The slew of new provisions has meant not only fewer options but also more obstacles for women looking to terminate a pregnancy, and in turn it has affected who is able to get an abortion in the state.
In October, Sheva Guy, a 23-year-old doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati, publicly recounted her journey traveling more than 300 miles to get an abortion. Guy was about 22 weeks into her planned pregnancy when she learned that the fetus had a fatal spinal abnormality; she could carry the pregnancy to term and give birth to a stillborn baby or seek an abortion. The only clinic in the state that performs abortions at 22.5 weeks was booked, so it referred her to a clinic in Chicago. Guy estimated that the trip, including the procedure, cost $3,000.
Abortion Torrent
Kasich, who served four years in the Ohio state Senate and 18 in the U.S. House of Representatives representing suburban Columbus, has long supported legislation limiting abortion. Among other anti-abortion bills he voted for during his House tenure were the Child Custody Protection Act, a 1998 bill that would have made it a federal crime to transport a minor across state lines for an abortion, and a 2000 ban on partial-birth abortions, an uncommon late-term procedure.
The provision in the budget that prohibited transfer agreements between abortion providers and public hospitals is considered the most controversial that Kasich signed. Although these pacts, which are required in seven other states, have been a requisite for Ohio abortion providers since 1996, the new rule greatly limited the pool of potential partners.
CORRECTION (Dec. 2, 12:04 p.m.): An earlier version of the map in this article, depicting the reduction in the number of Ohio abortion clinics, showed a circle that was too large for the number of clinics in Cincinnati in 2010; the number declined from two in 2010 to one in 2014. The map has been updated to show a smaller circle.
The U.S. Supreme Court late Wednesday night refused to block a Texas law that amounts to a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. The vote was 5-4, with three Trump-appointed justices joining two other conservative justices. Dissenting were conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and the court's three liberal justices.
Because the established procedure for challenging a state law is to sue officials charged with enforcement, the Texas state legislature wrote the law instead to put citizens in charge of enforcement. Specifically, the law allows anyone, without establishing any vested personal interest, to sue clinics and individuals alike for "aiding and abetting" abortions performed after about six weeks.
The Justice Department is "deeply concerned" about the law, according to Attorney General Merrick Garland, and is "evaluating all options to protect the constitutional rights of women, including access to an abortion."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed the lower chamber will take up legislation to codify access to abortion when lawmakers return later this month. But while the Women's Health Protection Act, which has been proposed during several legislative sessions, could have enough votes to win passage in the House, it faces a very uncertain future in the evenly divided Senate.
Justice Kagan, in her written dissent, said "Texas's law delegates to private individuals the power to prevent a woman from obtaining an abortion during the first stage of pregnancy. But a woman has a federal constitutional right to obtain an abortion during that first stage," a right that the Supreme Court has endorsed repeatedly over nearly a half century.
"The court's order is stunning," she wrote. "Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand. ... Because the court's failure to act rewards tactics designed to avoid judicial review and inflicts significant harm on the applicants and on women seeking abortions in Texas, I dissent."
Long resistant to any revisions to Senate institutional rules, Biden said in the days after the June decision by the Supreme Court overruling Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson that he would support eliminating that supermajority threshold for abortion bills, just as he did on voting rights legislation.
In fundraisers and in political speeches, Biden has vowed to reject any abortion restrictions that may come to his desk in a GOP-controlled Congress. He has also urged voters to boost the Democratic ranks in the Senate so enough senators would not only support reinstating abortion nationwide, but would be willing to change Senate rules to do it.
Even with the economy dominating so much of the midterm discourse, abortion has been a touchstone in high-profile contests from Ohio to Arizona, especially as Democrats try to trap Republicans between their most ardent anti-abortion base voters who want absolute or near-total bans and a majority of U.S. adults that wants at least some legal access to elective abortions.
The torrent of invective aimed at the Supreme Court makes one thing clear. The standards for medical facilities and the credentialing of the medical staff who work in them should be determined by medical authorities, not politicians. This should be a medical issue, not a political issue.
