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Nebraska Passes Amendment to Limit Abortion Rights
Historic Ballot Amendment on Abortion in Nebraska A significant ballot amendment aimed at limiting abortion rights has successfully passed in Nebraska, as reported by The Associated Press. This amendment restricts abortion access beyond the first three months of pregnancy and outperformed a competing measure that sought to establish a right to abortion until fetal viability. This legislative move…
Fulton county judge issues order that abortions must be regulated as they were before law took effect in 2022
Carter Sherman at The Guardian:
A Georgia judge on Monday struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban, ruling that the ban is unconstitutional and blocking it from being enforced. In a 26-page opinion, the Fulton county superior judge Robert McBurney ruled that the state’s abortion laws must revert to what they were before the six-week ban – known as the Life Act – was passed in 2019. The ban was blocked as long as Roe v Wade was the law of the land, but went into effect after the US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022. “When a fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life, then – and only then – may society intervene,” McBurney wrote. Abortions are now legal in Georgia up until about 22 weeks of pregnancy – the point at which Georgia permitted abortions prior to the Life Act. However, fetal viability tends to occur closer to 24 weeks of pregnancy. Although the Roe line of jurisprudence was supposed to prevent states from banning abortion prior to fetal viability, Georgia and several other states did so anyway even before Roe fell.
Under the six-week ban, providers could not perform abortions if they detected fetal cardiac activity, which emerges at about six weeks into pregnancy. Many women, McBurney wrote, do not even know they are pregnant at six weeks. “For these women, the liberty of privacy means that they alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability,” McBurney wrote. “It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could – or should – force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.” In a footnote, McBurney added: “There is an uncomfortable and usually unspoken subtext of involuntary servitude swirling about this debate, symbolically illustrated by the composition of the legal teams in this case. It is generally men who promote and defend laws like the Life Act, the effect of which is to require only women – and, given the socio-economic and demographic evidence presented at trial, primarily poor women, which means in Georgia primarily black and brown women – to engage in compulsory labor, ie, the carrying of a pregnancy to term at the government’s behest.”
Fulton County Justice Robert McBurney issues a ruling in Sistersong v. Georgia that HB481 be struck down, reverting the state’s abortion laws to pre-HB481 times, in which abortion is permitted up to 22 weeks.
HB481 was passed in 2019 and took effect in 2022 after Dobbs was handed down that bans abortions in Georgia after 6 weeks.
The rise of post-Roe c-sections
Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day:
I remember the feeling of hands inside me. Pulling, tugging, moving things aside. My emergency c-section wasn’t painful, but that feeling of being invaded was somehow worse than physical hurt. For years, the thought of the surgery would send me into a PTSD panic, my knees literally buckling and vomit coming up the back of my throat. In my memory, my arms are tied down while I’m being cut—but I know that’s not true. It’s just my brain’s way of making the powerlessness of the moment seem tangible.
Because I was so early in my pregnancy, just 28 weeks along, doctors had to cut me both horizontally and vertically, making it life-threatening for me to have a vaginal birth in the future and increasing my risk for uterine rupture. I didn’t know it then, but I would never have another child. So when I see anti-abortion groups blithely suggesting that women with life-threatening pregnancies should be forced into c-sections rather than easier, safer, and less traumatic abortions—it feels personal. Because I chose my medical nightmare; it was necessary to save both my life and my daughter’s. I can’t imagine the horror of going through such a thing unnecessarily, or at 16 weeks pregnant instead of 28. What if my tied-down arms weren’t a post-traumatic illusion, but a legal reality?
For nearly a year, I’ve been tracking this growing strategy: Some of the most powerful anti-abortion organizations in the country are using carefully-worded legislation and seemingly-credible clinical recommendations to codify medical atrocities—pushing doctors to force pregnant women into unnecessary labor and c-sections, even before fetal viability and sometimes even when a fetus has died. Why would anyone do such a thing? The answer is as simple as it is awful: Anti-abortion groups and lawmakers want to prove that abortion is never necessary to save a person’s life. The problem is that they know pregnancy can be deadly, especially in the United States. Rather than admit abortion can be life-saving, their solution is to force doctors to end deadly pregnancies in any other way—even if it means torturing women in the process.
Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists are so desperate to divorce abortion from health care, they’d prefer to see us dead than allow critically ill women to get care they disagree with. I mean that literally. This is how they kill us. With the sly shifting of medical standards and surreptitiously-placed legislative language. Because while these people are cruel, they’re certainly not stupid. Anti-abortion extremists know the only way to normalize medical torture is to move quietly and slowly. After all, dystopias aren’t created in a day. They’re built, law by law and talking point by talking point, through medical regulations, bureaucracy, and fear. From a Supreme Court ruling in Idaho to timid guidance from hospital administrators in Louisiana—anti-abortion groups don’t need to own up to their grim vision when they have others embedding the nightmare bit by bit.
That’s not to say they haven’t been busy themselves. Using extremist groups with credible-sounding names—like American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs or the Charlotte Lozier Institute—the anti-abortion movement has carefully disguised radical calls to hurt women as simple scientific recommendations. They’ve inserted the nonsense term ‘maternal fetal separation’ into legislation, court cases and conservative talking points, removing ‘abortion’ in an attempt to further the lie that the procedure is never necessary. They've published papers and trotted out ‘experts’ who claim it’s “medically standard” to force women into c-sections or vaginal labor when their lives are at risk. Again, even when it’s too early for a fetus to survive.
Anti-abortion legislators have done their job too, passing laws that allow their state to define what conditions are life-threatening during pregnancy and the best course of action for doctors. They’ve written mandates that emergency terminations be performed in a way that “provides the best opportunity for the unborn child to survive.” If states must be forced to save women’s lives, it appears, they’ll make sure we suffer greatly for the trouble. It’s not a coincidence that reports coming out of anti-abortion states show a sharp rise in c-sections. With their license and freedom on the line, doctors and hospitals are falling in line. One Texas OBGYN who was directed to give a septic patient a hysterotomy told researchers, “The morbidity is going to be insane.”
To people who value fetuses above women, that’s a price they’re willing to pay. Indeed, all of this cruelty starts to make morbid sense when you understand that the broader anti-abortion goal goes beyond forced c-sections or redefining medical standards. They are trying to make Americans numb to women suffering and dying during pregnancy. They’re treating it as unpreventable—natural, even—so that voters don’t bat an eye when the maternal mortality numbers skyrocket.
Jessica Valenti reports on the rise of c-sections post-Roe and dishonest efforts to divorce abortion from healthcare by anti-abortion zealots in her Abortion, Every Day blog.
Republicans spread disinformation about abortion later in pregnancy, and many Democrats are uncomfortable discussing it. But thousands of pe
Alanna Vagianos at HuffPost:
Many Republicans want you to believe that women are getting abortions in the eighth and ninth months of pregnancy simply because they can. The right-wing rhetoric has been used to criticize abortion rights supporters and Democrats for years. Even Donald Trump — who up until recently consistently dodged the topic of abortion — has started repeating the myth.
Democrats “support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month,” the GOP presidential nominee said last month. Democrats can “have [an abortion] in the seventh, eighth, ninth month, and they can kill the baby,” he said in another interview, adding that in some states “they can kill the baby after the baby is born.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said this week that “there are late-term abortions and every single Democrat supported it.” (“Late-term abortion” is a popular right-wing talking point, but HuffPost is not using it because it’s medically inaccurate.) The belief that pregnant people use abortion like birth control is a well-worn boogeyman that the anti-choice movement has peddled for decades. Though rife with misinformation, the political strategy has been extremely successful, creating cultural stigma so deep around abortions later in pregnancy that many Democrats, including President Joe Biden, and even some pro-choice advocates, are uncomfortable discussing it.
