#Abortion bans

[embracetheshipping]

#tictok #abortion #abortion bans #pro choice #us politics #fuck republicans #vote blue #idaho #texas #us supreme court #us vs Idaho #emtala #very important

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jaclyn Lee, Libby Cathey, Isabella Murray, Mike Pappano, and Gina Sunseri at ABC News:

Three Republicans on Wednesday joined Democrats in the Arizona House to vote to repeal the state's controversial 1864 ban on nearly all abortions, which was revived by a court ruling earlier this month and which only includes exceptions to save the life of the pregnant woman.

The final vote was 32-28. "I've known for a while that the votes were there, it just takes a lot of fortitude, a lot of spine," Democratic state Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton, who sponsored the bill, told ABC News' Jaclyn Lee. Hamilton said she had several phone conversations with Republicans the night before the vote and while she would not divulge the details of those conversations, she said it made her cautiously optimistic. "The eyes of the world were watching Arizona, and that's not hyperbole, and so these are decisions that we need to make for people and if you were able to talk to folks in these districts, you would find that this is an issue where they are showing up and representing the people in their district, which is what they were elected to do," Hamilton said. The bill now heads to the state Senate where it could be taken up next week.

[...] The Senate on Wednesday separately conducted a second read of its own abortion ban repeal bill, without objection, setting up a parallel vote -- though that is likely moot now because the House bill has been approved. Two Republican senators have already said they will support the repeal effort, signaling the House bill should pass that chamber and then go to Gov. Katie Hobbs' desk to be signed into law. The repeal of the abortion ban would then take effect 90 days after the end of the legislative session, which must be before June 30.

[...] But leading conservatives like Trump, former Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and Senate candidate Kari Lake have touted their general support for abortion restrictions while saying they don't back the 1864 ban.

On Wednesday, the Arizona House of Representatives voted 32-28 to repeal the 1864 near-total abortion ban. 3 Republicans crossed over to vote to repeal, along with all Democrats.

Next stop: the State Senate and then Gov. Katie Hobbs (D)'s desk.

See Also:

The Guardian: Arizona house votes to repeal state’s near-total ban on abortion

#Arizona #Abortion Bans #Abortion #Anti Abortion Extremism #Arizona House of Representatives #Arizona State Senate #Katie Hobbs #Arizona HB2677

[whydidisavethistomyphone]

This is the same logic as “be gay do crimes” because if something out of your control, like your sexuality, makes you a criminal, then you’re already a criminal, why are you obeying the law? What do you have to gain from it?

We have human rights so we don’t have to fight, steal or kill for the basics. It seems like the people in charge have forgotten how the world used to work.

#abortion #abortion bans #politics #us politics #be gay do crimes

[liberalsarecool]

Republicans use bad faith regarding abortion ban exemptions. It was always a sham.

The betrayal. The disrespect. The sadism. The evil. The suffering. This is who they are.

#abortion rights #abortion bans

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

#us supreme court #2022 elections #2022 midterms #us congress #us house of representatives #us senate #biden administration #rep. alexandria ocasio cortez #new york #us history #President Franklin d. Roosevelt #president abraham lincoln #abortions #abortion bans #roe v. wade #scotus #us politics #news #twitter #tweet #2022 #progressives #progressivism #democrats

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The "religious liberty" angle for overturning the overturning of Dobbs

Frank Wilhoit’s definition of “conservativism” remains a classic:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

Conservativism is, in other words, the opposite of the rule of law, which is the idea that the law applies equally to all. Many of America’s most predictably weird moments live in the tension between the rule of law and the conservative’s demand to be protected — but not bound — by the law.

Think of the Republican women of Florida whose full-throated support for the perfomatively cruel and bigoted policies of Ron Desantis turned to howls of outrage when the governor signed a law “overhauling alimony” (for “overhauling,” read “eliminating”):

https://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/this-is-a-death-sentence-for-me-florida-republican-women-say-they-will-switch-parties-after-desantis-approves-alimony-law-34563230

This is real leopards-eating-people’s-faces-party stuff, and it’s the only source of mirth in an otherwise grim situation.

But out of the culture-war bullshit backfires, none is so sweet and delicious as the religious liberty self-own. You see, under the rule of law, if some special consideration is owed to a group due to religious liberty, that means all religions. Of course, Wilhoit-drunk conservatives imagine that “religious liberty” is a synonym for Christian liberty, and that other groups will never demand the same carve outs.