Baton Rouge -- A torrent of bills moved through the Louisiana Legislature on Friday. Among them were proposals to restrict abortions, to put all New Orleans-area levee police under one supervisor and to allow residents to receive tax refunds by check instead of on a debit card.
The abortion measure, filed by Senate President John Alario, R-Westwego, would restrict abortions to the first 20 weeks of a pregnancy. Current restrictions prevent abortion after a fetus is "viable."
Rep. Frank Hoffman, R-Monroe, called the measure "another significant bill in Louisiana's pro-life history" and noted that the state was ranked at the top of a list of anti-abortion states this summer. The restrictions are expected to prohibit about 150 abortions a year, he said.
Doctors are protected from penalties, which could include fines, imprisonment and professional penalties, if the abortion is deemed necessary to protect the life of a pregnant woman or prevent her from suffering serious, permanent harm. The law specifically excludes psychological and emotional conditions from that exemption.
The graph reveals that both processes have been taking place. Younger cohorts are clearly more likely to back abortion rights in any given year, and there are also changes in cohorts over time. Most encouragingly, those born in the 1990s registered the highest level of support over the entire period in 2018, with almost 60 percent saying they favor abortion rights regardless of the reason.
Of course, the brutal irony is that working-class women also need abortions, and it is their access that will be most threatened by these bills. The Atlanta-area engineer facing an unplanned pregnancy has far more options for securing an abortion than the home health aide in rural Georgia. What the polling suggests, however, is that even though working-class women need abortion access the most, there are powerful structural counter-forces pushing in the opposite direction.
Ms Creasy has also received hundreds of messages for support for her campaign for abortion rights for Northern Irish women which followed a supreme court ruling that women from Northern Ireland were not entitled to free abortions on the NHS in England.
Many chronically ill and disabled folks rely on medications they no longer have access to, like methotrexate, which is secondarily used as an abortifacient. Methotrexate is primarily used for the treatment of severe chronic illnesses including rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. People living with chronic conditions often suffer from debilitating pain and rely on these medications to be able to function. On top of not being able to access medications that help manage their disabilities, people with disabilities are also more likely to have complications during pregnancy than their peers as well. People with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome specifically are nine times more likely to have complications during pregnancy, which can result in fatalities. Even in states where abortion is still protected, insurance companies are denying prescription refills of these medications because of the fear that they will be sued for assisting with an abortion, or that the person will sell the medication to those in need of an abortion who cannot access it.
The Silent Scream is an anti-abortion film released in 1984 by American Portrait Films, then based in Brunswick, Ohio. The film was created and narrated by Bernard Nathanson, an obstetrician and gynecologist from New York, and it was produced by Crusade for Life, an evangelical anti-abortion organization. In the video, Nathanson narrates ultrasound footage of an abortion of a twelve-week-old fetus, claiming that the fetus opened its mouth in what Nathanson calls a silent scream during the procedure. As a result of Nathanson's anti-abortion stance in the film, The Silent Scream contributed to the abortion debate in the 1980s.
From 1970 to 1972 Nathanson had directed in New York City, New York the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, which he called the largest abortion facility in the western world at that time, and he claimed to help found the National Abortion Rights Action League in New York City. Though he had previously performed abortions, by 1982 Nathanson opposed the procedure, owing his changed stance to the technology of ultrasound, which allowed observation of fetuses during abortions. He created the film as a statement against abortion, stating that any form of violence should be opposed, including those against a fetus.
The Silent Scream begins in Nathanson's office, where he first informs the viewer that he is an obstetrician and a gynecologist and that he had previously performed thousands of abortions. He then discusses ultrasound technology, the development of which changed his outlook on the abortion procedure. Touting the ability of the ultrasound to show live images of the fetus while in utero, Nathanson directs the audience to a monitor on which he outlines the body of the fetus, pointing to and naming specific body parts. 2ff7e9595c
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