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The landmark Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade has protected a person’s right to a safe and legal abortion since 1973. But many people, especially low-income women and women of color, still face heightened barriers to access the medical procedure due to the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal health insurance programs like Medicaid from covering abortions, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. 

The Hyde Amendment — named after former Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde, a vocally anti-abortion Republican — was passed in 1976 and has been renewed every year since. Congress has the opportunity to repeal the Hyde Amendment during the federal appropriations process each spring.

Research shows that 1 in 4 low-income women seeking an abortion are forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term when lawmakers restrict abortion coverage under Medicaid. Studies also show that a woman denied an abortion is more likely to fall into poverty than a woman who is able to get one.

The constitutional right to abortion is under concerted attack by a deeply conservative Supreme Court. Last month, the Supreme Court permitted Texas’ ban on abortion at six weeks to go into effect in a one-paragraph ruling decided without full briefing and oral argument,

On Dec. 1, the court will consider the constitutionality of Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In Dobbs, Mississippi is urging the Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade and take away from millions of Americans the fundamental right to control their bodies, choose whether and when to start a family, determine their life course, and participate as equals in American life.

destabilize a central part of the court’s jurisprudence protecting fundamental constitutional rights. As a result, Dobbs also threatens the fundamental rights to use birth control, marry a loved one, and make decisions about sexual intimacy.

House Democrats plan on Friday to push through broad legislation to uphold abortion rights, taking urgent action after a major Supreme Court setback as they brace for a ruling next year that could further roll back access to abortion nationwide.

The House vote will be largely symbolic given that the bill, the Women’s Health Protection Act, has little chance of advancing because of Republican opposition in the Senate.

The bill’s authors say they began drafting it a decade ago in response to emerging efforts at the state level to impose stringent requirements on those seeking and providing abortions, as well as the increasingly conservative makeup of the court.

Surge of Zika Virus Has Brazilians Re-examining Strict Abortion Laws

RECIFE, Brazil — The surging medical reports of babies being born with unusually small heads during the Zika epidemic in Brazil are igniting a fierce debate over the country’s abortion laws, which make the procedure illegal under most circumstances.

A judge in central Brazil has taken the rare step of publicly proclaiming that he will allow women to have legal abortions in cases of microcephaly, preparing the way for a fight over the issue in parts of the country’s labyrinthine legal system.

Will the Supreme Court Deadlock on the Texas Abortion Case?

If Justice Anthony Kennedy were a character from Lord of the Rings, he would be Treebeard the Ent—a giant walking tree who makes up his mind in his own time and then goes wherever he is going without worrying much about what’s in the underbrush.

Together, those requirements will impel the closure of about 34 of the 40 abortion clinics in the state.

Democrat 2016 contender Hillary Clinton tweeted Friday that she would like to see Planned Parenthood obtain an increase in taxpayer funding.

In an interview with Fusion, Clinton said that–if elected president–she would urge Congress to give the abortion business a raise in taxpayer funding.

“I am not only against defunding Planned Parenthood, but I would like to see Planned Parenthood even get more funding,” Clinton said. “Because, often times, it is both the first and the last resort for healthcare.”

People who care about basic American freedoms should be grateful to the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, for one thing: He has given liberals another good reason to flock to the polls in November.

Mr. McConnell is set to hold a procedural vote this week on a bill that would ban abortion at 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Twenty-week abortion bans, enacted in more than a dozen states and struck down in two, violate the Supreme Court’s standard that abortion can be restricted only when a fetus is viable outside the womb.

A contentious near-total ban on abortion in Poland went into effect late Wednesday, despite rampant opposition from hundreds of thousands of Poles who began protesting in the fall in the largest demonstrations in the country since the 1989 collapse of communism.

The decision had been made in October by the Constitutional Tribunal, but its implementation was delayed after it prompted a month of protests. On Wednesday the government abruptly announced that the ruling was being published in the government’s journal, meaning it came into effect.

“I think, I feel, I decide!” and “Freedom of choice instead of terror!” In Warsaw, they marched to the headquarters of the governing Law and Justice Party to songs including “I Will Survive.”

Women’s rights advocates and allies in Poland vowed on Thursday to continue to fight a near-total ban on abortion, calling it a breach of human rights and a sign that the country is regressing.

The constitutional court ruling, which abruptly came into effect Wednesday night, tightened Poland’s already restrictive laws to further ban abortions in cases of fetal abnormalities

When the ruling was first announced in October, it set off a month of protests on a scale not seen since the 1989 collapse of communism.

Louisiana voters passed a ballot measure in Tuesday’s election that enshrines anti-abortion language in the state’s constitution, The Associated Press projected. 

Amendment 1 adds language to the Louisiana Constitution stating that nothing in it “shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.”

state courts would not be able to declare that abortion restrictions violate the Louisiana Constitution. Any restrictions would be fair game, from limits on when a woman can have the procedure to an outright ban. 

You know who really reduced abortion numbers in the U.S.? President Obama, with the Affordable Care Act.

Millions of American Christians are likely to vote for President Trump on Tuesday because they believe it a religious obligation to support a president who will appoint “pro-life” judges.

The National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention both backed a limited right to abortion in the early 1970s, and an article in The Baptist Press welcomed the ruling in Roe v. Wade for advancing “religious liberty, human equality and justice.” A 1970 poll found that about two-thirds of Southern Baptist pastors supported allowing abortion in cases such as rape, deformity or a risk to the mother’s physical or mental well-being.

a top court’s decision to ban nearly all abortions, even as the nation’s leading politician urged his conservative supporters to “defend Poland.”

