Fogbow

I joined an Anti-Abortion march, but they wouldn’t let me stay.

Girl, 13, gives birth after she was raped and denied abortion in Mississippi
The nearest abortion clinic – in Chicago – was too far away and too expensive for her mother to provide her with the procedure

Lauren Aratani
Mon 14 Aug 2023 20.56 BST

A 13-year-old girl in Mississippi gave birth to a boy after she was raped as well as impregnated by a stranger – and then was unable to get an abortion, according to a Time magazine report published on Monday.

The mother of the girl, who uses the pseudonym Ashley in the report, was looking to get an abortion for her daughter but was told the closest abortion provider was in Chicago – a drive of more than nine hours from their home in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

People celebrate the defeat of Issue 1 during a watch party in Columbus on Tuesday, 8 August.
‘Ohio saw through the con’: abortion rights advocates celebrate Issue 1 result
Read more
Ashley’s mother, referred to as Regina in the report, told Time that the cost of getting an abortion in Chicago was too expensive when considering the price of travel, taking time off work and getting the abortion for her daughter.

“I don’t have the funds for all this,” Regina told Time.

The report is the latest in a series of horrific personal accounts that have surfaced after the US supreme court overturned the nationwide abortion access rights which had been established by the Roe v Wade precedent. Since the decision, titled Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 14 state laws banning abortion have gone into effect, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights.

The women’s health clinic that was at the center of the case was the last abortion provider in Mississippi until it closed last summer after the Dobbs decision.




https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... ives-birth

Across Idaho, doctors are leaving, looking for states where politics don’t dictate how they practice medicine. The consequences of Idaho’s anti-choice laws hit Sandpoint fast and hard, hollowing out medical care for women within months. For years, the town had a maternity ward that delivered as many as 350 babies every year – now it has nothing. The OB-GYN ward shut down this spring and doctors have been fleeing the state in a steady stream, seeking shelter in places where their work doesn’t put them at risk of criminal charges or big lawsuits.



Idaho is one of several states that had trigger laws: immediate abortion restrictions that went into effect when Roe v Wade fell a year ago. In August of 2022, the state enacted a near-total ban on abortion with exceptions only if the mother’s life is in danger, or in the case of rape and incest. Those instances require a police report to be filed. The state also adopted what it called an “abortion trafficking” ban, which bars taking minors to other states for abortion care. Family members can sue doctors for thousands of dollars if they perform an abortion, and doctors may face criminal fines and even prison time.

Idaho also became the only state in the country to stop tracking maternal mortality rates. Activists say it’s like they don’t want anyone to know how deadly their decisions might be.



Huntsberger has become an unlikely activist, a doctor who decided she had no choice but to speak out when the state interfered with her ability to treat her patients. When I ask if she’ll really leave that behind in Oregon, she laughs, a quick respite from our deadly serious conversation about consequences for families in Idaho and what losing medical care will mean. It’s hard to imagine she’ll stop speaking out about the consequences of anti–abortion legislation.

“Nobody knows if their pregnancy is going to be uncomplicated or complicated. Nobody sets out to have a complicated pregnancy. Things happen, some of which can be predicted, and some of which cannot. So you have a little bit of a component of Russian roulette,” she says. “Being pregnant is always more dangerous than not being pregnant.”

SuzieC wrote: ↑Sat Sep 02, 2023 6:49 am https://wapo.st/3El03QA
Gift article.

Anti-abortion extremists are attempting to block interstates and airports in Texas to keep women trapped in their state so they can't travel to New Mexico to get abortions.

Revealed: US pro-birth conference’s links to far-right eugenicists
Natal conference, to be held in Austin in December, promoted on far-right podcast circuit and set to host self-described eugenicists

Jason Wilson
Mon 4 Sep 2023 10.00 BST

A high-end hotel in the liberal Texan enclave of Austin is playing host to a conference whose theme is boosting global birth rates, but which will in fact feature racist and eugenicist internet personalities and far-right media figures.

The Natal conference – whose website warns that “by the end of the century, nearly every country on earth will have a shrinking population, and economic systems dependent on reliable growth will collapse” – is scheduled to be held on 1 December at the Line Hotel.

Natal’s website claim the conference has “has no political or ideological goal other than a world in which our children can have grandchildren”, but the Guardian can reveal its organizer Kevin Dolan has been promoting the event on the far-right podcast circuit, and has explicitly linked the conference’s “pro-natalist” orientation to eugenics.

Dolan was at one time a social media influencer connected to the far-right Mormon “Deznat” or “Deseret nationalist” subculture and has himself linked the conference’s theme with eugenics in interviews.

On 13 June, Dolan was a guest on the Jolly Heretic podcast, hosted by Edward Dutton, an Englishman who left an academic position in Finland after his university found that a work he co-authored with the self-described “scientific racist” Richard Lynn plagiarized a student’s dissertation. Dutton once served as editor of the eugenicist journal Mankind Quarterly and is listed as a Natal speaker.

