Tag Archives: Abortion

Abortion: The Leading Cause of Death in 2021

Rev 21:8 KJV “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Abortion Was the Leading Cause of Death Worldwide in 2021, Killing 42.6 Million People
  • Statistics compiled by Worldometers indicate that there were over 42.6 million abortions world-wide in 2021.
  • By contrast, 8.7 million people died from cancer in 2020, 5 million from smoking, 13 million from disease, and 1.7 million died of HIV/AIDS.
  • That means abortions accounted for 42% of every death around the world last year.
  • In America, just under 1 million babies are aborted every year. Though abortion rates have been dropping in the past decade, abortion remains the leading cause of death in the United States as well.

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Latinos Vote Pro-Life

Important Takeaways:

  • Latinos Abandon Democrat Party in Record Numbers, Vote Republican Because They’re Pro-Life
  • Hispanic voters are typically Catholic, pro-life and pro-family — and that’s at odds with a Democrat Party that is secular and radically pro-abortion.
  • California resident Luis Alberto Montalvo explained “Latinos, like myself, would rather side with a party that is pro-life, pro-personal responsibility, pro-law enforcement and pro-legal immigration”

Read the original article by clicking here.

U.S. appeals court sets Jan 7 argument date in Texas abortion case

(Reuters) – A United States appeals court has set a Jan. 7 argument date in the Texas abortion case, where the panel will hear the state’s bid to push a legal question about enforcement to the state supreme court.

The challengers of Texas’ near total ban on abortion contend the move will delay a merits ruling in the U.S. district court.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court left in place a ban on most abortions in Texas but allowed a legal challenge to proceed, with the fate of the Republican-backed measure that allows private citizens to enforce it still hanging in the balance.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Chris Reese)

Analysis: Texas abortion law opens door to copycat curbs on guns, other rights

By Lawrence Hurley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to leave in place a Texas law banning most abortions has opened the door for states to seek to restrict other rights including guns by copying the measure’s novel enforcement mechanism, though it remains to be seen how many will actually do it.

The Republican-backed Texas law takes enforcement away from state officials, instead empowering private citizens to sue anyone who performs or assists a woman in obtaining an abortion after embryo cardiac activity is detected – at about six weeks of pregnancy – with awards of at least $10,000 for successful lawsuits. The Supreme Court issued its ruling on Friday.

California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said the next day that he directed his staff to work with legislators and the state’s attorney general on a bill that would similarly enable private citizens to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes or sells assault weapons or self-assembled “ghost guns,” also with at least $10,000 in damages.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, another Democrat, said in an appearance on Tuesday on ABC’s program “The View” that she would support a similar effort in her state.

“We need to follow his lead,” James said, referring to Newsom.

President Joe Biden has urged the U.S. Congress to pass national gun restrictions, but Democratic-backed legislation over the years has been stymied by Republican opposition.

Legislators in five other Republican-led states have introduced abortion bills modeled on the Texas law, similarly structured to avoid judicial review, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, a legal advocacy group favoring abortion rights. None have yet been enacted.

The Texas law, known formally as S.B. 8, was designed to be difficult for courts to block because it removed state officials from enforcement, making it is hard for challengers to figure out who to sue and obtain a ruling that would halt it statewide. The Supreme Court largely accepted that construct while allowing abortion providers to proceed with a legal challenge aimed at some medical licensing officials.

‘A BIT OF AN INVITATION’

Critics have said that ruling would allow states to enact laws that circumvent other recognized rights such as LGBT and religious rights as well as guns.

“The court is not pushing back on the use of S.B. 8-style laws to infringe constitutionally protected rights. I do think this is a bit of an invitation to other states,” said David Noll, a professor at Rutgers Law School in New Jersey.

States seeking to roll back abortion rights may in the near future not need to resort to novel mechanisms like the Texas law to avoid running afoul of Supreme Court precedent on abortion. The conservative justices who hold a 6-3 majority on the court indicated during oral arguments on Dec. 1 in a case from Mississippi that they are willing to undercut or even overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.

In Illinois, one Democratic legislator has proposed targeting gun dealers with a measure similar to the one California is discussing. National gun control activists sound noncommittal.

Stacey Radnor, a spokesperson for the gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement that Newsom’s proposal is “an interesting approach that we’re going to examine further as we get more details.”