But people do get abortions later in pregnancy — a phrase that generally reflects abortions at or after 21 weeks. Some are women with wanted pregnancies who get a fatal fetal diagnosis. Others are young people who don’t realize they’re pregnant or don’t have a safe way to get an abortion right away. Still, others experience something catastrophic and life-changing later in pregnancy — a partner becoming violent, their home burning down, a job loss — that will make it nearly impossible to safely raise a child. There’s also an increasing number of people pushed further into pregnancy because they experience barriers to care early on: their home state banned abortion forcing them to travel, or their immigration status makes it dangerous for them to seek health care, or they need to save up for the procedure because it’s not covered by insurance.
No one is getting an abortion in the second or third trimester because they woke up one day, months into being pregnant, and decided they didn’t want to be pregnant anymore. But the politically manufactured shame around later abortion care runs so deep that many Democrats believe it too, in part because of the power of these lies. Biden has centered his reelection campaign around restoring Roe v. Wade, and advocates are building policy around it too, protecting abortion care until viability or around 24 weeks — effectively ignoring those who will need care later in pregnancy.
“One of the mistakes we’ve made as a movement is to not talk about later care,” said Dr. Diane Horvath, an OB-GYN and abortion provider at Partners In Abortion Care, an abortion clinic in Maryland where 90% of her patients receive care in the second and third trimesters. “I think we thought we were protecting ourselves by being quiet about it,” she said. “But when you leave gaps in the narrative … anti-abortion folks have always been very happy to fill them in with things that are scary and incorrect, and really debase people who have abortions and debase people who provide them.” Most abortions do happen in the first trimester: Almost 93% of abortions reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2020 were done before the 13th week. Nearly 99% took place by the end of the 20th week. Somewhere around 1% of abortions occur at 21 weeks or later, and the subset of abortions in the third trimester (around 26 weeks) is even smaller.
[...]
Even under the best of circumstances, with a lot of privilege and resources, getting an abortion in the third trimester when Roe was still intact was extremely difficult. “The whole time we’re asking ourselves, ‘What would we have done if any of these pieces were not in place? What if we couldn’t have accessed that money quickly? What if we didn’t have IDs that allowed us to get on a plane? What if we didn’t read and speak English?’” recalled Christensen, who along with her husband founded the abortion strategy and advocacy group Patient Forward.
In 2020, 9% of people who accessed abortions had to travel out of their home state to receive care, according to The Guttmacher Institute. Three years later, after the Dobbs decision that repealed Roe, that number has doubled with around 20% of patients seeking care across state lines. (That number does not account for the increase in medication abortion by mail, a common access point for pregnant people in the first trimester post-Roe.) Horvath and Morgan Nuzzo, a certified nurse midwife, opened Partners in Abortion Care shortly after the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022. The two met working at a Planned Parenthood clinic, but didn’t become close until Nuzzo was pregnant with her first child, and Horvath offered some hand-me-down baby clothes from her kids. Partners in Abortion Care in College Park, Maryland, is one of a small handful in the country that offer all-trimester abortion care. During the first year the clinic was opened, they saw patients from 40 different states and three countries.
Their clinic sees about 10 to 15 patients a week ― nearly all of whom are getting abortions after 20 weeks. The clinic caps the number of patients they see weekly because later care takes more time. Unlike early care, which can often be done using abortion pills, abortions in the second and third trimester are more complex. An abortion between 20 and 26 weeks is typically a two-day procedure, and past 26 weeks is a three-day procedure.
HuffPost explores the stigma of those who get an abortion post-fetal viability and how anti-abortion propaganda (such as falsely calling post-fetal viability abortions "late term abortions") plays a role in creating such stigmas.
Those who choose abortion in the later half of the 2nd or the 3rd trimester do so because of extenuating circumstances.
Post-fetal viability = anywhere after 21-25 weeks in gestational age.
Anti-abortion activists lost every referendum on the issue in 2022 and the right is scrambling to find a way to talk about a political hot p
Carter Sherman at The Guardian:
The post-Roe v Wade battle over abortion rights may just torpedo Republicans’ shot at the White House next year, and they know it. Anti-abortion activists lost every abortion-related voter referendum last year, while ire over the fall of Roe has been credited with boosting Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Now, Republicans in the presidential primary are scrambling to figure out how to talk about and legislate abortion. But they’re regurgitating some common anti-abortion myths to make their case.
