#Center For Reproductive Rights

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Walter Einenkel at Daily Kos:

Musician Vanessa Carlton is using her famous song “A Thousand Miles,” to bring attention to the fight for reproductive rights. The song, and Carlton, are featured in a new video released by the Center for Reproductive Rights. The video follows the journey of one young woman as she drives out of her home state of Texas to find health care access in another state. It is a lonely journey, marked by rest stops, sleeping in her car, and ending in a medical facility’s waiting room. A title card reads “Last year, abortion bans forced 170,000 Americans to go out of state for reproductive care,” citing research done by the Guttmacher Institute.  “I had an ectopic pregnancy and without abortion care, I could have died,” Carlson says at the end of the video. “Abortion is health care. Please tell Congress to protect reproductive freedom nationwide.”

Vanessa Carlton’s iconic 2002 hit A Thousand Miles is being highlighted in a video by abortion rights group Center for Reproductive Rights to show that abortion bans have forced persons seeking an abortion to travel far out of their home state, costing them time and money.

Ad:

[originalleftist]

Kate Cox flees Texas.

From a statement by the Center for Reproductive Rights:

"UPDATE: After a week of legal whiplash and threats of prosecution from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, our client Kate Cox has been forced to flee her home state of Texas to get the time-sensitive abortion care needed to protect her health and future fertility."

I wonder if she, or anyone who assisted her, will ever be able to go back without facing a felony prosecution. And how many others don't have the resources to go to court or seek help out of state.

Everyone who sanctimoniously "refused to vote for the lesser of two evils" in 2016, and patted yourself on the back for your moral superiority- you did this. This, and so much more. Hope you're proud.

Ken Paxton- I hope you choke on your own undoubtably miniscule dick.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The federal government has introduced legislation that would require charities providing reproductive health services to state clearly whether they offer abortion or abortion referrals. Organizations that fail to clearly tell their clients whether they provide these services could risk losing their charitable status. Marci Ien, the minister for women and gender equality, said Tuesday the legislation is meant to combat the spread of "misinformation" by some charities that operate crisis pregnancy centres. "People are walking in the doors of pregnancy crisis centres expecting to receive information on all options that are available to them," Ien told a press conference. "They are met with organizations that are imposing their anti-choice convictions on them."

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[hellyeahscarleteen]

"Be sure to double-check places advertising pregnancy tests for free: abortion or public health clinics often offer free testing, but CPCs often do too, to get people to come to them, and to fool people into thinking they are qualified healthcare providers (they're not).

Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are fake clinics run by anti-abortion organizations or individuals whose only aim is to convince anyone who comes in for a test not to terminate, often by any means available to them, including with intentional misinformation or emotional bullying or abuse. Because those who run them rarely have education, expertise or equipment needed to provide pregnancy care, even for those who want to choose to remain pregnant, CPCs aren't a good place to go. Sometimes they even don't use real tests for pregnancy, so even if a CPC seems like the only way you can find a way to test for pregnancy, know that they aren't even a reliable place to just get tested.

To do your best to be sure that's not where you're going to test, you can call into your local hospital, or ask a general doctor or clinic, for options for free pregnancy testing from a qualified healthcare provider, or check with friends to see if anyone's gone to where you're going."

Heather Corinna, The Pregnancy Panic Companion: When a Period Is Late or Missed

[fashionlandscapeblog]

Politics in the U.S. have shifted sooo much to the right that now there are only two competing political spectrums:

The far right drawing bills that would allow kids/ teenagers to work longer hours and perform some currently banned tasks, cutting taxes on the super rich (increasing them on the poor), criminalizing abortion (some states even want to implement the death sentence to women who have abortions), criminalizing trans people (by banning drag shows, or anything that 'sexualizes' children, without of course fobidding beauty competitions in little girls in bikinis), banning any books that talk about racism, trans people or homosexuality from schools, etc. There are people even talking about banning women's rights to vote.

Versus the center right, a.k.a. Democrats which are even more right than the CDU, which is Germany's center right party that widely endorses universal health care and many other social issues that the Democratic party rarely even talks about or would even dream in supporting ("Like why should I pay for other's peoples' wellbeing").

The center left, i.e. Bernie Sanders, is out of the panorama, since it is considered far left even by the Democrats in the U.S. of A. Bernie Sanders is by no means, a socialist. He'd be an average SPD member, which is Germany's current ruling center left party.

While the Evangelical right of the U.S. does not represent the majority, they have so much power, that they managed to succeed in drawing all these antisocial legislations. It's not only a democracy question, but the truly worrying thing is that they can be considered the Western Hemisphere's equivalent of the Taliban.

