. Any conversation about reproductive health should be led by the real experts—individuals and their doctors, not right-wing politicians.

To undermine access to needed care during a pandemic—when we should be making it easier to access health care, not harder—is unconscionable. Attacks on reproductive freedom have the greatest effect on communities that already face significant barriers in accessing health care, including people of color, people with low incomes, people living in rural areas, and LGBTQ people.

This ongoing push to limit access to both abortion services and contraception makes it clear that the only thing these extreme policies want to reduce is a woman’s freedom to make her own choices about her health and her future.

We have to use our voices and our votes to defend that freedom. We have to fight to have more women at the table, to protect our courts, to codify Roe, to repeal the Hyde Amendment, and to guarantee access to reproductive health care in every community. And we have to wage these battles on every front—from the states and the courts to Congress and the White House.

The other side has made it clear they will never stop. Until everyone in this country recognizes that reproductive rights are nonnegotiable human rights, neither can we.

Source: https://rewire.news/article/2020/07/20/despite-supreme-court-win-abortion-rights-are-still-not-safe/