Royal college voices concern at rise in number of prosecutions of ‘deeply traumatised’ women
Medical staff in the UK should not report women to the police if they believe their patients may have illegally ended their own pregnancy, a professional body is to say.
New guidance from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) will say it is never in the public interest to report women who have abortions to law enforcement agencies, according to the BBC.
Continue reading...Campaign ad, titled Forced, is designed to tie Donald Trump directly to the abortion issue
The Biden re-election campaign rolled out a new campaign ad Sunday, signaling a shift in emphasis to reproductive rights that the White House hopes will carry and define Democrats through the 2024 election cycle.
The campaign ad, titled Forced, is designed to tie Donald Trump directly to the abortion issue almost 18 months after his nominees to the supreme court helped to overturn a constitutional right to abortion enshrined in Roe v Wade, which would have turned 51 this week.
Continue reading...Abortion opponents are emboldened by the fall of Roe, but many states have enacted protections after ruling
Mike Pence had a message: always vote against abortion rights – even if, he suggested, that means voting for Donald Trump.
“That’s why we have primaries. We sort ’em out at every level. But after the primary’s over, you vote pro-life,” the former Republican vice-president to Trump told a downtown Washington DC ballroom of young, diehard anti-abortion activists on Saturday. “You go get behind men and women who are going to stand for the right to life.”
Continue reading...On the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade, a sparse crowd of activists brave snow on March for Life in Washington DC
While Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are planning a cascade of ads and events to coincide with the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade, hundreds of anti-abortion activists gathered on the National Mall in Washington DC on Friday in hopes of re-energizing a movement that has repeatedly stumbled since Roe’s overturning.
Originally organized around the goal of overturning the Roe precedent that established federal abortion rights, the March for Life has seen what was once its greatest victory become a political liability. In the 18 months since Roe’s demise, abortion rights supporters have trounced anti-abortion activists in state-level ballot referendums. Yet the march’s message was largely similar to past years: speakers and attendees alike talked about the need to make abortion “unthinkable” rather than just illegal – with scant details on how to make that happen.
Continue reading...The ruling by a unanimous panel of fifth US circuit court of appeals comes amid a wave of lawsuits focusing on abortion exceptions
The US government cannot enforce federal guidance in Texas requiring emergency room doctors to perform abortions if necessary to stabilize emergency room patients, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday, siding with the state in a lawsuit accusing Joe Biden’s administration of overstepping its authority.
The ruling by a unanimous panel of the fifth US circuit court of appeals comes amid a wave of lawsuits focusing on when abortions can be provided in states whose abortion bans have exceptions for medical emergencies.
Continue reading...At least 16 states will fund largely unregulated facilities that try to convince people to continue their pregnancies
In the months since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, at least 16 states have agreed to funnel more than $250m in taxpayer dollars towards anti-abortion facilities and programs that try to convince people to continue their pregnancies.
Much of that money is set to go to anti-abortion counseling centers, or crisis pregnancy centers, according to data provided by the Guttmacher Institute and Equity Forward, organizations that support abortion rights. It has been paid out throughout 2023 and will stretch into 2025.
Continue reading...State attorney general threatened to prosecute doctors if they provided abortion care to a woman with a nonviable pregnancy
When a Texas court ruled that a 31-year-old woman with a non-viable pregnancy could have an abortion despite the state’s strict bans, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, responded with a brazen threat to prosecute “hospitals, doctors, or anyone else” who would assist in providing the procedure. The letter he sent Texas hospitals hours after the ruling, threatening first-degree felonies that could result in life in prison, was a “stunning” move indicative of his longstanding crusade to criminalize abortion care, say legal experts and advocates.
“It is extraordinary that Paxton would threaten hospitals and doctors with this letter before even winning an appeal,” Mary Ziegler, a UC-Davis law professor who focuses on reproductive rights, told the Guardian. “It’s a very unusual maneuver, but does certainly reflect his ultimate goal of wanting to go after abortion providers and supporters at all costs.”