[odinsblog]

🗣️ Please read this !!

👉🏿 https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/crisis-pregnancy-centers-influence-post-dobbs-abortion-supreme-court.html

👉🏿 https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/alito-violates-supreme-court-ethics-rules.html

👉🏿 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1660649551668150272.html

[spiced-wine-fic]

Today’s election results are a devastating blow to the reproductive justice movement and to the health and safety of all Black womxn in the United States. We know many of you are feeling scared and anxious right now, and you are not alone. 

No matter who is the president, or which party is in power, we will always show up for our community, as we have been doing for the last 15 years. We are committed to helping Black womxn access out-of-state abortion care, learn about their contraception options, fight back against attacks on our fundamental rights, and experience positive, healthy births. Donate now to help us continue this vital work.

In his disastrous first term, Donald Trump oversaw the reversal of Roe v. Wade, which ended federal abortion protections nationwide and triggered Texas’ total abortion ban to go into effect. Womxn in Texas are still impacted by the effects of this ban, which has demonstrably worsened the Black maternal health and infant mortality crises and increased the threat of criminalization for Black womxn seeking abortion care. 

Texas has always been a hotbed for reproductive oppression, but the Trump administration emboldened our legislature and judiciary to further restrict our rights. We have seen firsthand the disastrous impact of Trump appointing activist judges who enabled attacks on mifepristone and most recently, made Texas the only state in the nation with the power to ban emergency abortions. Make a contribution now to help us keep advocating for the rights of Black womxn and girls in Texas.

We expect other states in the Deep South to face similar attacks as Trump’s reproductive oppression persists over the next four years—but we are not backing down. We keep us safe, which is why we will continue to advocate for our community, provide essential reproductive health services, and create spaces where Black womxn and girls can thrive. 

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Eleanor Klibanoff at Texas Tribune:

Two women have filed federal complaints against Texas hospitals they say refused to treat their ectopic pregnancies, leading both women to lose their fallopian tubes and endanger their future fertility. Texas law allows doctors to terminate ectopic pregnancies, a condition in which the fertilized egg implants in the fallopian tubes, instead of the uterus. Ectopic pregnancies are always non-viable and can quickly become life-threatening if left untreated. Despite these protections, these women say they were turned away from two separate hospitals that refused to treat them. The complaint alleges that the doctors and hospitals are so fearful of the state’s abortion laws, which carry penalties of up to life in prison when violated, that they are hesitating to perform even protected abortions.

The complaints were filed with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, a federal statute that requires hospitals to provide stabilizing medical care to anyone who shows up. That rule has long been interpreted to include medically necessary abortions, which has run up against state bans, including in Texas. Typically, federal EMTALA complaints are investigated by state health agencies, but the Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the complaint, is asking for it to instead be handled by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS. “CMS should not rely solely on a state agency’s assessment of the facts in reaching its determination because of Texas state officials’ hostility toward interpreting EMTALA as requiring hospitals to provide pregnancy termination to pregnant patients experiencing emergency medical conditions,” they wrote in the complaints. The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year declined to say that Idaho’s abortion ban trumps the EMTALA requirement, but a federal appeals court in New Orleans has found that Texas hospitals cannot be required under EMTALA to provide life-saving abortions.

Similar diagnoses, similar results

Kyleigh Thurman says in the complaint that she went to Ascension Seton Williamson Hospital in Round Rock, north of Austin, with a tubal ectopic pregnancy. She says the hospital initially discharged her without treating the ectopic pregnancy, but she returned three days later with vaginal bleeding and worsening symptoms. Despite her doctor’s orders, the hospital refused to give her methotrexate, a common treatment that stops an ectopic pregnancy from continuing to develop. “Infuriated, Ms. Thurman’s OB-GYN met Ms. Thurman at Ascension Williamson to plead with the medical staff to give her methotrexate,” the complaint says. They eventually agreed. But it was too late; the ectopic pregnancy had grown too large, and ruptured. Thurman nearly bled to death and had to have her right fallopian tube removed. A spokesperson for Ascension declined to discuss the specifics of the case, but said in a statement that they are “committed to providing high-quality care to all who seek our services.”

