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Key facts about the abortion debate in America

The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade – the decision that had guaranteed a constitutional right to an abortion for nearly 50 years – has shifted the legal battle over abortion to the states, with some prohibiting the procedure and others moving to safeguard it.

As the nation’s post-Roe chapter begins, here are key facts about Americans’ views on abortion, based on two Pew Research Center polls: one conducted from June 25-July 4 , just after this year’s high court ruling, and one conducted in March , before an earlier leaked draft of the opinion became public.

This analysis primarily draws from two Pew Research Center surveys, one surveying 10,441 U.S. adults conducted March 7-13, 2022, and another surveying 6,174 U.S. adults conducted June 27-July 4, 2022. Here are the questions used for the March survey , along with responses, and the questions used for the survey from June and July , along with responses.

Everyone who took part in these surveys is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories.  Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

A majority of the U.S. public disapproves of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. About six-in-ten adults (57%) disapprove of the court’s decision that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a right to abortion and that abortion laws can be set by states, including 43% who strongly disapprove, according to the summer survey. About four-in-ten (41%) approve, including 25% who strongly approve.

About eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (82%) disapprove of the court’s decision, including nearly two-thirds (66%) who strongly disapprove. Most Republicans and GOP leaners (70%) approve , including 48% who strongly approve.

Most women (62%) disapprove of the decision to end the federal right to an abortion. More than twice as many women strongly disapprove of the court’s decision (47%) as strongly approve of it (21%). Opinion among men is more divided: 52% disapprove (37% strongly), while 47% approve (28% strongly).

About six-in-ten Americans (62%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the summer survey – little changed since the March survey conducted just before the ruling. That includes 29% of Americans who say it should be legal in all cases and 33% who say it should be legal in most cases. About a third of U.S. adults (36%) say abortion should be illegal in all (8%) or most (28%) cases.

Generally, Americans’ views of whether abortion should be legal remained relatively unchanged in the past few years , though support fluctuated somewhat in previous decades.

Relatively few Americans take an absolutist view on the legality of abortion – either supporting or opposing it at all times, regardless of circumstances. The March survey found that support or opposition to abortion varies substantially depending on such circumstances as when an abortion takes place during a pregnancy, whether the pregnancy is life-threatening or whether a baby would have severe health problems.

While Republicans’ and Democrats’ views on the legality of abortion have long differed, the 46 percentage point partisan gap today is considerably larger than it was in the recent past, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling. The wider gap has been largely driven by Democrats: Today, 84% of Democrats say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 72% in 2016 and 63% in 2007. Republicans’ views have shown far less change over time: Currently, 38% of Republicans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, nearly identical to the 39% who said this in 2007.

However, the partisan divisions over whether abortion should generally be legal tell only part of the story. According to the March survey, sizable shares of Democrats favor restrictions on abortion under certain circumstances, while majorities of Republicans favor abortion being legal in some situations , such as in cases of rape or when the pregnancy is life-threatening.

There are wide religious divides in views of whether abortion should be legal , the summer survey found. An overwhelming share of religiously unaffiliated adults (83%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do six-in-ten Catholics. Protestants are divided in their views: 48% say it should be legal in all or most cases, while 50% say it should be illegal in all or most cases. Majorities of Black Protestants (71%) and White non-evangelical Protestants (61%) take the position that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while about three-quarters of White evangelicals (73%) say it should be illegal in all (20%) or most cases (53%).

In the March survey, 72% of White evangelicals said that the statement “human life begins at conception, so a fetus is a person with rights” reflected their views extremely or very well . That’s much greater than the share of White non-evangelical Protestants (32%), Black Protestants (38%) and Catholics (44%) who said the same. Overall, 38% of Americans said that statement matched their views extremely or very well.

Catholics, meanwhile, are divided along religious and political lines in their attitudes about abortion, according to the same survey. Catholics who attend Mass regularly are among the country’s strongest opponents of abortion being legal, and they are also more likely than those who attend less frequently to believe that life begins at conception and that a fetus has rights. Catholic Republicans, meanwhile, are far more conservative on a range of abortion questions than are Catholic Democrats.