Continue reading...Ken Paxton issues threat after judge ruled this week that Cox, a pregnant woman with a lethal fetal diagnosis, can get an abortion
The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, has threatened to prosecute any doctor who provides an abortion to Kate Cox, a woman with a non-viable pregnancy, advising hospitals to ignore a court order issued on Thursday allowing her to get the procedure.
The rightwing Paxton issued the warning to three Houston-area hospitals after a Texas judge ruled this week that Cox, a pregnant woman with a lethal fetal diagnosis, may obtain an abortion under the narrow medical exceptions offered by the state bans.
Continue reading...Woman, who is eight weeks pregnant, wants to have abortion in Kentucky but cannot legally do so because of near-total ban
A pregnant woman in Kentucky filed a lawsuit on Friday demanding the right to an abortion, the second legal challenge in days to sweeping abortion bans that have taken hold in more than a dozen US states since Roe v Wade was overturned last year.
The suit, filed in state court in Louisville, says Kentucky’s near-total prohibition against abortion violates the plaintiff’s rights to privacy and self-determination under the state constitution.
Continue reading...The former president is proud of appointing the supreme court justices who overturned the right to abortion – now the issue is a vote loser for Republicans
A few months ago, the former president Donald Trump accused the Republican party of speaking “very inarticulately” on abortion. And yet, for the GOP presidential frontrunner, inarticulateness seems to be a feature, not a bug, of his own approach to abortion.
Trump thinks he can run in 2024 as a “moderate” on abortion, Rolling Stone reported this week – even though he’s currently running ads in Iowa, a crucial state in the Republican primary, proclaiming himself “the most pro-life president ever”. It’s a title to which Trump has a legitimate claim: his three nominees to the supreme court not only handed the nation’s highest court a definitive conservative majority, but all three voted to overturn Roe v Wade in summer 2022.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Legislation hailed as big step towards providing fair access to terminations across state
Queensland will become Australia’s first jurisdiction to introduce a law to allow nurses and midwives to dispense pregnancy termination medication in a move expected to improve access in the state’s “huge abortion deserts”.
In August the Therapeutic Goods Administration scrapped restrictions on the prescription of medical abortion pills, known as MS-2 Step, to be used in the early stages of pregnancy. But it is up to individual jurisdictions to determine the specific healthcare practitioner and the appropriate qualifications for prescribing.
Continue reading...Abortion rights groups in Missouri and Nebraska are proposing measures to expand rights; 2022 clip surfaces of Mike Johnson saying allowing people to receive abortions is ‘causing an American Holocaust’
Democrats in Virginia this week proposed amending the state constitution to enshrine abortion rights.
The proposal follow Democrats’ win in the state earlier this month in which they gained control of the state legislature, signifying a blow to Republicans’ plans that included curtailing abortion access.
“Throughout the campaign cycle we told Virginians that a Democratic majority meant that abortion access would be protected in the Commonwealth.
Today, that reigns true. Our resolution will begin the process of amending our constitution to protect reproductive rights in Virginia, building on the work that I and congresswoman Jennifer McClellan started many years ago.
Continue reading...Newly elected president and far-right libertarian has vowed to repeal country’s 2020 landmark legalisation of abortion
Three years after Argentina made history as the first large Latin American country to legalise abortion, women’s rights campaigners are gearing up to again go to battle after the election of Javier Milei as president.
“It’s a very bleak picture,” said Soledad Deza of the Fundación Mujeres x Mujeres. “This is a government that is promising us greater inequality and – from the first minute – that the autonomy, sovereignty and independence of our bodies is not going to be supported by the state.”
Continue reading...After stinging defeat in a statewide vote, GOP lawmakers seek to move jurisdiction to legislature for constitutional amendment
Four Ohio Republican state lawmakers are seeking to strip judges of their power to interpret an abortion rights amendment after voters opted to enshrine those rights in the state’s constitution this week.
Republican state house representatives Jennifer Gross, Bill Dean, Melanie Miller and Beth Lear said in a news release on Thursday that they will push to have Ohio’s legislature – not the courts – make any decisions about the amendment passed on Tuesday.