Groups favoring gun rights have called Newsom’s announcement a stunt, pointing out that California already has a law banning military-style assault weapons.

“If they really wanted to be the full-blown aggressive so-and-sos that Texas has been, they would ban handguns,” said Erik Jaffe, a lawyer who filed a brief at the Supreme Court on behalf of the Firearms Policy Coalition gun rights group that has been critical of the Texas law, said of California.

Jaffe said Newsom, who in September survived a recall election, “might not survive the political fallout” of such a measure.

James White, a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives who supports the state’s abortion law, questioned in a letter to the state’s attorney general whether private individuals are bound by the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling legalizing gay marriage nationwide. But White said in an interview he does not anticipate a state law similar to the abortion law targeting the rights of same-sex couples.

“The Supreme Court has ruled that who people decide to get married to is left to their discretion. I don’t know how you would get into civil litigation,” White said.

Advocacy groups for LGBT people said they have not heard of any such proposals.

“I have not, and I hope I never do,” said Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, adding that any such measures could run into other legal problems because they would be unlawfully discriminatory.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham and Scott Malone)

U.S. Supreme Court allows challenge to Texas six-week abortion ban

By Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday allowed abortion providers to pursue a legal challenge to a ban on most abortions in Texas, with the fate of the Republican-backed measure that allows private citizens to enforce it now hanging in the balance.

The justices, who heard arguments on the case on Nov. 1, lifted a block on lower court proceedings, likely paving the way for a federal judge to formally block the law. The conservative-majority court on Sept. 1 had declined to halt the law. The court in a separate case dismissed a separate challenge brought by President Joe Biden’s administration.

The Supreme Court has yet to decide another major abortion rights case from Mississippi that could lead to the overturning of the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized the procedure nationwide.

The court in the Texas case ruled 8-1 that the challenge was allowed under a 1908 Supreme Court ruling that said state laws can be challenged in federal court by suing state government officials. Texas had sought to exploit a loophole in that earlier ruling by saying no state officials could enforce it, but the Supreme Court said the challengers could pursue their case by naming state licensing officials as defendants.

Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas dissented on that part of the ruling, saying he would have dismissed the lawsuit altogether.

The Texas measure is the nation’s most restrictive abortion law. It bans abortions at around six weeks, a point in time when many women do not yet realize they are pregnant, and has no exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. It is one of a series of restrictive abortion laws passed by Republicans at the state level in recent years.

The Texas law enables private citizens to sue anyone who performs or assists a woman in getting an abortion after cardiac activity is detected in the embryo. Individual citizens can be awarded a minimum of $10,000 for bringing successful lawsuits under the law. Biden’s administration has called it a “bounty.”

That feature made it more difficult to directly sue the state to challenge the law’s legality, helping shield the measure from being immediately blocked.

Abortion providers and the Biden administration in separate legal challenges argued that the law violates a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy recognized in the Roe v. Wade ruling and is impermissibly designed to evade federal judicial review.

The Mississippi law – blocked by lower courts – bans abortions starting at 15 weeks of pregnancy. The court’s conservative justices during oral arguments in the Mississippi case on Dec. 1 indicated sympathy toward the Mississippi measure and potential support for overturning Roe.

How the conservative justices voted in the Texas case may not guide how they vote on the Mississippi law because the legal issues differed, particularly relating to its unusual enforcement mechanism.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)

Groups push to make California a haven for abortion rights

By Sharon Bernstein

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) – California must prepare for an influx of women seeking abortions in the liberal state if the U.S. Supreme Court ends the constitutional right to the procedure, dozens of women’s health and rights groups said in a report released on Wednesday.

The report by the Future of Abortion Council is aimed at positioning California as place where women from conservative states can get abortions. It comes as the Supreme Court considers overturning or weakening its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized the procedure nationwide.

Last week, the conservative-dominated court signaled a willingness to dramatically curtail abortion rights in America and possibly overturn Roe during oral arguments for a Mississippi case.

“It is imperative that California take the lead, live up to its proclamation as a ‘Reproductive Freedom State,’ and be ready to serve anyone who seeks abortion services,” Democrat Toni Atkins, president pro tem of the state Senate, wrote in a letter introducing the report.

The council made more than 40 recommendations, including a call for the state to fund programs to train additional abortion providers and legal protections for women from states where abortion becomes illegal.