Women (66%) are more likely than men (57%) to say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling.

More than half of U.S. adults – including 60% of women and 51% of men – said in March that women should have a greater say than men in setting abortion policy . Just 3% of U.S. adults said men should have more influence over abortion policy than women, with the remainder (39%) saying women and men should have equal say.

The March survey also found that by some measures, women report being closer to the abortion issue than men . For example, women were more likely than men to say they had given “a lot” of thought to issues around abortion prior to taking the survey (40% vs. 30%). They were also considerably more likely than men to say they personally knew someone (such as a close friend, family member or themselves) who had had an abortion (66% vs. 51%) – a gender gap that was evident across age groups, political parties and religious groups.

Relatively few Americans view the morality of abortion in stark terms , the March survey found. Overall, just 7% of all U.S. adults say having an abortion is morally acceptable in all cases, and 13% say it is morally wrong in all cases. A third say that having an abortion is morally wrong in most cases, while about a quarter (24%) say it is morally acceptable in most cases. An additional 21% do not consider having an abortion a moral issue.

Among Republicans, most (68%) say that having an abortion is morally wrong either in most (48%) or all cases (20%). Only about three-in-ten Democrats (29%) hold a similar view. Instead, about four-in-ten Democrats say having an abortion is morally  acceptable  in most (32%) or all (11%) cases, while an additional 28% say it is not a moral issue. 

White evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly say having an abortion is morally wrong in most (51%) or all cases (30%). A slim majority of Catholics (53%) also view having an abortion as morally wrong, but many also say it is morally acceptable in most (24%) or all cases (4%), or that it is not a moral issue (17%). Among religiously unaffiliated Americans, about three-quarters see having an abortion as morally acceptable (45%) or not a moral issue (32%).

• Religion & Abortion

Carrie Blazina is a former digital producer at Pew Research Center .

Cultural Issues and the 2024 Election

Support for legal abortion is widespread in many places, especially in europe, public opinion on abortion, americans overwhelmingly say access to ivf is a good thing, broad public support for legal abortion persists 2 years after dobbs, most popular.

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• Fact sheets /
• Six out of 10 unintended pregnancies end in induced abortion.
• Abortion is a common health intervention. It is very safe when carried out using a method recommended by WHO, appropriate to the pregnancy duration and by someone with the necessary skills.
• However, around 45% of abortions are unsafe.
• Unsafe abortion is an important preventable cause of maternal deaths and morbidities. It can lead to physical and mental health complications and social and financial burdens for women, communities and health systems.
• Lack of access to safe, timely, affordable and respectful abortion care is a critical public health and human rights issue.

Around 73 million induced abortions take place worldwide each year. Six out of 10 (61%) of all unintended pregnancies, and 3 out of 10 (29%) of all pregnancies, end in induced abortion (1) .

Comprehensive abortion care is included in the list of essential health care services published by WHO in 2020. Abortion is a simple health care intervention that can be safely and effectively managed by a wide range of health workers using medication or a surgical procedure. In the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, a medical abortion can also be safely self-managed by the pregnant person outside of a health care facility (e.g. at home), in whole or in part. This requires that the woman has access to accurate information, quality medicines and support from a trained health worker (if she needs or wants it during the process).

Comprehensive abortion care includes the provision of information, abortion management and post-abortion care. It encompasses care related to miscarriage (spontaneous abortion and missed abortion), induced abortion (the deliberate interruption of an ongoing pregnancy by medical or surgical means), incomplete abortion as well as intrauterine fetal demise.

The information in this fact sheet focuses on care related to induced abortion.

Scope of the problem

When carried out using a method recommended by WHO appropriate to the pregnancy duration, and by someone with the necessary skills, abortion is a safe health care intervention (5).

However, when people with unintended pregnancies face barriers to attaining safe, timely, affordable, geographically reachable, respectful and non-discriminatory abortion care, they often resort to unsafe abortion. 1

Global estimates from 2010–2014 demonstrate that 45% of all induced abortions are unsafe. Of all unsafe abortions, one third were performed under the least safe conditions, i.e. by untrained persons using dangerous and invasive methods.  More than half of all these unsafe abortions occurred in Asia, most of them in south and central Asia. In Latin American and Africa, the majority (approximately 3 out of 4) of all abortions were unsafe. In Africa, nearly half of all abortions occurred under the least safe circumstances (3) .

