In October last year, a new law was introduced providing a “safe access zone” around abortion clinics, which makes it an offence for a person to do anything that intentionally or recklessly influences a person’s decision to use abortion services, obstructs them, or causes harassment, alarm or distress to someone using or working at the premises.
As far as I know at least this is the only activity so protected in law.
Why?
Medical leaders are calling for reform of abortion laws in England and Wales after an “unprecedented” rise in women and girls being prosecuted for ending their own pregnancies.
Eh?
Six women have appeared in court over the past two years under the Offences against the Person Act. There had previously been only a handful of known convictions since the law was introduced in 1861. It is a criminal offence to have an abortion after 24 weeks or without approval from two doctors, carrying a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
The groups, which represent about 800,000 healthcare professionals, are calling for a halt to prosecutions, saying abortion should be a healthcare issue, not a criminal one.
Backed by 20 legal experts and charities including Women’s Aid and Liberty, they suggest the change could be made as an amendment to the crime and policing bill, set to be introduced to parliament in the spring. They also call for a new bill to modernise abortion legislation, “so it can be managed through the same robust regulatory and quality monitoring processes as all other healthcare”.
Ahhh.
So, they want to change the law to abortion being legal at the wish of the mother, up to term. No restrictions, no weighing of rights of in potentio and so on.
Cut up and out the 38 week baby at your pleasure.
The fuckers.
is no doubt also adding to what is being labelled by policy experts as a fertility crisis, but which is, in fact, a crisis in women’s lack of choice.
Reducing abortion reduces the fertility rate apparently.
Which is, you know, fun logic.
It argued that sexuality is subject to degrees of social conditioning,
Oh, so, Baby I Was Born This Way ain’t, in fact, true then?
Rather than a sex strike, there is another tried and tested form of activism, utilised by women and men the world over: a workers strike, the withdrawal of our wage labour that fuels the systems of capital that dare to govern us. Ban patriarchy, not sex.
And you knew that was coming, didn;t you? Capitalism is, in fact, the evil that must be expunged from society…..
One of the arguments deployed by opponents of the abortion act was that it would result in a “slippery slope” – that its strict criteria would inevitably be widened to allow “abortion on demand” up to a pregnancy’s full term.
A similar argument is being used by opponents of assisted dying. But the fears raised more than half a century ago in relation to abortion have not been realised.
We’ve got 200k abortions a year, well over 90% of which are justified on “metnal health of the mother” grounds and as that CoE curate has been shouting about, abortion up to term for things like a cleft palate or club foot does, in fact, happen.
What the fuck do the bint mean there’s been no slippery slope?
Abortion rose, upon legalisation, from 3% of all pregnancies to the current 25% or so. This is evidence against there being a slippery slope?
Maybe it’s all just performative?
Women across the world are today experiencing the visceral, secondhand body horror of another Trump administration, and that is nothing compared with the all-too-real feeling of peril that many American women will be having as I write. We hold fear, tension and trauma in our bodies, and though that is the kind of idea that strongmen such as Trump and their acolytes would snigger at, it’s well documented that, to quote the psychiatrist and author Bessel van der Kolk, the body keeps the score. It is a complete tragedy that yet more American women are facing the prospect of their reproductive rights being curtailed even further.
This body horror will be felt by the many others on Trump’s hitlist of undesirables: immigrants, gay and transgender people, disabled people, protesters. Anyone capable of empathy. Yet in the context of the assault on reproductive rights, and being a woman myself, it is women I am writing about today.
What assault on reproductuive rights?
Recall, the Supreme Court said, in effect: “It ain’t in the Constitution so it’s for the States and democracy”. Which was, erm, nowt to do with Trump policies.
That also means that action at the Federal level – without a constitutional amendment – ain’t gonna work either. It’s for the States.
Now, without delving into really grubby detail there were 6 – I think – propositions about abortion on the ballot this week. Of which – I think – 4 passed.
Which, erm, ain’t an assault upon abortion.
There is good news for American women to cling to, with Missouri and Arizona voting to expand abortion rights, and Colorado, New York, Maryland, Montana and Nevada all passing measures to protect them.
See?
Guess we’ll go with performative then?
In the 18 months after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, leading more than a dozen states to implement near-total abortion bans, hundreds more babies died than expected, new research has found.
The study, which was conducted by researchers from the Ohio State University and published on Monday in Jama Pediatrics, compared data on infant mortality from the months before Roe’s downfall with data from afterward. Overall infant mortality, they found, rose by 7% in October 2022, March 2023 and April 2023.