Remember when Louisiana decided spend tax dollars to fund “religious” schools under a charter school program, only to discover — to their Islamaphobic horror — that this would allow Muslim schools to get public subsidies, too?

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/louisiana_n_1593995

(They could have tried the Quebec gambit, where hijabs and yarmulkes are classed as “religious” and therefore banned for public servants and publicly owned premises, while crosses are treated as “cultural” and therefore exempted — that’s some primo Wilhoitism right there)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-francois-legault-crucifix-religious-symbols-1.4858757

The Satanic Temple has perfected the art of hoisting religious liberty on its own petard. Are you a state lawmaker hoping to put a giant Ten Commandments on the statehouse lawn? Go ahead, have some religious liberty — just don’t be surprised when the Satanic Temple shows up to put a giant statue of Baphomet next to it:

https://www.npr.org/2018/08/17/639726472/satanic-temple-protests-ten-commandments-monument-with-goat-headed-statue

Wanna put a Christmas tree in the state capitol building? Sure, but there’s gonna be a Satanic winter festival display right next to it:

https://katv.com/news/offbeat/satanic-temple-display-installed-at-illinois-capitol-next-to-nativity-scene-menorah-decorations-snake-serpent-satanic-temple-springfield-christmas-tree

And now we come to Dobbs, and the cowardly, illegitimate Supreme Court’s cowardly, illegitimate overturning of Roe v Wade, a move that was immediately followed by “red” states implementing total, or near-total bans on abortion:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/15/paid-medical-disinformation/#crisis-pregnancy-centers

These same states are hotbeds of “religious liberty” nonsense. In about a dozen of these states, Jews, Christians, and Satanists are filing “religious liberty” challenges to the abortion ban. In Indiana, the Hoosier Jews For Choice have joined with other religious groups in a class action, to argue that the “religious freedom” law that Mike Pence signed as governor protects their right to an abortion:

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/21/legal-strategy-that-could-topple-abortion-bans-00102468

Their case builds on precedents from the covid lockdowns, like decisions that said that if secular exceptions to lockdown rules or vaccine mandates existed, then states had to also allow religious exemptions. That opens the door for religious exemptions to abortion bans — if there’s a secular rule that permits abortion in the instance of incest or rape, then faith-based exceptions must be permitted, too.

Some of the challenges to abortion rules seek to carve out religious exemptions, but others seek to overturn the abortion rules altogether, because the lawmakers who passed them explicitly justified them in the name of fusing Christian “values” with secular law, a First Amendment no-no.

As Rabbi James Bennett told Politico’s Alice Ollstein: “They’re entitled to their interpretation of when life begins, but they’re not entitled to have the exclusive one.”

In Florida, a group of Jewish, Buddhist, Episcopalian, Universalists and United Church clerics are challenging the “aiding and abetting” law because it restricts the things they can say from the pulpit — a classic religious liberty gambit.

Kentucky’s challenge comes from three Jewish women whose faith holds that life begins “with the first breath.” Lead plaintiff Lisa Sobel described how Kentucky’s law bars her from seeking IVF treatment, because she could face criminal charges for “discarding non-viable embryos” created during the process.

Then there’s the Satanic Temple, in court in Texas, Idaho and Indiana. The Satanists say that abortion is a religious ritual, and argue that the state can’t limit their access to it.

These challenges all rest on state religious liberty laws. What will happen when some or all of these reach the Supreme Court? It’s a risky gambit. This is the court that upheld Trump’s Muslim ban and the right of a Christian baker to refuse to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. It’s a court that loves Wilhoit’s “in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

It’s a court that’s so Wilhoit-drunk, it’s willing to grant religious liberty to bigots who worry about imaginary same-sex couples:

https://newrepublic.com/article/173987/mysterious-case-fake-gay-marriage-website-real-straight-man-supreme-court

But in the meantime, the bigots and religious maniacs who want to preserve “religious liberty” while banning abortion are walking a fine line. The Becket Fund, which funded the Hobby Lobby case (establishing that religious maniacs can deny health care to their employees if their imaginary friends object), has filed a brief in one case arguing that the religious convictions of people arguing for a right to abortion aren’t really sincere in their beliefs:

https://becketnewsite.s3.amazonaws.com/20230118184008/Individual-Members-v.-Anonymous-Planitiff-Amicus-Brief.pdf

This is quite a line for Becket to have crossed — religious liberty trufans hate it when courts demand that people seeking religious exemptions prove that their beliefs are sincerely held.

