Texas abortion case heard before state’s highest court, as more women join lawsuit

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office has not responded to multiple requests from NPR for comment on the new plaintiffs, but in filings, lawyers for the state argue that these women were not harmed by the state’s abortion laws. They say the law is clear, the exception is sufficient as is, and suggest that doctors … Read more

Idaho Asks Supreme Court To Let It Fully Impose Punitive Abortion Ban During Appeal

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra published a memo shortly after the Dobbs decision reminding hospitals that EMTALA requires them to perform abortions as part of emergency stabilizing care. Idaho’s ban prohibits abortions except when necessary to prevent the pregnant woman’s death. Read more at Talking Points Memo  

We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse

We have entered an era not of unsafe abortion but of widespread state surveillance and criminalization—of pregnant women, certainly, but also of doctors and pharmacists and clinic staffers and volunteers and friends and family members, of anyone who comes into meaningful contact with a pregnancy that does not end in a healthy birth. Those who … Read more

How abortion bans are undercutting efforts to prevent domestic violence

Research shows that OB-GYNs are often the first or only doctors to learn if a patient is facing intimate partner violence. While women of all ages experience intimate partner violence, it is most prevalent among women of reproductive age, the people most likely to see an OB-GYN. Meanwhile, abortion bans have contributed to reproductive health … Read more

Abortion is still under threat by dark money groups that helped overturn Roe

Dark money groups help conceal who is behind the influx of cash and the political agendas of a wealthy donor, group or corporation. For example, without looking into the Concord Fund, a major PWO donor, the average person would not realize its ties to anti-abortion lawyer Leonard Leo – the man who helped pick the … Read more

Medical exceptions to abortion bans often exclude mental health conditions

Even before the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last year overturning the federal right to abortion, people with mental health problems faced disproportionate barriers to getting an abortion, said Sarah Roberts, a researcher with the University of California, San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health program. As mental health care … Read more

Abortion bans and anti-LGBTQ laws are complicating business travel

“We think critically about who we are sending where and ask employees if they’re comfortable going to a state that has demonstrated they are not inclusive towards petrople with certain identities,” said Cierra Gross, CEO of Caged Bird HR, a consultancy firm. “We could be putting someone’s physical and psychological safety on the line in … Read more