Reproductive Rights News Roundup

Florida

Black in Repro Statements on the Arrest of Susan Lorincz After the Killing of Ajike Owens
Contact: Natasha Sutherland, Florida Watch
Black in Repro fights for reproductive justice, which is the right to have children, the right not to have children, and the right to parent children in safe and healthy communities. We deserve basic human rights simply because we are human. What happened was a crime and it should not have taken so much public pressure and time to result in an arrest.

Justice Canady ignores his conflict of interest in high-profile abortion ban case
By Dan Christensen and Noreen Marcus
Florida Bulldog
Florida Supreme Court Justice Charles Canady has an undeclared conflict of interest amid the high court’s review of a strict abortion ban passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis last year.

Florida prosecutor drops charges against abortion protestors, Democratic chair. Here’s why
By James Call
Tallahassee Democrat
All trespassing charges have been dropped against Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried and 10 other abortion rights protesters, including the Senate Democratic Leader Lauren Book, after they were arrested April 3 in front of Tallahassee City Hall.

In Florida, these Black women see the fight for abortion access as part of a greater struggle for their safety
By Rebekah Barber
The 19th
As Florida has tightened its abortion laws and passed policies that restrict access to reproductive health care, nearly 40 Black women in the state have formed a coalition to push back against these measures that are disproportionately harming them.

Law professor says no rules explicitly prevent Justice Canady’s involvement in Florida Supreme Court abortion case, despite possible conflict of interest
By Ta’Leah Vansistine
WMNF Tampa Bay
The Florida Supreme Court is hearing a case that challenges the state’s 15-week abortion ban, even though one justice may have a conflict of interest.

Cops: Planned Parenthood facility damaged in shooting
By Carrie Ecklund
Venice Sun
A Sarasota woman was arrested for shooting at the address of a Planned Parenthood facility in downtown Sarasota early Saturday.

Tallahassee Tally: How Palm Beach County lawmakers voted on key bills. Today: Abortion.
Editorial Board
Palm Beach Post
The “Heartbeat Protection Act,” HB 7/SB 300, prohibits physicians from terminating a pregnancy after 6 weeks of gestation, down from the 15-week limit Gov. Ron DeSantis just signed in April 2022, which was down from the previous 24-week limit established prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

National

These state Supreme Courts are weighing abortion bans
By Rachel Roubein
Washington Post
One such place is Florida, where an upcoming decision over a 15-week ban has implications for newly passed abortion limits. The state has become an access point for abortion in the South since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.

A year after the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion access is reshuffled on state lines
By Chris Kenning
USA Today
Nearly a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that found a constitutional right to abortion, the decision has left a fractured and still-changing map of U.S. abortion access.

Anti-abortion politicians never intended to support women and children
By Kelly Baden
The Hill
It’s been one year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and conservative states have had plenty of time to enact the policies to support women, children and families that they promised to prioritize once they reached their goal of banning abortion.

America’s religious leaders sharply divided over abortion, a year after Roe v Wade’s reversal
By David Crary
Associated Press
In the year since the Supreme Court struck down the nationwide right to abortion, America’s religious leaders and denominations have responded in strikingly diverse ways — some celebrating the state-level bans that have ensued, others angered that a conservative Christian cause has changed the law of the land in ways they consider oppressive.

Abortion Is Already Tripping Up The 2024 Republican Candidates
By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
FiveThirtyEight
Ask six Republican candidates for president whether they think there should be a national ban on abortion, and you’ll get at least seven different answers.

7 abortion questions every presidential candidate needs to answer
Editorial
Washington Post
Republicans blundered in last year’s midterms by trying to skirt the issue of abortion. Democrats outperformed expectations and bucked historical trends by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advertisements attacking the GOP for revoking reproductive rights.

Amazon and Google fund anti-abortion lawmakers through complex shell game
By Nick Robins-Early
The Guardian
As North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban is due to come into effect on 1 July, an analysis from the non-profit Center for Political Accountability (CPA) shows several major corporations donated large sums to a Republican political organization which in turn funded groups working to elect anti-abortion state legislators.

The false promise of abortion exceptions
By Becca Andrews
Reckon
Why abortion exceptions aren’t the solution most people think they are. (Abbey Crain)
When Jessica Bernardo found out she was pregnant, it was reason to celebrate. Bernardo and her husband had struggled for two years to conceive, and when their fetus was diagnosed with Down syndrome, they continued to celebrate, naming her Emma, which means “whole.”

SC Supreme Court accepts challenge to state’s 6-week abortion ban, which remains blocked
By Seanna Adcox
Post and Courier
South Carolina’s highest court will directly take up a legal challenge to the state’s latest six-week abortion ban less than six months after tossing out the last one.

I’m Childless Because of a Far-Right South Carolina Church
By Andra Watkins
Newsweek
Recently, Judge James Ho, a Trump-appointed judge on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, spoke for many on the religious far-right when he said: “Pregnancy is not a serious illness.”

77% of Louisiana residents support legal abortions after rape, survey finds
By Eliza Stanley
LSU Manship News Service
Seventy-seven percent of Louisiana residents say a woman should be able to obtain a legal abortion if she became pregnant after being raped, according to an LSU survey released Thursday.

Here’s How Companies Can Protect the Privacy of People Providing or Seeking Abortion Care
By Jennifer Weiss-Wolf and Alexandra Reeve Givens
Ms. Magazine
In the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s leaked decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a wave of dystopian warnings flooded the internet.

After a decades-long stalemate, nurse-midwives can now practice without physician “supervision”
By Rachel Crumpler
NC Health News
Suzanne Wertman used to work as a certified nurse-midwife at a private practice in Wilmington. But in a day, that changed.

CBP subjects migrants to grave reproductive injustices
By Tina Vásquez
Prism Reports
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) subjects pregnant, postpartum, and nursing migrants to inhumane and dangerous conditions, often in violation of the federal immigration agency’s own standards of care, according to documentation recently made public by advocacy organizations.

Catch-22: State bans limit abortion counseling, but Title X rules require it
By Rachana Pradhan
KFF Health News
State abortion bans in Tennessee and beyond, which constrain women’s health care, have put family planning clinics at risk of losing their federal funding.

Trump’s worst judge will hear a $1.8 billion attack on Planned Parenthood
By Ian Millhiser
Vox
Remember Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk? Last month, Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas, tried to remove mifepristone, a drug used in more than half of all US abortions, from the market.

Memo: How Anti-Abortion “Personhood” Ideology Threatens Reproductive Freedom Nationwide
Staff Report
NARAL Pro-Choice America
Anti-abortion extremists are attempting to force religious beliefs into law with “fetal personhood” measures as part of their crusade against reproductive freedom.

Memo: The Anti-Abortion Movement Targets Birth Control in a Post-Dobbs America
Staff Report
NARAL Pro-Choice America
The anti-abortion movement’s mounting attacks on birth control make clear that its agenda has never been limited to banning abortion care—it wants to rollback access to all the reproductive care people need to decide if, how, and when they want to build their families.