Not only is Becket throwing its opposition to “sincerely held belief” tests under the bus, they’re doing so for nothing. Jewish religious texts clearly state that life begins at the first breath, and that the life of a pregnant person takes precedence over the life of the fetus in their uterus.

The kicker in Ollstein’s great article comes in the last paragraph, delivered by Columbia Law’s Elizabeth Reiner Platt, who runs the Law, Rights, and Religion Project:

The idea of reproductive rights as a religious liberty issue is absolutely not something that came from lawyers. It’s how faith communities themselves have been talking about their approach to reproductive rights for literally decades.

The Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop (I’m a grad, instructor and board member) is having its fundraiser auction to help defray tuition. I’ve donated a “Tuckerization” — the right to name a character in a future novel:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/clarion-sf-fantasy-writers-workshop-23-campaign/#/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/11/wilhoitism/#hoosier-jews

[Image ID: Moses parting the Red Sea. On the seabed is revealed a Planned Parenthood clinic.]

Image: Nina Paley (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moses-Splits-Sea_by_Nina_Paley.jpg

CC0 1.0 https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en

 — 

Kristina D.C. Hoeppner (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/4nitsirk/40406966752/

CC BY-SA 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

#pluralistic #religion #frank wilhoit #petard #gender #religious freedom #1a #abortion bans #dobbs #roe

[gwydionmisha]

#Abortion Bans #Abortion #Polls #News

[soberscientistlife]

That is a powerful message from RBG

#vote blue #vote democrat #vote biden #women's rights #abortion bans

[sher-ee]

#donald trump #trump is a threat to democracy #president trump #arizona #abortion bans #vote blue #women #women must vote blue #gop #christian nationalism #criminalizing women #vote biden #trump 2024

[not-safe-for-democracy]

Source

#breaking news #this just in #arizona supreme court #abortion bans

[lifewithchronicpain]

Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, remember her name because she is the first woman to be reported* to die from the fall of Roe and the Texas abortion ban. She won't be the last.

*There may be others we don't know about, but she is the first to make any kind of news that I have heard about.

The New Yorker link has limited access and I could only see it long enough to catch her name and find the response post that also includes details of her death. I first heard of this on the Rachel Maddow show. Here are some quotes:

Today, The New Yorker published a heart-breaking piece about Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, a 29 year-old woman who died a few weeks after Roe was overturned. In the headline, the magazine asks, “Did An Abortion Ban Cost a Young Texas Woman Her Life?” The answer, without a doubt, is yes. So why is it so hard to say so? Anyone who works in the abortion rights world knows that bans have killed multiple people since Roe was overturned. The public hasn’t heard their stories, though, because families understandably don’t want their loved ones’ lives and deaths picked apart by reporters and anti-abortion activists. It’s only a matter of time, for example, before Republicans and conservative groups claim that Yeni’s death had nothing to do with Texas’ abortion ban. They’ll point to how the young woman could be inconsistent taking her hypertension medication, or the time she missed an appointment with a maternal fetal medicine specialist. They will find a way to blame her...

Yeni would be alive if she was given an abortion. Yet this young woman with hypertension, diabetes and a history of pulmonary edema was never even talked to about ending her pregnancy. Not when she went to the emergency room of a Catholic hospital just 7 weeks into her pregnancy with breathing problems, not when she visited an affiliated OBGYN who told Yeni she was at risk of having a heart attack and stroke. Abortion wasn’t even mentioned when Yeni was so ill that she had to be transferred to a bigger hospital where records stated she was at “high risk for clinical decompensation/death.” As OBGYN Joanne Stone, former president of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, told The New Yorker, “If she weren’t pregnant, she likely wouldn’t be dead.”

This is an election year and we are posed to either re-elect Biden who will appoint a judge that would bring the courts back to balance. Or Trump who is responsible for appointing judges specifically to end Roe v Wade.

There is so little the average American can do about this, but most of us have the power to vote. Please use it. And please pay attention to your local races too.

