Five weeks after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization stripped much of the population of reproductive autonomy, several states have banned abortion. Requests for abortion pills by mail and travel to other states is up, as are awful circumstances for doctors and patients when pregnancies go wrong.
The Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization and declared that there is no constitutional right to abortion. It did so while disregarding extensive evidence of the harm this will cause.
In a leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v Wade, Justice Alito ignores extensive evidence about how important the right to abortion has been to U.S. society and that removing it will cause tremendous suffering.
A new CDC report on 2020 maternal mortality rates has unsurprising but disturbing findings: Maternal deaths increased compared to the previous year, and the increases were larger among Black and Hispanic women than White women.
On December 1, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and the questions from the Republican-appointed justices indicated that the Court is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade.
On October 4, HHS announced a final rule to undo a horrible Trump administration action that resulted in the Title X family planning program’s capacity being cut in half.
Texas SB 8 and the Supreme Court majority’s response to it are both appalling.
For more than four decades, each spending bill Congress passes has contained a discriminatory and harmful rider: the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funds to pay for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or life-endangering pregnancies. A House Appropriations subcommittee hearing addressed its harms, which disproportionately fall on Black and Brown women.
A new estimate from the Guttmacher Institute calculates the impact of the Title X gag rule: a 47% drop in the program’s capacity to serve female patients, most of whom have low incomes and few other options for receiving high-quality family planning services.
The Title X family planning program has long provided voluntary, high-quality, evidence-based care to clients with low incomes, but its ability to uphold standards of care and its own programmatic requirements is under threat.