Kelsie Norris-De La Cruz had a similar experience at Texas Health Arlington Memorial Hospital, outside Dallas. An emergency room physician diagnosed her with a tubal ectopic pregnancy and said she should get an injection of methotrexate or have surgery to remove the pregnancy. She chose surgery, but once the on-call OB/GYNs arrived, the complaint alleges, the hospital refused to treat her and told her to come back in 48 hours. “Ms. Norris-De La Cruz’s mother asked if the hospital’s refusal to provide care had anything to do with Texas’s abortion bans but received no response,” the complaint says. “As the conversation became more heated, the OB/GYN confirmed it was possible that Ms. Norris-De La Cruz could rupture over the next 48 hours and subsequently stormed out of the room.” Texas Health did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Norris-De La Cruz eventually found an OB/GYN through a friend who agreed to perform an emergency surgery to remove the ectopic pregnancy. By then, the mass had grown so large that it required also removing her right fallopian tube and 75% of her right ovary. “I ended up losing half of my fertility and if I was made to wait any longer, it’s very likely I would have died,” Norris-De La Cruz said in a statement. “These bans are making it nearly impossible to get basic emergency healthcare. So, I’m filing this complaint because women like me deserve justice and accountability from those that hurt us. Texas state officials can’t keep ignoring us. We can’t let them.”

Two Texas women, Kyleigh Thurman and Kelsie Norris-De La Cruz, filed federal EMTALA complaints against 2 Texas hospitals over refusal to treat ectopic pregnancies as a result of Texas’s strict anti-abortion laws.

See Also:

The 19th News: Two women say Texas hospitals wouldn’t treat their ectopic pregnancies. Each lost a fallopian tube as a result.

Jezebel: Texas Women Denied Care for Ectopic Pregnancies Due to State’s Abortion Ban Take Legal Action

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

In the new, post-Roe v. Wade world, for some anti-abortion forces, it is not enough to remove constitutional protection for abortion. They want to make criminals of women who seek abortions.

As if that weren’t enough, Republican legislators in four Southern states have proposed legislation that would make abortion a capital offense. Were such legislation to be passed, it would mark an unprecedented escalation of the right wing’s war on women.

As is true throughout America’s death penalty system, race and class will play a large role in who would be prosecuted, sentenced, and executed for getting an abortion.

National Public Radio quotes Dana Sussman, acting executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, as saying that criminalization of abortion already falls disproportionately on “‘poor people, people of color, young people. Anyone who is experiencing a mental health crisis, anyone who has a substance-use disorder, those are the people that are gonna be most vulnerable to suspicion and the specter of law enforcement when they experience a pregnancy loss.”

The dangerous extremism of the death-penalty-for-abortion proposals is reflected in the fact that in at least one state’s bill there is no exception for rape or incest. Welcome to the world that some radical conservatives want to create.

At a time when the death penalty is under intense scrutiny for its injustice, unreliability, and cruelty, they want to double down on it. In their dystopian vision, women who once had a constitutional right to abortion would now be put to death for exercising that right.

To cite one example, Arkansas House Bill 1174 says that “all unborn children should be protected under the state homicide laws as all other persons.” In addition to the woman who aborts a fetus, friends, partners, medical providers, and anyone else who helped her decide to end a pregnancy would be liable for the death penalty as accomplices under the Arkansas bill.

The anti-abortion movement has never had a plausible claim to being “pro-life,” but the Republican legislators who are pushing death penalty plans are stretching hypocrisy to withering heights.

Make no mistake about the danger ahead. This is an organized effort.

Though none of these bills seem likely to pass in the near term, they are part of an effort to normalize the idea that a fetus is a person protected by state homicide laws so that, sometime in the future, women who exercise their right to make their own family decisions might find themselves on murder dockets.

It’s the boiling frog theory. Gradually raise the heat on the pot and the amphibian won’t jump out before the water’s bubbling and it’s too late. Those who believe in reproductive freedom need to jump on this latest escalating attack on it.

Like the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade last June, the death penalty-for-abortion legislators are bucking strong international trends. Even Catholic South American countries like Colombia and Mexico have decriminalized abortion. Over the last three decades, close to 60 nations have liberalized their abortion laws. Only one of the world’s 195 countries, El Salvador, treats abortion as murder.

Bad company to keep. Anti-women, anti-reproductive rights legislators in southern states seem to be feeding their religious frenzy and desire for vengeance against those who believe differently.

Of course there’s that old “eye for an eye” concept that originated in Babylon about proportional justice. Let’s put aside the fact that these elected officials are not advocating an embryo for an embryo. They purport to embrace the Judeo-Christian tradition, but its truer form is about tolerance, not revenge.

Politicians loudly proclaiming their Christianity with legislation proposing death for mothers having abortions seem to have forgotten that Jesus renounced Babylonian justice: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you . . . [if] anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.”

Perhaps it’s too much to expect politicians seeking to stir up their base to follow the Bible. Pragmatically, however, they might want to notice that last June’s Supreme Court decision in Dobbs was the “driving force” that energized majorities of young people, women, and men who believe in reproductive freedom to cast their votes against Republicans in 2022.