#roe v wade #abortion #abortion bans #texas abortion ban #texas #death cw #sexism #misogyny #feminism #pregnancy #abortion rights

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Susan Rinkunas at Jezebel:

Today the Supreme Court held a brutal two hours of arguments in a case about whether women and pregnant people deserve life-saving medical care if that care happens to be abortion. (Yes, this is the second abortion case this term.) Several justices, and the lawyer for the plaintiff, trotted out wild hypotheticals and invoked the dangerous concept of fetal personhood in a disturbing preview of the future that awaits every state if Donald Trump wins the presidency. It could mean that people face horrible medical mistreatment simply because they’re pregnant and, at the most extreme end, could lead to a federal abortion ban.

The case, Moyle v. United States, is about whether state abortion bans like Idaho’s can override a longstanding federal law that requires emergency rooms to stabilize patients, including by offering abortion if necessary. That law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) says hospitals that accept Medicare funding have to stabilize patients in medical crises and deliver babies when women are in labor. But given that some states passed abortion bans that only have exceptions to prevent death, not to treat threats to health, the Biden administration reiterated hospitals’ obligations after the Dobbs decision, and later sued the state of Idaho. Idaho strongly disagrees that its hospitals should have to provide abortions for threats to health—like when a woman’s water breaks in the second trimester, far too early for a baby to survive but, when left untreated, could result in a life-threatening infection called sepsis or extensive blood loss known as hemorrhaging. The state worked with the right-wing Christian legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom to craft its legal arguments and one such argument raised in briefs and in the courtroom is the claim that a fetus is a patient under federal law.

Justice Elena Kagan asked Josh Turner, the lawyer representing Idaho, how the state ban functions when doctors believe a woman’s pregnancy complication might cause her to lose her uterus, and thereby her ability to have children in the future, but not cause her to die. Turner’s response was chilling: “Congress under EMTALA recognizes that there are two patients to consider in those circumstances. And the two-patient scenario is tough when you have these competing interests.” This logic is terrifying, mostly because a fetus is only a patient under EMTALA when there aren’t health threats to the pregnant person. The woman is the patient first and foremost. Idaho is trying to claim that because the words “unborn child” are used in the law, it means that the interests of the woman and the fetus have equal weight, when they do not. This is fetal personhood and it’s scary not least because the people being denied ER treatment in Idaho and other states are often in their first and second trimester and there’s no way the embryo or fetus will survive. The fetus is a lost cause at that stage, yet states like Idaho say that women themselves need to be facing death before they can have an abortion. (People coming to ERs later in pregnancy with complications would typically have labor induced and then doctors would try to keep the fetus alive.)

[...] If by some miracle the court rules against Idaho, that doesn’t mean abortion access is safe by any means. Barrett and Gorsuch both asked if a future Congress could ban hospitals from performing any abortions or gender-affirming surgeries as a condition of accepting Medicare funds. Prelogar said yes, Congress does have the power to pass laws like that. And of course, there is the lurking threat of the 19th-century Comstock Act which a Republican president could enforce to ban abortion nationwide, even at clinics in states with abortion protections.

SCOTUS heard oral arguments on a pair of cases pertaining to EMTALA on Wednesday, and the radical right-wing black robed theocrat-majority are likely to rule in favor of Idaho's cruel anti-abortion law to weaken EMTALA.

See Also:

HuffPost: Conservative SCOTUS Almost Entirely Ignores Pregnant Patients In Emergency Abortion Arguments

Vox: The Supreme Court’s likely to make it more dangerous to be pregnant in a red state

#EMTALA #Abortion #Abortion Bans #Moyle v. United States #Idaho v. United States #Fetal Personhood #Idaho #Idaho SB1309 #Alliance Defending Freedom #Elizabeth Prelogar #SCOTUS

[killed-by-choice]

FACT: Banning abortion dramatically reduces the rate of abortion— and the number of women dying from abortion

Restrictive state-level abortion policies are associated with not having an abortion at all. Calculated to account for the rate of criminal/illegal abortions.