Twenty-six states are certain or likely to ban abortions if the court limits or overturns Roe, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which studies abortion rights.

More than 40 health care providers, women’s rights groups and Democratic politicians formed the council in September after the Supreme Court refused to block a Texas law that effectively bans abortion at about six weeks and allows people to sue doctors or others who have helped a woman end a pregnancy after fetal cardiac activity can be detected.

The Guttmacher Institute predicted in September that as many as 1.4 million women may drive in to California for abortion services if neighboring states outlaw or severely limit access to the procedure. That estimate doesn’t include women who might fly to the West Coast for abortions.

When the new Texas law took effect in September, Planned Parenthood clinics in California began treating two to three Texans per day, said Brandon Richards, a spokesperson for the clinics.

“We started to see an immediate impact on our health centers in California,” Richards said.

(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and David Gregorio)

Analysis-Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court appointees poised to deliver on abortion

By Andrew Chung and Lawrence Hurley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The month before being elected president in 2016, Donald Trump promised during a debate with his opponent Hillary Clinton to name justices to the U.S. Supreme Court who would overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.

His three appointees – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – may be on the verge of turning that pledge into a reality, based on their remarks during arguments over the legality of a restrictive Mississippi abortion law.

“Trump is very effective, as we saw at the Supreme Court,” Mike Davis, who leads the Article III Project legal group that backed the Republican former president’s judicial appointees during his time in office, said, referring to Wednesday’s arguments. “He delivered, as he promised he would.”

During four years in office, Trump managed to appoint one third of the current members of the highest U.S. judicial body and half of its conservative bloc, with all three of his picks coming from a list compiled by conservative legal activists.

Wednesday’s arguments marked the first time that the current court has heard a case in which overturning Roe was explicitly on the table. Trump’s appointees – Gorsuch in 2017, Kavanaugh in 2018 and Barrett in 2020 – may prove instrumental in how far the court may go in rolling back abortion rights. All six conservative justices indicated a willingness to dramatically curtail abortion rights and perhaps outright overturn Roe.

Then-candidate Trump said in the October 2016 debate with Democrat Clinton of overturning Roe: “Well, if we put another two or perhaps three justices on, that … will happen automatically in my opinion because I am putting pro-life justices on the court.”

It was a pitch that appealed to conservative Christian voters who helped put him into office and remained among his most ardent backers. Trump has not yet announced whether he will run again in 2024.

“I think it’s more possible than any time that we’ve seen at least in my lifetime,” Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life group that holds annual anti-abortion rallies in Washington, said of overturning Roe.

While saying politics is just one part of the effort to stop abortion, Mancini added: “I’m very grateful to President Trump for the decisions he made.”

Barrett’s appointment in particular buoyed religious conservatives and anti-abortion activists, cementing the court’s 6-3 conservative super-majority. Barrett, a devout Catholic and former legal scholar, previously had signaled support for overturning Roe in the past.

RESPECTING PRECEDENT

Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett voiced doubts during the argument either about Roe’s legal underpinnings or the need to adhere to it as a decades-old major decision, a legal principle called stare decisis. Supporters of the principle have said it protects the court’s credibility and legitimacy by avoiding politicization and keeping the law steady and evenhanded.

Gorsuch highlighted what abortion opponents consider a weakness in the argument to keep Roe: it has already been changed and limited by a 1992 ruling called Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey that reaffirmed the right to abortion, and the test for what restrictions states may enact has “evolved over time, too.”

Kavanaugh emphasized American divisions over abortion, offering a view often expressed by abortion opponents that the question should be one for the “people” – state legislatures or the U.S. Congress – to decide.

“The Constitution’s neither pro-life nor pro-choice on the question of abortion,” Kavanaugh said.

Barrett during her Senate confirmation hearings indicated Roe was not a “super-precedent” that should never be overturned. During Wednesday’s arguments, Barrett raised the idea that certain precedents should be harder to overrule than others.

She also asked whether the recent adoption in some states of “safe haven” laws, which let women hand over unwanted babies to healthcare facilities without penalty, undermines certain justifications for abortions because women are not forced into motherhood merely by giving birth.

The last time the Supreme Court was this close to overturning Roe was in the 1992 Casey case, when its moderates banded together and reaffirmed abortion rights.

The outcome could be different this time in part thanks to a decades-long effort by conservative legal activists to reshape the court and remarkably effective political maneuvering by a key Republican senator, Mitch McConnell.