On average, in those months, researchers found that there were roughly 247 more infant deaths a month than expected. In six out of those 18 months, mortality among infants with congenital anomalies rose by 10%. In those months, there were about 210 more deaths a month than expected.
Make abortion more difficult and more potentially non-viable babies will be born. Seems logical.
Before all this there were c. 600k abortions a year. So, how many of those potentially viable now get born and are viable? That is the benefit side of that cost above, no?
To do that we’d need to look at numbers by state of course, as some have had, since Dobbs, highly restrictive lawes and others have carried merrily on. But then if we were to nail down hte effect on the unviable we’d need to do it state by state as well and they don’t. Odd that.
A Georgia judge on Monday struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban, ruling that the ban is unconstitutional and blocking it from being enforced.
In a 26-page opinion, the Fulton county superior judge Robert McBurney ruled that the state’s abortion laws must revert to what they were before the six-week ban – known as the Life Act – was passed in 2019. The ban was blocked as long as Roe v Wade was the law of the land, but went into effect after the US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022.
“When a fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life, then – and only then – may society intervene,” McBurney wrote.
Effectively, around and about, the State court judge is insisting upon the Roe argument – privacy. This could also be true under the Georgia state cnostitution. We know from Dobbs that it’s not under the US federal one. But it could be true more locally.
Have to wait and see really.
McBurney’s ruling arrives weeks after ProPublica reported that two Georgia women, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, died after being unable to access legal abortions in the months after Roe was overturned. In statements after McBurney’s ruling, abortion rights supporters highlighted Thurman and Miller’s deaths.
“We are encouraged that a Georgia court has ruled for bodily autonomy,” said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, a plaintiff in the case that led to Monday’s ruling. “At the same time, we can’t forget that every day the ban has been in place has been a day too long – and we have felt the dire consequences with the devastating and preventable deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller.”
What excellent Newspeak that is. Both women died after actually having medical abortions – you know, those pills that are so safe people are prescribing them over the internet? At least one of them then got truly loousy, no good, treatment for the partial failure of the pills but it’s wasn’t the absence of an abortion that killed her.
“The United States is, and has been for quite some time, in the midst of a maternal and infant mortality crisis,” said Dr Jamila Perritt, a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist and president of Physicians for Reproductive Health.
Banning access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion care, is “directly causing an increase in morbidity and mortality in our community”, she said. “We have really robust evidence that shows us that when people have sought abortion care and are unable to obtain it, their psychological, social, physical and emotional health is harmed.”
Maternal and infant mortality will probably increase because of the restrictions – especially if national limitations, like enforcement of the Comstock Act, are put into place.
A few bits – the US has recently changed the way it measures maternal mortality which is a part of the explanation. The two cases in Georgia everyone is making so much of were women who *did* have abortions and got those complications that never happen from taking the pills.
But, as ever, it’s the whole thing that needs to be looked at. How many are not aborted – if we’re to weigh the bodies – as a result of the changes? Perhaps that should be used as an offset against those who die because no abortion?
OK, OK, yes. I’m an extremist and all that.
However, something that would be really interesting to find out. Has the birth rate risen? These same changes – has the birth rate risen or not? And even that will be complex. The pregnancy to birth rate will, presumably, have risen. But if the pregnancy rate has fallen – more people take more care – then the effect on births in total could go either way.
Given the toxicity of the underlying subject I’m not sure we’ll ever see any proper papers on this. But perhaps we should?
The Government is enacting new legislation from Oct 31 that would bar protests, including silent prayer, within a buffer zone of 150 metres of a clinic or hospital providing abortion services.
Labour has ditched draft guidance by the last Conservative government that told police silent prayer should be allowed inside the new “safe access zones”.
It has also scrapped exemptions allowing “consensual” communication within the zones, which has been interpreted as permitting the handing out of leaflets or activists engaging people in conversation.
The changes mean that silent prayer will be banned in the zones, although it will be at the discretion of the police to determine whether it meets the threshold for prosecution.
Some 20 to 25% of abortion are in main hospitals.
This makes it illegal to pray silently within 150 metres of a main hospital.
Rilly?
The Home Office is to consider banning silent prayer outside abortion clinics, The Telegraph understands.
Just to be objectionable, does this include anyone who gets out a prayer mat for one of the five a day within 150 metres of a hospital?
‘I felt entirely alone’: comedian Grace Campbell on the aftermath of her abortion
Well, there was one less around.