“Women who lived in a state where abortion access was low were more likely than women living in a state with greater access to use highly effective contraceptives rather than no method” Not only are abortion rates lower where abortions are illegal, but unwanted pregnancy rates too. People are more careful. (From the Guttmacher Institute, former statistics arm of Planned Parenthood.) https://www.guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/2015/05/state-abortion-context-and-us-womens-contraceptive-choices-1995-2010

29% of Medicaid eligible pregnant women who would have an abortion with Medicaid coverage, instead give birth. Calculated to account for the rate of criminal/illegal abortions. https://bmcwomenshealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12905-019-0775-5

Analysis of statewide data from the three States indicated that following restrictions on State funding of abortions, the proportion of reported pregnancies resulting in births, rather than in abortions, increased in all three States. Calculated to account for the rate of criminal/illegal abortions. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1580169/pdf/pubhealthrep00193-0013.pdf

Approximately one-fourth of women who would have Medicaid-funded abortions instead give birth when this funding is unavailable … Studies have found little evidence that lack of Medicaid funding has resulted in illegal abortions. Calculated to account for the rate of criminal/illegal abortions.

We find that a 100-mile increase in distance to the nearest clinic is associated with 30.7 percent fewer abortions and 3.2 percent more births. Calculated to account for the rate of criminal/illegal abortions.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pam.22263

rate of abortion is found to be lower in states where access to providers is reduced and state policies are restrictive. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9099567/

A wait time as short as 72 hours is enough to start decreasing abortion rates. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1049386716300603

Abortion decreased after being restricted: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4050978/

Michigan banned Medicaid from paying for abortion. Abortion rates dropped. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8135922/

The farther away a woman is from an abortion facility, the less likely she is to get one: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2134397?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Some restrictions were enacted in Eastern Europe in the 80s and 90s. The rates of abortion AND pregnancy rates both decreased.

Fetal development information and required waiting periods lead to less abortion:

A study in Louisiana and Maryland found that laws against abortion were effective at stopping abortions

Countries with abortion bans also have dramatically lower maternal mortality compared to other countries in the region with dangerously permissive abortion laws.

“Contrary to the notion proposing a negative impact of restrictive abortion laws on maternal health, the abortion mortality ratio did not increase after the abortion ban in Chile. Rather, it decreased over 96 percent.”

Mexican states that ban and restrict abortion have better MMR than permissive states: “Over the 10-year period, states with less permissive abortion legislation exhibited lower Maternal Mortality Rates than more permissive states.”

Poland bans all abortion except LotM and has the world’s lowest MMR (2/100000). Malta bans almost all abortions and has MMR of 6/100000

It also works in reverse. Multiple countries have seen an increase in MMR after legalizing abortion.

Guyana legalized abortion and achieved the worst MMR on the continent. (Compare that to Chile, which has constitutional protections for the unborn and an MMR that dropped by over 96% AFTER abortion was banned.)

Ethiopia legalized abortion and it made MMR worse: “Although abortion was not legalised on demand, it was legalised on broad socio-economic grounds: the Center for Reproductive Rights place it in the same category as the UK and Finland which, while not strictly allowing abortion on demand, do allow something close to that in practice.” … “Over the period of legalisation, the proportion of women with septic shock more than doubled, with the same result for organ failure. The proportion admitted to intensive care nearly tripled. Between 2008 and 2014, the percentage of women receiving post-abortion care who have severe complications increased by over 50%, from 7% to 11%. During this time, the proportion of women presenting with organ failure quadrupled, the proportion with peritonitis quintupled, and the proportion with shock nearly doubled.”

Ireland’s once-stellar MMR also increased after legalizing abortion. (Compare to Poland and Malta with almost total bans and to the UK where abortion is essentially legal in demand up to the second trimester.)

The pattern repeats in Asia. Nepal, where there is no restriction on abortion, has one of the world’s highest maternal mortality rates. (The lowest in the region is Sri Lanka, with a rate fourteen times lower than Nepal and very good restrictions on abortion.)

In addition, less people are being lured into abortion under the false impression that it’s “safe and legal”. If any of them die of illegal abortion, it’s because they knowingly committed a crime. There will no longer be cases like 17-year-old Roselle Owens, Sarah Dunn, Tonya Reaves and Cree Erwin-Sheppard (to name a few) who were killed by abortion because they were lied to about the risks.

#pro life #pro choice #abortion #tw abortion #tw murder #tw death #tw ab*rtion #abortion debate #maternal mortality #death from legal abortion #abortion is not healthcare #abortion is not a right #abortion kills women #abortion bans #abortion bans save lives #abortion bans save women #human rights #maternal health

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

#us politics #twitter #tweet #tyt #the young turks #john iadarola #abortion #abortion bans #Nebraska #south carolina #republicans #conservatives #gop #gop policy #gop platform #republican family values #2023

[androgynealienfemme]

Doctors have denied an American woman on holiday in Malta a potentially life-saving abortion, despite saying her baby had a “zero chance” of survival after she was admitted to hospital with severe bleeding in her 16th week of pregnancy.