Trump entered office with a Supreme Court vacancy to fill because McConnell, then Senate majority leader, refused to consider Democratic President Barack Obama’s 2016 nominee. Then last year McConnell moved to have the Senate speedily confirm Barrett a week before the presidential election to replace the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an abortion rights champion.

Roe v. Wade recognized that the right to personal privacy under the U.S. Constitution protects a woman’s ability to terminate her pregnancy. Mississippi’s Republican-backed 2018 law, blocked by lower courts, bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. A ruling in the case is due by the end of next June.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung and Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)

Chile lawmakers knock down bill to ease abortion rules

By Fabian Cambero

SANTIAGO (Reuters) – Chile’s lower Chamber of Deputies rejected a bill on Tuesday that sought to expand legal access for women to get abortions, legislation that was opposed by the South American country’s center-right government.

At the end of September, legislators in the chamber voted in favor of studying and debating the bill, that proposed legalizing termination of pregnancy up to 14 weeks.

Chile in 2017 legalized abortion for women under conditions where their life was in danger, a fetus was unviable or when a pregnancy had resulted from rape.

“The Chamber rejected a motion that modifies the Penal Code, to decriminalize consensual abortion by women within the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. The project is shelved,” the lower chamber posted on Twitter after the vote.

Deputy Maya Fernández, who had promoted the bill, criticized the rejection and said it would push women into more risky illegal abortions.

“Many still prefer that there be clandestine abortions where women are subjected to inhumane conditions,” she wrote on Twitter.

A number of countries around conservative Latin America have taken steps to decriminalize abortion, including Argentina last year and Mexico, where the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in September that penalizing abortion is unconstitutional.

(Reporting by Fabián Andrés Cambero; Editing by Adam Jourdan and David Gregorio)

In U.S. Supreme Court case, the past could be the future on abortion

By Lawrence Hurley

OXFORD, Miss. (Reuters) – Just months before she was set to start law school in the summer of 1973, Barbara Phillips was shocked to learn she was pregnant.

Then 24, she wanted an abortion. The U.S. Supreme Court had legalized abortion nationwide months earlier with its landmark Roe v. Wade ruling recognizing a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. But abortions were not legally available at the time in Mississippi, where she lived in the small town of Port Gibson.

Phillips, a Black woman enmeshed in the civil rights movement, could feel her dream of becoming a lawyer slipping away.

“It was devastating. I was desperate,” Phillips said, sitting on the patio of her cozy one-story house in Oxford, a college town about 160 miles (260 km) north of Jackson, Mississippi’s capital.

At the time of the Roe ruling, 46 of the 50 U.S. states had some sort of criminal prohibitions on abortion. Access often was limited to wealthy and well-connected women, who tended to be white.

With a feminist group’s help, Phillips located a doctor in New York willing to provide an abortion. New York before Roe was the only state that let out-of-state women obtain abortions. She flew there for the procedure.

Now 72, Phillips does not regret her abortion. She went on to attend Northwestern law school in Chicago and realize her goal of becoming a civil rights lawyer, with a long career. Years later, she had a son when she felt the time was right.

“I was determined to decide for myself what I wanted to do with my life and my body,” Phillips said.

U.S. abortion rights are under attack unlike any time since the Roe ruling, with Republican-backed restrictions being passed in numerous states. The Supreme Court on Dec. 1 is set to hear arguments in a case in which Mississippi is seeking to revive its law, blocked by lower courts, banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Mississippi has raised the stakes by explicitly asking the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Such a ruling could turn back the clock in Mississippi, which currently has just one abortion clinic, and other states to the kind of environment on abortion access that Phillips experienced nearly a half century ago.

Large swathes of America could return to an era in which women who want to end a pregnancy face the choice of undergoing a potentially dangerous illegal abortion, traveling long distances to a state where the procedure remains legal and available or buying abortion pills online.

Mississippi’s abortion law is not the only one being tested at the Supreme Court. The justices on Nov. 1 heard arguments in challenges to a Texas law banning abortion at about six weeks of pregnancy, but have not yet ruled.

TRIGGER LAWS

Mississippi is one of a dozen states with so-called trigger laws that would immediately ban abortion in all or most cases if Roe is overturned, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

Many are in the South, so a Mississippi woman would be unable to obtain an abortion in neighboring Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee or Alabama. The nearest states where abortion would remain legal, at least in the short term, would be Illinois and Florida.

