Yesterday, a federal judge blocked two abortion laws in Alabama, one that dictates how close an abortion clinic could be to a public school, and another that banned a common second-trimester abortion procedure. The judge, Myron Thompson, ruled that both laws were likely to be found unconstitutional.
The Florida Senate approved a bill today that both defunds Planned Parenthood and places new restrictions on abortion procedures, because that is the current, hideous trend sweeping the nation. The bill, SB 1722, is now headed to Governor Rick Scott’s desk, where it will almost certainly be signed into law.
With the Supreme Court’s decision to hear a challenge to Texas’s HB2, an omnibus bill aimed at regulating abortion providers out of existence, Dawn Porter’s new documentary, Trapped, is an essential examination of dwindling abortion rights in the South. The documentary, which recently won Sundance’s Special Jury Award…
Actress Amy Brenneman is one of the many women who has shared her abortion story in supporting brief filed with the Supreme Court. In the brief, Brennan writes about her 1986 abortion, which she had while she was still a junior at Harvard. Brenneman’s brief reads:
Sunday night’s episode of Last Week Tonight focused on abortion laws in the United States, namely the fact that—get this—some of them are not actually designed with women’s health and safety in mind.
Amy Hagstrom Miller is used to fielding frantic phone calls. She’s been working in abortion care since 1989; in 2003 she founded Whole Woman’s Health, a group of clinics in five states that provide gynecological care and abortions. In Texas, Whole Woman’s hotline is getting one particular call in particular, over and…
Ohio health officials announced on Friday that it will revoke the licenses of two abortion clinics in the Cincinnati and Dayton areas. The two clinics, Women’s Med Center in Kettering and Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio, are the only two abortion clinics in the region. The clinics serve roughly 480,000 women.
According to a new report by the Associated Press, abortion rates in the United States have fallen nearly 21% since 2010. The drop is attributable to a number of factors ranging from widening access to birth control, to restrictive TRAP laws and the nationwide closure of about 70 abortion clinics.
On Friday night, U.S. District Judge William Conley struck down a 2013 Wisconsin law that required abortion providers to obtain admission privileges at neighboring hospitals.
States like Texas and Missouri have been loudly crowing for years about their success in making abortion harder and harder to access. But today, let's take a moment to recognize, once again, the contributions Ohio has made to the cause: a thicket of confusing, burdensome, and sometimes contradictory laws and…
A federal judge has ruled that an Indiana law seeking to change the definition of "abortion clinic" is unconstitutional. The law would have required that any medical facility providing RU-486, the abortion pill, be defined as an abortion clinic, forcing it to meet the same stringent standards Indiana has created for…
In a recent speech, America's least likable Reptoid Rick Perry drew an idiotic and completely specious parallel between the harsh and medically unnecessary abortion restrictions in his state and Joan Rivers' recent tragic death. If you were ever worried that anti-choice politicians had run out of stupid and offensive…
In the halcyon days of anti-choice insanity in Texas, lawmakers were able to gleefully shut down over half the abortion providers in the state, all the while claiming that they had women's best interests in mind. In south Texas, as a result, women who wanted to safely and legally terminate their pregnancies faced a…
Ohio's unnecessarily severe abortion restrictions have forced yet another clinic to close its doors permanently — leaving women in the Cincinnati area with only one abortion provider, which is also in danger of being shut down. And thus the pro-life mission to deprive women of control over their own bodies continues…
More bad news for tricksy anti-abortion lawmakers: today, a federal court ruled unconstitutional an Alabama law that would require abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. Had the law gone into effect, all but two abortion clinics in the state would have been forced to close.
It's been just over a year since Texas passed hideously severe (and not medically necessary) restrictions on abortion providers. In that time, over half of the clinics in the state have been forced to stop offering abortion services — however, the rate of abortion procedures in the state has only dropped 13 percent.…
The fate of Mississippi's last remaining abortion clinic has been very tenuous for the past two years, a result of conservative lawmakers' increasingly creative and dastardly attempts to deny women reproductive autonomy. Fortunately, a federal appeals panel has just struck down the severe anti-abortion measure that…
It's quite easy to feel dispirited about reproductive rights in America. Conservative lawmakers across the country are endlessly devoted to coming up with increasingly inventive ways to restrict women's abortion access (some of their favorites include shuttering clinics nationwide and forcing women to have to jump…
Across the country, conservative legislators are gleefully endeavoring to enact laws that unnecessarily force abortion clinics to close, making it hugely difficult for women to have access to safe, legal abortions. And this week in Wisconsin, a federal judge is hearing arguments for and against Wisconsin's own shitty…
On Wednesday, the Louisiana House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that would impose strict and unnecessary regulations on abortion providers. If Gov. Bobby Jindal signs it into law — and he's indicated that he will — at least three of the state's five clinics will be forced to close.