Despite an “extreme risk” of haemorrhage and infection, doctors at the Mater Dei hospital in Msida told Andrea Prudente that they would not perform a termination because of the country’s total ban on abortion.

Prudente and her husband are seeking a medical transfer from Malta to the UK, which the couple say is their only option due to the risk to her life. They claim medical staff were uncooperative in their attempts to leave and in sharing medical records with the couple’s insurance company.

“I just want to get out of here alive,” Prudente told the Guardian from her hospital room in Malta’s capital, Valletta. “I couldn’t in my wildest dreams have thought up a nightmare like this.”

Activists in Malta say the case has alarming echoes of the treatment of Savita Halappanavar, who died of sepsis in an Irish hospital in 2012 after doctors refused a request to terminate her pregnancy when she began to miscarry at 17 weeks, due to the abortion ban that was in place in Ireland then.

Malta is the only country in the EU to ban abortion under any circumstances. The only options for those seeking to end a pregnancy on the island nation are to buy illegal abortion medication online or seek a termination overseas.

Prudente, 38, was on holiday with her partner, Jay Weeldreyer, 45, on the island of Gozo on 12 June when she began bleeding heavily in the night.

Doctors in Gozo prescribed her a drug to protect against miscarriage, but two days later when they were back on Malta, the main island, Prudente’s waters broke and she was admitted to St Thomas hospital, where she was told that her placenta had become partially detached.

A follow-up ultrasound 48 hours later found there was no amniotic fluid left in her womb, and the couple were told the baby could not survive. They were also told that because of Malta’s abortion law, there was nothing doctors could do to end the pregnancy as long as the foetus had a heartbeat.

Prudente was transferred to Mater Dei hospital, where she was additionally diagnosed with a ruptured membrane and an umbilical cord that was protruding from her cervix, putting her at even greater risk of haemorrhage and infection. She also tested positive for Covid-19. She is being kept in Covid isolation and receiving antibiotics to ward off infection.

Weeldreyer said medical staff came to check for a foetal heartbeat every day.

“It’s an inconceivable form of emotional and psychological torture,” he said. “Part of me still celebrates hearing the heartbeat … and at the same time, I don’t want that heartbeat there because this is just leading to more suffering for this woman that I love.”

Lara Dimitrijevic, founder of Malta’s Women’s Rights Foundation and the lawyer representing Prudente, said the hospital only provided medical records after she intervened, which has delayed a transfer to the UK.

“It took a day for Andrea to receive her file and we are dealing with an emergency situation,” she said. “Every minute could lend itself to putting Andrea’s life in danger.”

Mater Dei hospital confirmed that it had given Prudente access to her file, but did not comment further on the case.

Prudente said the current advice from Maltese medical staff was for her to leave the hospital and wait at the couple’s hotel for the foetus’s heartbeat to stop or for Prudente to develop an infection, after which they could intervene.

“I feel like I’m being actively traumatised,” she said.

The Women’s Rights Foundation filed a judicial protest last week on behalf of 188 women, claiming the Maltese government’s blanket ban on abortion breached their right to health, privacy and equality. The foundation is now preparing to launch a case challenging the constitutional ban.

Weeldreyer said the couple had no idea that Malta had an abortion ban when they booked the holiday, intended to be a “babymoon”, where they could spend time on a Mediterranean island before the birth of their first child together.

Prudente said she was “desperate” to get off the island and receive appropriate medical care, but also wanted to raise awareness of the situation in Malta to prevent others suffering in the way that she had.

“I don’t want this to happen to more people,” she said.

This is the reality of abortion bans. This is what it leads to. Being asked to wait until you get an infection before you can terminate a dangerous pregnancy.

#pro choice #reproductive rights #feminism #abortion #abortion bans #long post #news #world news

[gwydionmisha]

Call the Capitol Switchboard at [phone] and ask to be connected to the representative of your choice.

*Here is one that will send your reps a fax: https://resist.bot/

To get your Critters' numbers to call direct: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

#Republican #Anti-Abortion Bills #Abortion Bans #News #Bodily Autonomy