Even in red states like Kansas and Kentucky, and in states like Michigan that went for Trump in 2016, post-Dobbs ballot measures that protected abortion won, and ballot measures meant to end it lost.

Maybe that wouldn’t be so in Arkansas, Texas, Kentucky, and South Carolina, the states where these new death-penalty-for-abortion bills have been introduced. But their proponents don’t seem to care about the 2024 political energy they may be handing Democrats in other parts of the country.

Such blindness to national political implications is also suggested by the extreme measures in Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas: The bills there also explicitly include abortion by medication. (A pill for a pill?) More than half the abortions nationwide occur by pharmaceuticals—at least pending the ruling in a fraught Texas case where right-wing groups have asked an anti-abortionist federal judge to invalidate a 22-year-old FDA decision that the pill is safe.

If that happens, the threat of legislation to make swallowing a pill murder may accelerate Democratic voters’ run to the polls nationwide in 2024. It may lead independents to steer clear of the fanatics for whom the end of Roe was just the beginning of the next stage of the anti-abortion crusade.

These Southern state legislators may think that imposing the death penalty will deter abortions. Think again. Legal restrictions on abortions don’t stop them but only multiply the numbers of unsafe, back-alley endings to pregnancy for women who can’t afford a baby or aren’t ready to have one.

Moreover, there is no reliable evidence in the familiar context of one person killing another that the death penalty really is a deterrent. Nearly two of three Americans doubt that it is.

In the end, as the Brennan Center for Justice rightly notes, “Criminalizing abortion and pregnancy upends lives, breaks up families, and disrupts entire communities.” And the idea of piling a possible death sentence on top of the painful choice to end a pregnancy is not just hypocritical and destructive, it is as cruel as it is unusual.

[loudlylovingreview]

JULIA CONLEY: THE RESISTANCE STARTS NOW

“We’re more prepared than ever to block the disastrous Trump policies we know are coming,” said one climate group. Supporters watch results come in during an election night watch party for Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris at Howard University on November 5, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images) As voters across the United States grappled…

[darkdragon768]

"Don't listen to yourself, you do want to have kids someday!" SHUT UP "You do want to start a family on your own!" SHUT UP "You do want to-" SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP YOU DON'T KNOW HOW I FEEL AND YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT I WANT SO STOP SAYING I'M CONFUSED OR HAVEN'T FOUND THE RIGHT ONE (emphasis on a male partner specifically because gendered language) YET OR ACTING LIKE YOU KNOW HOW I WANT TO LIVE MY LIFE

AND STOP FUCKING SAYING HAVING KIDS IS A WONDERFUL THING WHEN YOU'RE A NO-UTERUS-HAVER

I NEVER AND NEVER WILL TELL ANYONE MY GENDER THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS IF ALL I GET IN RETURN IS GETTING CALLED CRAZY AND STUPID

SO WHY DO I STILL TRY TO MAKE THEM UNDERSTAND WHEN IT'S FOR NOTHING.

[hellyeahscarleteen]

How can you tell whether a clinic is a real health center or a crisis pregnancy center?

The FWHC offers this sound advice on how to find a reliable, bonafide clinic, no matter what choice a pregnant person is making:

• Select clinics that provide the full range of contraceptive alternatives. • Ask on the phone if they provide or refer for abortion services. Avoid centers that refuse to give a straightforward answer. • Do not use the ones listed in yellow pages under Abortion Alternatives. • Be cautious when surfing the web. Often you will find anti-abortion religious-based websites disguised as pro-choice information. Keep searching for reliable information. • Select clinics that have clearly established reputations. Avoid centers with ambiguous descriptions. Avoid clinics whose staff do not provide full, clear answers regarding their services. Ask friends or relatives you trust!

(From Crisis Pregnancy Centers: Harm, Not Help)

[rapeculturerealities]

Minnesota, seen as abortion haven, still funds ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ | MPR News

Since 2005, Minnesota has given over $3 million in taxpayer money every grant cycle to 25 of these centers under the “positive alternatives grant,” a program created by former Gov. Tim Pawlenty to discourage abortion.

Now with a DFL hold on the state, Walz says he’s ready to end the program, citing misinformation.

“I think that there’s a lot of misinformation that came out of that … I think women deserve better than that, I think they deserve to have the whole picture,” he told MPR News in January.

This comes after Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison issued a consumer alert in August against “crisis pregnancy centers” based on a 2021 study of nine states including Minnesota. He defined them as “private organizations that seek to prevent people from accessing abortion care as well as contraceptives.”