Consequences of inaccessible quality abortion care

Lack of access to safe, affordable, timely and respectful abortion care, and the stigma associated with abortion, pose risks to women’s physical and mental well-being throughout the life-course.

Inaccessibility of quality abortion care risks violating a range of human rights of women and girls, including the right to life; the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health; the right to benefit from scientific progress and its realization; the right to decide freely and responsibly on the number, spacing and timing of children; and the right to be free from torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment.

One review from 2003–12, found that 4.7-13% of maternal deaths were linked to abortive pregnancy outcomes (4) but noted that maternal deaths due to abortion, and more specifically unsafe abortion, are often misclassified and underreported given the stigma. 

Deaths from safe abortion are negligible, <1/100 000 (5). On the other hand, in regions where unsafe abortions are common, the death rates are high, at > 200/100 000 abortions. Estimates from 2012 indicate that in developing countries alone, 7 million women per year were treated in hospital facilities for complications of unsafe abortion (6) .

Physical health risks associated with unsafe abortion include:

• incomplete abortion (failure to remove or expel all pregnancy tissue from the uterus);
• haemorrhage (heavy bleeding);
• uterine perforation (caused when the uterus is pierced by a sharp object); and
• damage to the genital tract and internal organs as a consequence of inserting dangerous objects into the vagina or anus.

Restrictive abortion regulation can cause distress and stigma, and risk constituting a violation of human rights of women and girls, including the right to privacy and the right to non-discrimination and equality, while also imposing financial burdens on women and girls. Regulations that force women to travel to attain legal care, or require mandatory counselling or waiting periods, lead to loss of income and other financial costs, and can make abortion inaccessible to women with low resources (6,8) .

Estimates from 2006 show that complications of unsafe abortions cost health systems in developing countries US$ 553 million per year for post-abortion treatments. In addition, households experienced US$ 922 million in loss of income due to long-term disability related to unsafe abortion (10) . Countries and health systems could make substantial monetary savings by providing greater access to modern contraception and quality induced abortion (8,9) .

Expanding quality abortion care

Evidence shows that restricting access to abortions does not reduce the number of abortions (1) ; however, it does affect whether the abortions that women and girls attain are safe and dignified. The proportion of unsafe abortions are significantly higher in countries with highly restrictive abortion laws than in countries with less restrictive laws (2) .

Barriers to accessing safe and respectful abortion include high costs, stigma for those seeking abortions and health care workers, and the refusal of health workers to provide an abortion based on personal conscience or religious belief. Access is further impeded by restrictive laws and requirements that are not medically justified, including criminalization of abortion, mandatory waiting periods, provision of biased information or counselling, third-party authorization and restrictions regarding the type of health care providers or facilities that can provide abortion services.

Multiple actions are needed at the legal, health system and community levels so that everyone who needs abortion care has access to it. The three cornerstones of an enabling environment for quality comprehensive abortion care are:

• respect for human rights, including a supportive framework of law and policy;
• the availability and accessibility of information; and
• a supportive, universally accessible, affordable and well functioning health system.

A well-functioning health system implies many factors, including:

• evidence-based policies;
• universal health coverage;
• the reliable supply of quality, affordable medical products and equipment;
• that an adequate number of health workers, of different types, provide abortion care at a reachable distance to patients; 
• the delivery of abortion care through a variety of approaches, e.g. care in health facilities, digital interventions and self-care approaches, allowing for choices depending on the values and preferences of the pregnant person, available resources, and the national and local context;
• that health workers are trained to provide safe and respectful abortion care, to support informed decision-making and to interpret laws and policies regulating abortion;
• that health workers are supported and protected from stigma; and
• provision of contraception to prevent unintended pregnancies.

Availability and accessibility of information implies:

• provision of evidence-based comprehensive sexuality education; and
• accurate, non-biased and evidence-based information on abortion and contraceptive methods.