In his conversation with Dutton, Dolan said: “I think that the pro-natalist and the eugenic positions are very much not in opposition, they’re very much aligned.”



https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... s-eugenics

Republicans Attempting to Move Away From ‘Pro-Life’ Terminology: ‘Need to Be Specific’

“Many voters think [‘pro-life’] means you’re for no exceptions in favor of abortion ever, ever, and ‘pro-choice’ now can mean any number of things,” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said. “So the conversation was mostly oriented around how voters think of those labels, that they’ve shifted.”
Hawley, who has been vocal about his pro-life beliefs during his time as a senator, argued that “if you’re going to talk about the issue, you need to be specific.”
Wyoming Sen. Cynthia Lummis, meanwhile, told the network that voters “require more in-depth discussions” and “you can’t get away with a label anymore.”
“What we’ve learned is you have to dive in and talk to people about very specifically where you are on that subject if you’re running for public office,” she said.

"National Catholic Register"
https://www.ncregister.com/cna/republic ... e-specific

tek wrote: ↑Sun Sep 10, 2023 4:40 pm

Republicans Attempting to Move Away From ‘Pro-Life’ Terminology: ‘Need to Be Specific’

“Many voters think [‘pro-life’] means you’re for no exceptions in favor of abortion ever, ever, and ‘pro-choice’ now can mean any number of things,” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said. “So the conversation was mostly oriented around how voters think of those labels, that they’ve shifted.”

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — A complaint filed Monday alleges that Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita violated professional conduct rules in statements he made about a doctor who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim last year.

The Indiana Supreme Court’s disciplinary commission references an interview Rokita gave in July 2022 about Dr. Caitlin Bernard on a Fox News show, The Indianapolis Star reported.

The commission also alleges in its complaint that Rokita, a Republican who is anti-abortion, violated confidentiality requirements by making statements about an investigation into Bernard prior to filing a complaint with the state’s Medical Licensing Board.

Rokita in his response filed with the state Supreme Court denied the confidentiality charge, arguing “no confidentiality should be required” because Bernard had first discussed the 10-year-old’s story publicly.

Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, gave the girl a medication-induced abortion in June 2022 and received widespread attention after she gave an interview to the Indianapolis Star about the child.

The doctor’s account of the rape victim traveling from Ohio to Indiana to receive abortion drugs became a flashpoint in the abortion debate days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer.

Medium Buying @MediumBuying wrote: #KYGov: The Andy Beshear campaign is up on TV with this spot --

Hadley to camera:

"This is to you, Daniel Cameron. To tell a 12-year-old girl she must have the baby of her stepfather who raped her is unthinkable"

Arkansas moves to install ‘monument to unborn children’ on state grounds
Designs for the commemoration to ‘unborn children aborted during the era of Roe v Wade’ must be turned in by Saturday

Carter Sherman
Thu 28 Sep 2023 21.59 CEST

Arkansas is building a “monument to unborn children” on the grounds of its state capitol, and Saturday marks the last day for its would-be artists to submit prospective designs for it.

The monument is planned to commemorate the “unborn children aborted during the era of Roe v Wade”, the 1973 US supreme court decision that legalized abortion nationwide until it was overturned last year. It will be funded by private individuals and organizations, rather than the state, while its construction will be overseen by the capitol arts and grounds commission, a state agency – with the help of some Arkansas anti-abortion groups.

Arkansas’s governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican who previously served as former president Donald Trump’s press secretary, signed a bill to create the monument into law earlier this year. As the bill made its way through the state government , one of the its sponsors compared the monument to memorials to second world war veterans, firefighters and the Little Rock Nine – a group of Black students who enrolled in a formerly all-white Arkansas school only to be confronted by a white mob and the Arkansas national guard, who tried to block the Black students from entering the school.



https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ortion-ban

Inside the medical examiner’s office, two pathologists removed a baby’s lungs from his chest, clamped them together and placed them in a container of water. Then they watched.

They were examining the suspicious death of the baby whose body was found in a Maryland home; his mother said he was stillborn.

If the lungs floated, the theory behind the test holds, the baby likely was born alive. If they sank, the baby likely was stillborn.

“A very simple premise,” the assistant medical examiner later testified.

The lungs floated — and the mother was charged with murder.

In investigations across the country, the lung float test has emerged as a barometer of sorts to help determine if a mother suffered the devastating loss of a stillbirth or if she murdered her baby who was born alive. The test has been used in at least 11 cases where women were charged criminally since 2013 and has helped put nine of them behind bars, a ProPublica review of court records and news reports found. Some of those women remain in prison. Some had their charges dropped and were released.

But the test is so deeply flawed that many medical examiners say it cannot be trusted. They put it in the same company as the discredited analysis of bite marks and bloodstain patterns, 911 calls and hair comparisons, all of which lack solid scientific foundations and have contributed to wrongful convictions.



Since the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion, legal experts and reproductive justice advocates have voiced fears that an increased reliance on the lung float test will lead to more prosecutions in a landscape where any pregnancy that doesn’t end with a living, breathing baby can be viewed with suspicion. In several cases, the fact that a woman had considered abortion was used against her. Black, brown and poor women, research shows, already disproportionately face pregnancy-related prosecutions. Black women also are more than two times as likely to have a stillbirth as white women.

Even medical examiners who perform the test as part of an autopsy acknowledge its shortcomings. They concede that there are several ways to perform it, undermining the standardization that many forensic disciplines demand. Yet judges have allowed prosecutors to use it as evidence in court.