“CPC is a term used to refer to certain facilities that represent themselves as legitimate reproductive health care clinics providing care for pregnant people but actually aim to dissuade people from accessing certain types of reproductive health care, including abortion care and even contraceptive options,” the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says.

[reasonsforhope]

"The first modern attempt at transferring a uterus from one human to another occurred at the turn of the millennium. But surgeons had to remove the organ, which had become necrotic, 99 days later. The first successful transplant was performed in 2011 — but even then, the recipient wasn’t immediately able to get pregnant and deliver a baby. It took three more years for the first person in the world with a transplanted uterus to give birth. 

More than 70 such babies have been born globally in the decade since. “It’s a complete new world,” said Giuliano Testa, chief of abdominal transplant at Baylor University Medical Center.

Almost a third of those babies — 22 and counting — have been born in Dallas at Baylor. On Thursday, Testa and his team published a major cohort study in JAMA analyzing the results from the program’s first 20 patients. All women were of reproductive age and had no uterus (most having been born without one), but had at least one functioning ovary. Most of the uteri came from living donors, but two came from deceased donors.

Fourteen women had successful transplants, all of whom were able to have at least one baby.  

“That success rate is extraordinary, and I want that to get out there,” said Liza Johannesson, the medical director of uterus transplants at Baylor, who works with Testa and co-authored the study. “We want this to be an option for all women out there that need it.”

Six patients had transplant failures, all within two weeks of the procedure. Part of the problem may have been a learning curve: The study initially included only 10 patients, and five of the six with failed transplants were in that first group. These were “technical” failures, Testa said, involving aspects of the surgery such as how surgeons connected the organ’s blood vessels, what material was used for sutures, and selecting a uterus that would work well in a transplant. 

The team saw only one transplant fail in the second group of 10 people, the researchers said. All 20 transplants took place between September 2016 and August 2019.

Only one other cohort study has previously been published on uterus transplants, in 2022. A Swedish team, which included Johannesson before she moved to Baylor, performed seven successful transplants out of nine attempts. Six women, including the first transplant recipient to ever deliver a baby back in 2014, gave birth.

“It’s hard to extract data from that, because they were the first ones that did it,” Johannesson said. “This is the first time we can actually see the safety and efficacy of this procedure properly.”

So far, the signs are good: High success rates for transplants and live births, safe and healthy children so far, and early signs that immunosuppressants — typically given to transplant recipients so their bodies don’t reject the new organ — may not cause long-term harm, the researchers said. (The uterine transplants are removed after recipients no longer need them to deliver children.) And the Baylor team has figured out how to identify the right uterus for transfer: It should be from a donor who has had a baby before, is premenopausal, and, of course, who matches the blood type of the recipient, Testa said...

“They’ve really embraced the idea of practicing improvement as you go along, to understand how to make this safer or more effective. And that’s reflected in the results,” said Jessica Walter, an assistant professor of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who co-authored an editorial on the research in JAMA...

Walter was a skeptic herself when she first learned about uterine transplants. The procedure seemed invasive and complicated. But she did her fellowship training at Penn Medicine, home to one of just four programs in the U.S. doing uterine transplants. 

“The firsts — the first time the patient received a transplant, the first time she got her period after the transplant, the positive pregnancy test,” Walter said. “Immersing myself in the science, the patients, the practitioners, and researchers — it really changed my opinion that this is science, and this is an innovation like anything else.” ...

Many transgender women are hopeful that uterine transplants might someday be available for them, but it’s likely a far-off possibility. Scientists need to rewind and do animal studies on how a uterus might fare in a different “hormonal milieu” before doing any clinical trials of the procedure with trans people, Wagner said.

Among cisgender women, more long-term research is still needed on the donors, recipients, and the children they have, experts said.

“We want other centers to start up,” Johannesson said. “Our main goal is to publish all of our data, as much as we can.”"

-via Stat, August 16, 2024

[creature-wizard]

Since folks are exhausted from hearing about Project 2025 and Agenda 47, here are some reasons to feel hopeful about Harris

(It would be wonderful if folks could reblog this, a lot of people are feeling very discouraged right now and could use the morale boost!)

[thecurvycritic]

Women's Reproductive Rights Challenged Within Preconceived

With IVF rights and the Cox case in Texas lurking around the corner, this doc is right on time #preconceived #documentary #SXSW2024 #SXSW

My mother held me as we watched a breaking new sreport informing America that the landmark ruling for women’s reproductive rights, Roe vs Wade, had just been overturned by the Supreme Court.  Tears streamed down my face in response to the fact this generation will be living a Handmaid Tale existence with no decision over their own bodies without government interference or incarceration at…