WHO response

WHO provides global technical and policy guidance on the use of contraception to prevent unintended pregnancy, provision of information on abortion care, abortion management (including miscarriage, induced abortion, incomplete abortion and fetal death) and post-abortion care. In 2022, WHO published an updated, consolidated guideline on abortion care, including all WHO recommendations and best practice statements across three domains essential to the provision of abortion care: law and policy, clinical services and service delivery. 

WHO also maintains the Global Abortion Policies Database . This interactive online database contains comprehensive information on the abortion laws, policies, health standards and guidelines for all countries. 

Upon request, WHO provides technical support to countries to adapt sexual and reproductive health guidelines to specific contexts and strengthen national policies and programmes related to contraception and safe abortion care. A quality abortion care monitoring and evaluation framework is also in development.

WHO is a cosponsor of the HRP (UNDP/UNFPA/UNICEF/WHO/World Bank Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction) , which carries out research on clinical care, abortion regulation, abortion stigma, as well as implementation research on community and health systems approaches to quality abortion care. It also monitors the global burden of unsafe abortion and its consequences.

1 An “unsafe abortion” is defined as a procedure for terminating a pregnancy performed by persons lacking the necessary information or skills or in an environment not in conformity with minimal medical standards, or both. The persons, skills and medical standards considered safe in the provision of abortion are different for medical and surgical abortion and by pregnancy duration. In using this definition, what is considered ‘safe’ or unsafe needs to be interpreted in line with the most current WHO technical and policy guidance (2).

(1) Bearak J, Popinchalk A, Ganatra B, Moller A-B, Tunçalp Ö, Beavin C et al. Unintended pregnancy and abortion by income, region, and the legal status of abortion: estimates from a comprehensive model for 1990–2019. Lancet Glob Health. 2020 Sep; 8(9):e1152-e1161. doi: 10.1016/S2214-109X(20)30315-6. 

(2) Ganatra B, Tunçalp Ö, Johnston H, Johnson BR, Gülmezoglu A, Temmerman M. From concept to measurement: Operationalizing WHO's definition of unsafe abortion. Bull World Health Organ 2014;92:155; 10.2471/BLT.14.136333.

(3) Ganatra B, Gerdts C, Rossier C, Johnson Jr B R, Tuncalp Ö, Assifi A et al. Global, regional, and subregional classification of abortions by safety, 2010–14: estimates from a Bayesian hierarchical model. The Lancet. 2017 Sep.

(4) Say L, Chou D, Gemmill A, Tunçalp Ö, Moller AB, Daniels J et al. Global causes of maternal death: a WHO systematic analysis. Lancet Glob Health. 2014 Jun; 2(6):e323-33.

(5) Raymond EG, Grimes DA. The comparative safety of legal induced abortion and childbirth in the United States. Obstet Gynecol. 2012 Feb;119(2 Pt 1):215-9. doi: 10.1097/AOG.0b013e31823fe923. PMID: 22270271.

(6) Singh S, Maddow-Zimet I. Facility-based treatment for medical complications resulting from unsafe pregnancy termination in the developing world, 2012: a review of evidence from 26 countries. BJOG 2015; published online Aug 19. DOI:10.1111/1471-0528.13552.

(7) Coast E, Lattof SR, Meulen Rodgers YV, Moore B, Poss C. The microeconomics of abortion: A scoping review and analysis of the economic consequences for abortion care-seekers. PLoS One. 2021 Jun 9;16(6):e0252005. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0252005. PMID: 34106927; PMCID: PMC8189560.

(8) Lattof SR, Coast E, Rodgers YVM, Moore B, Poss C. The mesoeconomics of abortion: A scoping review and analysis of the economic effects of abortion on health systems. PLoS One. 2020 Nov 4;15(11):e0237227. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0237227. PMID: 33147223; PMCID: PMC7641432.

(9) Rodgers YVM, Coast E, Lattof SR, Poss C, Moore B. The macroeconomics of abortion: A scoping review and analysis of the costs and outcomes. PLoS One. 2021 May 6;16(5):e0250692. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0250692. PMID: 33956826; PMCID: PMC8101771.

