A Guide to Abortion Resources in a Post-Roe America

Most people don’t think about abortion until they need one. But with the right to access now gone, the time to plan is now. IN A PERFECT world, abortion access would be easy. The minute you realized you needed an abortion, you’d be able to grab some abortion pills from the drugstore, or make an appointment with your regular gynecologist for a quick and easy vacuum aspiration. But we don’t live in a perfect world. In modern-day America, abortion access can be impossible at worst and fraught at best: even in “safe” states like California and New York, abortion pills are heavily restricted and can be pretty pricey. And since few gynecologists offer abortion services out of their private practice, you need to find a specialized clinic—which can be a challenging process, particularly since many anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers” are easy to confuse with actual abortion providers. And chillingly, things are only going to get worse. Across the country, expansive bans like Texas’ Senate Bill 8 have rendered abortion functionally inaccessible; now, with the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, access is about to disappear in close to half of America. No one is safe from these bans: Even if abortion rights are legally protected in your home state, an influx of patients from other states is likely to tax an already overstressed system, making appointments difficult to get. All of this is exacerbated by a general truth about abortion: Most people don’t actually think about how they’re going to get one until they’re dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. But that is something you can change. One of the best things you can do in our post-Roe world is know your options ahead of time and make an abortion access plan long before you need one—and share that information with others, so they can be prepared as well.

via wired: A Guide to Abortion Resources in a Post-Roe America

siehe auch: Roe Stood for 49 Years. It Revolutionized Life for Women The national right to abortion pushed back the age of childbearing, increased college and workforce participation, and created economically stable families. THE SUPREME COURT today overturned the legal right to abortion in the United States, returning the ability to regulate the procedure to the states, more than half of which have promised to ban it. The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization explicitly overturns the landmark 1973 case Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed the right to abortion, prior to fetal viability, across the country. (…) “The ability to determine the timing of your childbearing is a pillar of the modern family,” says Philip N. Cohen, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, who argued in The New Republic in May that abortion rights are a fundamental component of democracy. “Abortion rights are central to women’s progress, and are part of a package of self-determination and autonomy that are foundational to women’s lives.” It’s important to state up front that the Roe decision in January 1973 doesn’t represent a single moment when all abortion access in the US changed, as though a switch had been flipped. Before Roe, the decision had been up to state legislatures, as it will be again. In the late 1960s, 11 states loosened what had been total bans on abortion to allow occasional exceptions, after scrutiny by some sort of medical committee, for rape or incest or to preserve women’s lives. More significantly, by 1970 Washington, DC, and five states—Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, and Washington—legalized abortion, both for their own residents and for any women affluent enough to get there.

By <a rel=”nofollow” class=”external text” href=”https://www.flickr.com/people/11020019@N04″>Lorie Shaull</a> from St Paul, United States – <a rel=”nofollow” class=”external text” href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/number7cloud/47113308954/”>My body my choice sign at a Stop Abortion Bans Rally in St Paul, Minnesota</a>, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link