More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Abortion providers can be independent clinics or affiliated with a hospital or larger healthcare organization. Each one provides safe, wanted abortions to pregnant people. Abortion providers often face harassment and violence, despite widespread support for abortion access.
Abortion advocates have created volunteer-run, donor-supported, community-based mutual aid groups around the country to provide free abortion pills to people living in states restricting abortion.
These groups serve people of all ages and gestational stages, using different protocols for people in later pregnancy. As they start their third year of operations, they have mailed abortion medications to over 70,000 people in total.
Advocates, medical students, faith leaders and physicians came together in Bowling Greens, Ky., to mark the two-year anniversary of the Kentucky Court of Appeals decision that allowed one of the nation’s most draconian state abortion bans to take effect. The near-total ban in Kentucky has no exception for abortion care in cases of incest or rape.
With a mobile billboard truck reading “Kentucky’s Abortion Ban Is Driving Away Doctors” as a backdrop, the press conference highlighted the devastating implications of Kentucky’s abortion ban—chief among them its power to drive doctors away.
A new report revealed the number of abortions in the first three months of 2024 was significantly higher than abortions in the first three months of 2023 and 2022.
Before telehealth abortion became available, patients had to travel hundreds of miles to brick-and-mortar clinics, walk a gauntlet of protesters and pay on average $560 for medication abortion. Now they can obtain abortion pills by telehealth from the privacy of their own homes and have them mailed directly to all 50 states with prompt delivery.
Since Dobbs, an increasing number of abortion providers are providing telemedicine abortion services to women living in states banning abortion.
Today there are four practices with over two dozen providers that provide telehealth abortion services to people in restrictive states. One of them is the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, called The MAP for short. Ms. spoke with the medical director of The MAP: Dr. Angel Foster, a Harvard-trained obstetrician/gynecologist and health sciences professor at the University of Ottawa, where she leads a large research group that’s dedicated to global abortion work.
“This is going to be a wonderful day. We are going to terrorize this place. And I want the manager to hear me say that. … More people are coming … and we’re going to make sure we terrorize you guys so good.”
These words were shared on a Facebook livestream by antiabortion extremist Bevelyn Beatty Williams as she prepared to invade and harass a Planned Parenthood clinic in lower Manhattan in June of 2020. On Wednesday, July 24, Williams was sentenced to 41 months in prison by U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Rochon for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act—a 1994 federal law that “prohibits violent, threatening, damaging and obstructive conduct intended to injure, intimidate, or interfere with the right to seek, obtain or provide reproductive health services.”
Four antiabortion extremists, Dennis Green, Paul Vaughn, Coleman Boyd and Cal Zastrow, were sentenced last week following their convictions for felony conspiracy and violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. These charges stemmed from their involvement in a 2021 blockade of the carafem Health Center in Nashville, a reproductive health clinic that offered abortion care.
On March 5, 2021, the four defendants and the seven other indicted individuals blockaded the entrance to the Carafem Nashville Health Center. Patients were unable to enter the clinic, and staff members were unable to leave. In Coleman Boyd’s live stream of the blockade, he can be heard harassing and intimidating a patient, calling her a “mom coming to kill her baby.” Boyd also encouraged one of his children—a minor—to do the same. A patient and employee of the clinic testified at the trial, saying they felt fear and anxiety during the clinic blockade. Court documents described the blockade as “borne out of the defendant’s lack of respect for the law,” meant to “train and encourage others to carry out additional unlawful blockades.”
A personal narrative by Dr. Katherine Brown, an OB-GYN physician who provides comprehensive reproductive healthcare, including abortion services. She reflects on the evolution of her understanding of her role as a physician, emphasizing the importance of humility and recognizing the expertise of her patients in making decisions about their own reproductive health. Dr. Brown criticizes political interference in abortion care, arguing that such decisions should be left to the individuals directly affected.
“Abortion can be relief but at the same time despair. Abortion can be the right decision, and at the same time feels like the only decision among a set of horrible decisions. What always remains true is the patient is the one who is the expert of their lives. No one can know what is right for them.”
From June 15-25, the Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust hosted their 27th annual antiabortion extremist training program. This 10-day long program in Washington, D.C., was led by violent, extremist leaders intent on radicalizing young adults into the antiabortion movement and training them in harassment and intimidation schemes.
The Supreme Court’s dismissal of the EMTALA case drew the fierce ire of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Warning of the “storm clouds [that] loom ahead,” Jackson condemned the Court’s failure to resolve the case on the merits, in accordance with the long-settled principle that “state laws that conflict with federal laws, are ‘without effect.’”
In an alternate dissent, the Court’s hardcore conservative justices—Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch—paid homage to the unborn child.
The Supreme Court has come down on the major abortion case Moyle v. United States, effectively dismissing the case and leaving pregnant women and healthcare providers in Idaho without answers.
I just had the privilege of experiencing the very best of American modern medicine this week for my knee surgery. We celebrate our American medical system as the best in the world—so why would we voluntarily decide to deny the care that I just received this past week to women in 21 states in our country?