Continue reading...The law was first major push since fall of Roe to explicitly block people from crossing state lines to access abortion care
A federal judge has temporarily blocked an Idaho law that prohibits adults from helping minors get an abortion.
While abortion is still prohibited in Idaho with very narrow exceptions, this week’s court order marks a victory for abortion rights advocates in the state who say the now-blocked law is unconstitutional.
Continue reading...This live blog is now closed. You can read the full report on Manchin’s announcement here:
Joe Biden has hailed the tentative deal reached between SAG-AFTRA and television studios on Wednesday.
In a statement released by the White House on Thursday, Biden said:
Collective bargaining works. I applaud SAG-AFTRA and Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers for working together in good faith towards an agreement that allows our entertainment industry to continue telling the stories of America.
When both sides come to the table to negotiate in earnest they can make businesses stronger and allow workers to secure pay and benefits that help them raise families and retire with dignity.
“She called me four-letter words in each of the last two debates… The reality is this – the Republican party has appropriately I think had scrutiny of Hunter Biden for years. I mean, you know, not only the media but even Republican politicians, correctly,” said Ramaswamy.
“In the last debate…she said, ‘I feel dumber every time I hear you speak’… For using TikTok, the criticism wasn’t of Nikki Haley’s daughter. It was of Nikki Haley for having been completely oblivious to where the next generation of Americans is actually getting their information,” he added.
Continue reading...Democrats will almost certainly use the issue to buoy their party in races, while Republican voters may be abandoning their party over it
More than a year after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, handing states the power to decide if and how to ban abortion, voters have again overwhelmingly rejected attempts to curtail access to the procedure. A string of successes for abortion rights groups on Tuesday are raising hopes among Democrats that, despite recent dismal polls, the issue will lift their odds in 2024.
In Ohio, the only state to hold an abortion-related ballot referendum in 2023, more than 56% of voters agreed to enshrine the right to the procedure into the state constitution. In Virginia, Democrats won back full control of the state legislature after Republicans campaigned on the promise of a “sensible limit” that would ban most abortions past 15 weeks of pregnancy. In Kentucky, the incumbent Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, bested his anti-abortion Republican opponent. And in Pennsylvania, in a race dominated by talk of abortion, Democrats won a seat on the state supreme court.
Continue reading...This live blog is now closed. For the latest on the 2023 election, read our latest reports:
US supreme court justices on today appeared inclined to uphold the legality of a federal law that makes it a crime for people under domestic violence restraining orders to have guns in the latest major case to test the willingness of its conservative majority to further expand gun rights, Reuters reports.
The justices heard arguments in an appeal by Joe Biden’s administration of a lower court’s ruling striking down the law – intended to protect victims of domestic abuse - as a violation of the US constitution’s second amendment right to “keep and bear arms”.
I mean, not taking your recycling to the curb on Thursdays, if it’s a serious problem it’s irresponsible,” Roberts said.
What seems irresponsible to some people might seem like, well, it’s not a big deal to others.”
And the reason that we use the term ‘not responsible’ is because it is the standard this court has articulated” in its three major gun rights rulings in the past 15 years, Prelogar said.
Continue reading...Ad released in Virginia part of well-funded effort to portray Democrats as abortion extremists and Republicans as reasonable compromisers
The ad opens with the sound of a fetal heartbeat.
“Most people believe that abortion at the moment of birth is wrong, far beyond any reasonable limit. Not Virginia Democrats,” a female narrator says, just before the sound of a baby cooing and crying. “They fought to make late-term abortions the rule, not the exception.”
Continue reading...Preliminary order before 2024 trial comes months after Kansans voted to protect abortion rights in state constitution
Kansas cannot enforce laws that would force abortion patients to wait 24 hours for the procedure or be given anti-abortion talking points, a judge ruled on Monday.
The move comes months after Kansans overwhelmingly voted to protect abortion rights in the state’s constitution.
Continue reading...