Reproductive Rights News Roundup – 8/30/2019

Women Are More Than Their Ability to Reproduce. That’s Why I’m Sharing My Abortion Story.
By Jo DeLosSantos
Rewire.News
Only those of us who have considered an abortion, whether we ended up securing one or not, can truly understand the terror of being newly pregnant without means and support.

Many Republicans Don’t Like Planned Parenthood — But They Don’t Mind Birth Control
By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
FiveThirtyEight
President Trump notched a partial victory last week in a war that Republicans have been waging for more than a decade: Planned Parenthood will no longer receive one important source of federal funding for birth control and other reproductive health services.

How the Trump Administration Is Stigmatizing Abortion
By Margaret Talbot
The New Yorker
One of the anti-abortion movement’s biggest victories in the past decade or so is a cultural one, though with legislative underpinnings: it has cast a medical procedure that is safe and legal as one that is sketchy and shameful, something for the dark back alleys of our imaginations to reclaim.

Title X Has Never Paid for Abortions—But the Trump Administration Gutted It Anyway
By Jess McHugh
Fortune
Planned Parenthood announced last week that it would withdraw from Title X—a federal program that funds family planning for low-income households—over a new rule preventing abortion referrals.

The Trump Administration Sides With Nurses Who Object to Abortion
By Emma Green
The Atlantic
Under Donald Trump, departments across the executive branch have made religious freedom a clear priority, and nowhere has that agenda been more prominent than at the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS.

Why anti-abortion groups are backing away from abortion bans
By Anna North
Vox
When legislators in Tennessee debated a bill earlier this month that would ban abortion as soon as a pregnancy can be detected, opposition came from a surprising place: anti-abortion groups.

Judge Blocks Missouri’s 8-Week Abortion Ban From Going Into Effect
By Lydia O’Connor
Huffington Post
A judge has temporarily blocked one of the country’s most restrictive abortion laws from going into effect in Missouri the next day, saying a lawsuit over the statute’s constitutionality needs to play out before the state can enforce it.

Exclusive: Advocates Will Mobilize to #ReclaimTheCourt on Kavanaugh’s Confirmation Anniversary
By Ally Boguhn
Rewire.News
Exactly one year after Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in on the U.S. Supreme Court, the Women’s March, Demand Justice, and the Center for Popular Democracy Action plan to mobilize women, survivors, and their members to hold the nation’s highest court accountable amid a slew of attacks on reproductive health and rights.

A Judge Blocked Missouri’s Extreme Abortion Ban, but We’re Not Out of the Woods
By Jessica Mason Pieklo
Rewire.News
The decision intensifies the legal fight over just when and under what pretenses states can ban abortions before viability. And conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court may soon get their chance to join in.

Equal Rights Activists Urge Florida Lawmakers To Ratify ERA
By Cathy Carter
WUSF Tampa Bay
Thirty-seven states have ratified the Equal Rights Amendment — one short of the required three-quarters for passage.

Seeking Equal Rights Amendment ratification on Women’s Equality Day
Video Report
Tampa Bay Times
If Florida ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, it would change the country’s Constitution. A ratification bill has been introduced in Florida’s legislative sessions since 2000 without progress.