(10). Vlassoff et al. Economic impact of unsafe abortion-related morbidity and mortality: evidence and estimation challenges. Brighton, Institute of Development Studies, 2008 (IDS Research Reports 59).

• Abortion care guideline
• Classification of abortions by safety: article in The Lancet
• Quality of care
• Maintaining essential health services during the COVID-19 outbreak
• Sexual and reproductive health and research including the Special Programme HRP

Global Abortion Policies Database

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Pro and Con: Abortion

To access extended pro and con arguments, sources, and discussion questions about whether abortion should be legal, go to ProCon.org .

The debate over whether abortion should be a legal option has long divided people around the world. Split into two groups, pro-choice and pro-life, the two sides frequently clash in protests.

A June 2, 2022 Gallup poll , 55% of Americans identified as “pro-choice,” the highest percentage since 1995. 39% identified as “pro-life,” and 5% were neither or unsure. For the first time in the history of the poll question (since 2001), 52% of Americans believe abortion is morally acceptable. 38% believed the procedure to be morally wrong, and 10% answered that it depended on the situation or they were unsure.

Surgical abortion (aka suction curettage or vacuum curettage) is the most common type of abortion procedure. It involves using a suction device to remove the contents of a pregnant woman’s uterus. Surgical abortion performed later in pregnancy (after 12-16 weeks) is called D&E (dilation and evacuation). The second most common abortion procedure, a medical abortion (aka an “abortion pill”), involves taking medications, usually mifepristone and misoprostol (aka RU-486), within the first seven to nine weeks of pregnancy to induce an abortion. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that 67% of abortions performed in 2014 were performed at or less than eight weeks’ gestation, and 91.5% were performed at or less than 13 weeks’ gestation. 77.3% were performed by surgical procedure, while 22.6% were medical abortions. An abortion can cost from $500 to over $1,000 depending on where it is performed and how long into the pregnancy it is.

• Abortion is a safe medical procedure that protects lives.
• Abortion bans endangers healthcare for those not seeking abortions.
• Abortion bans deny bodily autonomy, creating wide-ranging repercussions.
• Life begins at conception, making abortion murder.
• Legal abortion promotes a culture in which life is disposable.
• Increased access to birth control, health insurance, and sexual education would make abortion unnecessary.

This article was published on June 24, 2022, at Britannica’s ProCon.org , a nonpartisan issue-information source.

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The New Faces of Abortion Rights

The crowd that greeted Kamala Harris in a high-school gym outside Milwaukee last month was delighted to the point of delirium. People roared when she said that, as a former prosecutor, she knows “Donald Trump’s type.” They cheered again when she spoke up for affordable child care and an assault-weapons ban. But when she said, “We trust women to make decisions about their own body,” the response was so loud that it nearly drowned out the end of the sentence. She shouted above the din, “And not have their government tell them what to do.”

Before Harris spoke, Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, noted that she has been talking up abortion rights since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, two years ago. In January, on the fifty-first anniversary of the Roe decision, she had opened a national reproductive-rights tour just fifteen miles away, in traditionally Republican territory, where Democrats are counting on opposition to Dobbs to help them in November. Rebecca Hammer, a financial planner from Oconomowoc, emerged into the sunlight after the rally, thrilled to see Harris as the party’s new standard-bearer. She was aware that President Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic, is a reluctant Roe supporter, who said as recently as last year, “I’m not big on abortion.” Harris is a different story. “It is personal to her,” Hammer said. “She can feel it in her bones.”

Few issues are more important to Harris’s chances in November than reproductive rights, which also include in-vitro fertilization and contraception. Since Dobbs, pro-choice advocates have scored victories on ballot initiatives in states such as Kansas, Michigan, Kentucky, and Ohio, signalling the strength of the Democrats’ case. In Wisconsin, where four of the past six Presidential races have been decided by less than one percentage point, polls show that abortion is the top issue for Democrats. “There is not a piece of the coalition who we feel is not mobilized by this issue,” Morgan Mohr, the director of the Harris campaign’s reproductive-rights strategy, told me.