The average distance a Mississippi woman would need to drive to reach a clinic would increase from 78 miles to 380 miles (125 to 610 km) each way, according to Guttmacher.

While some abortion rights advocates fear a return to grisly illegal back-alley abortions, there has been an important development since the pre-Roe era: abortion pills. Mississippi is among 19 states imposing restrictions on medication-induced abortions.

Mississippi officials are cagey on what a post-Roe world might look like. Republican Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who asked the court to overturn Roe, declined an interview request, as did Republican Governor Tate Reeves.

Mississippi Commissioner of Agriculture and Commerce Andy Gipson, who as a Republican state legislator helped shepherd the 2018 passage of the 15-week ban, called Roe v. Wade “antiquated, old law based on antiquated and old science.”

Gipson in an interview declined to answer questions about what Mississippi – or the southeastern United States – would be like without abortion rights, focusing on the specifics of the 15-week ban.

“It’s a false narrative to paint this as a picture of an outright ban throughout the southeast,” Gipson said, noting that the Supreme Court does not have to formally overturn Roe to uphold Mississippi’s law.

In court papers, Fitch said scientific advances, including contested claims that a fetus can detect pain early in a pregnancy, emphasize how Roe and a subsequent 1992 decision that reaffirmed abortion rights are “decades out of date.”

Abortion rights advocates have said any ruling upholding Mississippi’s law would effectively gut Roe, giving states unfettered power to limit or ban the procedure.

Phillips worries about a revival of dangerous, unregulated abortions that imperil women’s lives.

“I’m afraid that many more women and girls will be in back alleys,” Phillips said. “I’m worried we are going to find them in country roads, dead.”

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham and Scott Malone)

With prayers and signs, abortion demonstrators converge on U.S. Supreme Court

By Jan Wolfe

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Shortly before the U.S. Supreme Court began heard arguments in a major abortion dispute out of Texas, a group of demonstrators who oppose abortion joined together outside the stately white marble neoclassical building to pray for the nine justices, listing each one by name.

Hundreds of people in support and opposition to a restrictive Texas abortion law gathered on Monday outside the courthouse on a mild autumn day in the U.S. capital. The justices heard arguments in challenges by President Joe Biden’s administration and abortion providers to the measure, which imposes a near-total abortion ban – prohibiting it after six weeks of pregnancy – and empowers private citizens enforce it.

Abortion opponents held signs saying, “Let their hearts beat,” and played Christian music. Abortion rights supporters held signs saying “Bans off our bodies” and “Abortion is essential.”

Some of the law’s supporters cast the debate in religious terms.

The Reverend Patrick Mahoney, chief strategy officer for the anti-abortion group Stanton Public Policy Center, said, “Our strength is local. You can go to every community in the country right now and find grandmas in church basements knitting baby booties or doing bake sales. There’s this collective energy bubbling in our movement right now.”

Regarding the law’s private-enforcement mechanism, Mahoney said, “Is that the way I would have gone? Probably not. But it’s saving innocent lives. Overall I think it’s innovative and creative.”

The law puts enforcement in the hands of private citizens, empowering them to sue anyone who performs or assists a woman in getting an abortion after cardiac activity is detected in the embryo. Individual citizens can be awarded a minimum of $10,000 in successful lawsuits.

Julia Deluce, a coordinator with the group Students for Life, said she was advocating for the rights of “pre-born children,” adding, “They are human. They are part of our species. And they deserve our protection.”

Abortion rights demonstrators voiced alarm over the Texas law, which bans abortion at a point in time when many women do not yet realize they are pregnant. Abortion was legalized nationwide in the Supreme Court’s Roe. v. Wade decision. A series of restrictive Republican-backed abortion laws have been passed by states in recent years.

Washington resident Martha Dickey said she has been advocating for abortion rights since the 1970s.

“I found out what happened in Texas and I was really upset,” Dickey said. “… It stops the chance for a woman to be free to decide what happens to her own body.”

Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder of the Whole Women’s Health Clinic abortion provider that challenged the Texas law, said, “A ban like this doesn’t change the fact that people need abortions. It just changes the kind of abortions they can have.” She said she hopes the justices understand the impact of their decisions “on real people’s lives.”

(Writing by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)