When Grace Campbell decided to terminate her pregnancy, she felt relief at being able to exercise a right so many women had fought for. But nothing prepared her for the depression that came after. Here, the comedian reflects on the physical and emotional toll
Ho Hum.
An excellent exampole of a male and female difference. She’s looking for confirmation, assurance, empathy. Men are saying, well, don’t do that then. Not all men, obviously, but that’s a v male response to this all the same.
‘This is life and death’: inside a Florida clinic after the six-week abortion ban
That’s, umm, what the whole discussion is about, no?
The risk of stating plainly what Idaho argued at the US supreme court on Wednesday morning is that it is so sadistic and extreme that people might not believe you. Idaho has one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country. Prohibiting all abortions at any stage of gestation, with no exceptions for rape or incest, the Idaho law allows doctors to perform abortions in cases where the life – but not “merely” the health – of the pregnant woman is at risk.
We can only kill this one person if by not doing so we kill this other person.
A singular version of the trolley problem.
And?
‘How sick do they have to get?’ Doctors brace for US supreme court hearing on emergency abortions
The piece opens standard American journalism school style. Personal story from a participant.
Personally I absolutely hate this style but that’s what they’re taught, that’s what wins prizes.
Still, the background, sure. We’re back in this battleground of competing rights. That of the child/baby/foetus/blastocyst to not be killed and that of the mother to not be mother/not die herself. As we’ve got laws – and always have had too – about where those two sets of rights switch from the babbie must be born to switch on that vacuum cleaner then we’ve got to have legal judgements about where that switch is.
Pretty much everyone – even The Pope – will agree that treating the ectopic pregnancy to save the mother’s life, even if that does mean the death of the embryo (note the very precise formulation the Catholic Church uses there, treat and if as a byproduct is OK, directly not) is moral if regrettable.
Defining “emergency” as “the bird’s feeling a bit peaky” would lead us to where we are in Britain today, effectively on demand even as that’s not, at all, what the law says.
So, yes, there are going to mneed to be lgeal rulings.
The Arizona supreme court ruled Tuesday to let a law banning almost all abortions in the state go into effect, a decision that could curtail abortion access in the US south-west and could make Arizona one of the biggest battlefields in the 2024 electoral fight over abortion rights.
The justices said Arizona could enforce a 1864 near-total abortion ban, first passed before Arizona became a state, that went unenforced for decades after the US supreme court legalized abortion nationwide in the 1973 decision Roe v Wade. However, the justices also ruled to hold off on requiring the state to enforce the ban for 14 days, in order to allow advocates to ask a lower court to pause it again.
Precisely, and exactly, because abortion became a constitutional right – and then didn’t – the 50 year process of working through the debate on the subject, the revision of all those old laws, didn’t happen.
Therefore the US is going to go through all of that 50 years later than everyone else.
Shrug.
What horrifies me is that any parliamentarian should want to decriminalise the fatal poisoning or dismemberment of unborn babies that are so well developed that they could survive outside the womb. No amount of sugar coating this can remove the repellent reality of what – if the law is changed in the way certain MPs want – could end up happening.
Ms. Creasy, for example.
Donald Trump backs abortion ban in ‘later months’ — but says states can decide
Former president rejects nationwide ban and supports exceptions for rape and incest.
For vicious ideologues like me this is far too weak tea. But it’s around and about what the general population thinks is the right apprpach. It’s also what the law is. Abortion is not a right in the Constitution, nor is it one of the reserved powers of the Federal Government. It is, therefore, a matter for the States.
The Donald is the reasonable and sensible one here. Who saw that one coming?
No watering-down, no new red tape: it’s time to fully decriminalise abortion in England and Wales
Stella Creasy
So any bird should be allowed to kill any kid – right up to the point of birth itself – for any reason or none?
Might that not be considered something of an extreme position?
Also, fuck off.
A rightwing Christian lobby group that wants abortion to be banned has forged ties with an adviser to the prime minister and is drawing up policy briefings for politicians.
The UK branch of the US-based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has more than doubled its spending since 2020 and been appointed a stakeholder in a parliamentary group on religious freedoms in a role that grants it direct access to MPs.
The ADF’s efforts to boost its UK influence are revealed as part of an Observer analysis that shows a surge in activity within the wider anti-abortion movement.
Ahead of a historic vote on abortion later this spring, in which MPs will vote on a law that would abolish the criminal offence associated with a woman ending her own pregnancy in England and Wales, several anti-abortion campaign groups have expanded their teams, ramped up advertising and coordinated mass letter-writing campaigns targeting MPs.
People campaign about upcoming change in the law. Where would democracy be if this sort of thing catches on?