‘Late-term abortions’
At the last Republican debate, the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley suggested that the United States should ban “late-term abortions”, as a compromise between people who support abortion rights and those who do not. But while Republicans like to throw around the phrase, it’s not exactly clear what they mean – in medicine, “late-term” refers to pregnancies that last beyond 40 weeks, not abortions that occur later on in pregnancy. “‘Late-term abortion’ isn’t a thing,” said Katherine Kraschel, an assistant professor of law and health at Northeastern University. “It’s a term created by people who oppose abortion to spread disinformation and shame people who have abortion. It has no basis in medicine or science.” Moreover, less than 1% of all US abortions are performed at or past 21 weeks of pregnancy, according to Centers for Disease Control (CDC) data. While there isn’t great data on why people seek abortions later on in pregnancy, many of those cases may involve individuals whose pregnancies have been diagnosed with devastating fetal abnormalities – many of which can only be detected past the first trimester.
Women may also get abortions later on in pregnancy because it was too difficult to get one earlier. People who work at abortion funds have told the Guardian that, since Roe fell, they have seen an increase in people getting abortions in their second trimester of pregnancy. “If the concern is really with abortions that happen later on in pregnancy, then the laws that they’re putting in place to restrict access to abortion are only increasing the likelihood that someone has to access abortion further on in the pregnancy,” Kraschel said.
Abortions ‘up until the day of birth’
In the last presidential debate, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis – who signed a six-week ban into law in his state – and the South Carolina senator Tim Scott said that Democrats and the states that they control would like to permit abortions up until birth. There are a few states that do not restrict abortion based on the gestational age, such as Oregon, Colorado and Minnesota, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion restrictions. But most Democratic-leaning states do limit how late into pregnancy someone can get an abortion. States such as New York and California, which Republicans frequently single out, ban almost all abortions after fetal viability, which is generally around 24 weeks into pregnancy.
‘Post-birth abortions’
Earlier this summer, DeSantis claimed on CNN that “some liberal states” allow “post-birth abortions”. That statement is categorically wrong. Killing an infant is infanticide, a crime that is already illegal in all 50 states. This kind of claim, however, has gained some traction within GOP circles; Republicans in Congress have spent years trying to pass legislation that would regulate babies “born alive” after an abortion. [...]
A 15-week abortion ban – and the questionable reasons for it
At the last Republican debate, Scott and former vice-president Mike Pence declared that they would support a 15-week federal ban on abortion (and allow states to restrict the procedure earlier on in pregnancy). Such a law, which is also supported by the powerful anti-abortion group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, would be the first nationwide abortion ban in the history of the United States. Even before the supreme court decided Roe v Wade in 1973, states dictated their own abortion laws. When he declared his support for a 15-week ban, Pence said that the idea was “supported by 70% of the American people” and suggested that a 15-week ban was reasonable because abortion should be banned after “a baby is capable of feeling pain”. These are both common anti-abortion talking points among Republicans – and they are both misleading, if not totally incorrect.
Republicans, scrambling to figure out on how to talk about abortion in the post-Roe world, are resorting to pushing myths to justify abortion bans, such as pushing the debunked "post-birth abortion" canard, alongside the usual nonsense about "late-term abortion" and nonexistent "abortion up until the day of birth."
Supreme Court to Consider Abortion Case Challenging Roe v. Wade
Supreme Court to Consider Abortion Case Challenging Roe v. Wade
May 18, 2021 The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear a Mississippi case with the potential to seriously weaken the abortion rights in Roe v. Wade. The justices will consider a law passed by the Mississippi legislature in 2018 that would ban almost all abortions after 15 weeks. Since the law passed, lower federal judges have ruled it was unconstitutional because of Roe v. Wade. That…
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