One group of women donned long red dresses and white bonnets meant to evoke the subjugated women in the Handmaid’s Tale novel and television series and marched into a cathedral and down the aisle between worshipers.

Twice before, in 2016 and 2018, the ruling party moved in Parliament to impose a ban on abortion. But it backed off both times after nationwide demonstrations underscored the political cost. This time, the ban came through the Constitutional Tribunal, which is firmly controlled by party loyalists.

The Biden administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to do what the justices declined to do last month when asked by a group of Texas abortion providers: block the enforcement of a Texas law that imposes a near-total ban on abortions performed after the sixth week of pregnancy.

making “abortion effectively unavailable” after six weeks, “Texas has, in short, successfully nullified” the Supreme Court’s “decisions within its borders.”

Rather than handle the request on the so-called shadow docket, Fletcher also suggested in his filing that the justices could treat the request as a petition for review, schedule full briefing and oral argument, and resolve the merits of the case without waiting for the litigation to conclude in the lower courts.

the story doesn’t end here. While the pro-life movement has won the right to legislate against abortion, it has not yet proven that it can do so in a way that can command durable majority support. Its weaknesses will not disappear in victory. Its foes and critics have been radicalized by its judicial success. And the vicissitudes of politics and its own compromises have linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right — some libertine and hyperindividualist, others simply hostile to synthesis, conciliation and majoritarian politics.

among its own writers and activists, the movement has understood itself to also be carrying on the best of America’s tradition of social reform, including causes associated with liberalism and progressivism.

To win the long-term battle, to persuade the country’s vast disquieted middle, abortion opponents need models that prove this critique wrong. They need to show how abortion restrictions are compatible with the goods that abortion advocates accuse them of compromising — the health of the poorest women, the flourishing of their children, the dignity of motherhood even when it comes unexpectedly or amid great difficulty.

In the first decades since Wade, the typical abortion patient was young and white; according to The American Prospect, “the typical abortion patient these days is a 20-something single mother of color.” The reasons for this are largely driven by greater socioeconomic barriers to contraception, and therefore, to abortion as well. “Women in the middle class continued to see unplanned pregnancies decline” in the 1990s when things began to change, according to The American Prospect.

Roe v. Wade decision was a landmark occasion for reproductive rights advocates and for women (though, as I noted above, women are not the only people affected.) Abortion, like birth control, is an issue that is framed as a “women’s rights issue,” when in reality, it affects women and their partners. Of course, a woman’s right to have autonomy over her body is at the heart of the debate on the pro-choice side, but intelligent conversations about sexual health and reproductive rights should be include men’s voices as well. By framing these discussions as “women’s issues,” it becomes a niche, special-interest concern, making the general public dismissive of the issues at hand at the expense of people who are most affected.

Both sides of the debate can agree that abortion is a divisive issue. It’s both personal and widespread in its nature — a basic question of how much ownership women have over their bodies, and what responsibility, if any, the government bears for the unborn — something that’s not so “one size fits all.” I’d say if you don’t believe in abortions, don’t have one; but the very option is universally unacceptable to some. As an all-or-nothing proposition, it’s impossible to find common ground.

President Biden signed two executive actions Thursday that are designed to expand access to reproductive health care and health insurance through the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid.

"There's nothing new that we're doing here other than restoring the Affordable Care Act and restoring Medicaid to the way it was before [Donald] Trump became president. Because by fiat, he changed — made [it] more inaccessible, more expensive and more difficult for people to qualify for either of those two plans," Biden said in a brief Oval Office signing ceremony.

"This is going back to what the situation was prior to Trump's executive order."

As a longtime advocate for women’s equality and reproductive freedom, I was surprised not to encounter the resistance so many women face from the medical community and society when I made this choice. Women are often told that they will regret losing their ability to have children. My doctor understood I knew what was right for my life, my body and my health. It felt like a miracle.

And yet after I scheduled my surgery, I was haunted by a Catholic teaching about women formulated by Pope John Paul II as part of his larger “theology of the body.” He was deeply concerned about the rising threat of feminism — particularly the growing movement in Protestant denominations to ordain women to the priesthood — and needed to articulate why Catholic women could not enjoy roles equal to men’s.

By extension, then, a uterus is God’s way of showing a woman that her primary role is to be a mother, literally and figuratively.

Joe Biden is only the second Catholic president of the United States. He's also a supporter of abortion rights — a position at odds with official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

Jamie Manson, president of Catholics for Choice, said she hopes for what she describes as a "better dialogue" between church leaders and some rank-and-file Catholics who disagree with aspects of the church's teachings.

Polling suggests a majority of American Catholics support abortion rights in most or all cases and oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

For government officials:Legislate the “personal choice” of mask noncompliance the way you have for decades tried to legislate women over their own deeply personal decisions.

After refusing to wear a mask or to instruct his staff to work remotely, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) tested positive for the coronavirus. He then tweeted that he would be taking hydroxychloroquine, despite top infectious-disease specialists, including Anthony S. Fauci, noting that the anti-malarial drug has not been proved an effective treatment. “It is what was decided as the best course of action between my doctor and me — not by government bureaucrats,” Gohmert wrote.

Was he plagiarizing Busy Philipps? Because last year at a hearing on abortion, the actor and activist told Gohmert, “I don’t believe that a politician’s place is to decide what’s best for a woman. It’s a choice between a woman and her doctor.”

Republican Senator Jason Rapert and Rep. Mary Bentley filed a bill on Wednesday that would make abortion illegal in Arkansas except when the mother’s life is at stake.

If passed, the bill will generally prohibit abortion in Arkansas and give the U.S. Supreme Court an opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and other pro-abortion decisions.

A conservative education and research organization, Family Council, showed support for the bill.