Mohr recalled the moment when she realized that the campaign was onto something. Earlier this year, she monitored a focus group of voters as they watched a new ad featuring Austin Dennard, a Texas ob-gyn who was denied an abortion even though her fetus had no chance of survival. “In Texas, you are forced to carry that pregnancy, and that is because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v. Wade,” Dennard said, looking directly at the camera. “I was to continue my pregnancy, putting my life at risk. It’s every woman’s worst nightmare, and it was absolutely unbearable.” Members of the focus group put their hands to their heads or held them to their hearts. Dennard’s story, Mohr saw, was harrowing, and potentially galvanizing.

To make that emotional connection with voters, Mohr has helped more than a dozen women to talk about their abortions on the campaign trail. The women, called abortion storytellers, have introduced Harris at events, and they are training others to give their own testimonies in the hope of highlighting the stakes in November. Those sharing their experiences include the actor Ashley Judd, who travelled to Virginia to speak about being raped and getting an abortion. Hadley Duvall , whose raw account of being raped by her stepfather at the age of twelve moved Kentucky voters in 2023, stopped in Madison and La Crosse in late July. Two women, one from Louisiana and one from Texas, did twenty-eight events in seventeen cities in six states last spring. Unlike feminist groups that for decades have told abortion stories while emphasizing female empowerment, and politicians who have relied on elliptical talk of “choice,” these women often speak about the agony of needing to terminate a pregnancy for medical reasons and, because of Dobbs, struggling to find help. At a rally in Madison in June to mark the anniversary of Dobbs, Senator Elizabeth Warren told me that such stories are powerful because, by moving beyond euphemism, they “break the mold.”

“The conventional wisdom was you don’t talk about abortion on TV,” Tanya Bjork, a Harris campaign adviser and a longtime Democratic strategist in Wisconsin, told me. “That is completely different already this year. We talk about abortion all over the place.” Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman who was denied an abortion until she became gravely ill , told me backstage after the rally in Madison, “I don’t think two years ago I would have been talking about my uterus on national television—and now my permanently closed fallopian tube is just a fact.” She became a plaintiff in a Texas lawsuit and recorded a sixty-second ad, “ Willow’s Box ,” about her ordeal, which has been viewed nearly six million times on YouTube. She has since quit her job and appeared at campaign roundtables and rallies around the country, where she tells her story over and over. “You realize that, even though this is hard, you’re reaching new people every time,” she said. “If I can hit one new person’s ears each time, I’ll keep doing it.”

Anna Igler is, like Dennard, an abortion storyteller who has been both a doctor and a patient. An ob-gyn in the Green Bay area of Wisconsin, who has regularly overseen births and performed abortions, she ended a pregnancy of her own at twenty-five weeks, in 2020, after her fetus was diagnosed with a devastating brain abnormality. Unable to be treated in Wisconsin after twenty-one weeks, she travelled to Colorado for the procedure. On the morning of June 24, 2022, Igler was at work in her office when she received a text from a friend. “Anna, I’m so sorry,” it read. Igler was perplexed. She had not been following the news that day and was not expecting the Dobbs ruling. “Then I got the gist of the message, and I was, like, Holy shit, you’ve got to be kidding me, it really happened.” Wisconsin would now enforce an 1849 law that made it illegal to perform an abortion except to save the life of a mother. (The law has since been overturned by a circuit-court judge.)

Igler had rarely discussed her abortion, but she reached out to a Green Bay Press-Gazette reporter, who told her story . Soon, she was taping an advertisement for Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat in a tough reëlection race. (He won.) The following year, she did an ad for a Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate (who also won), and she is now featured in a multimillion-dollar ad campaign for American Bridge , a Democratic political-action committee. In the ad, she says, with red eyes, that she ended a wanted pregnancy “because my baby was very sick.” She has spoken at press conferences and rallies, and she told me that, for a few days after each event, she cries a lot. “And then I just do it all over again when someone asks,” she said. “Because I have to. This is too important not to talk about.”

I met Igler on a Saturday morning at the headquarters of the Brown County Democratic Party, where she had agreed to speak to a dozen volunteers ahead of a door-knocking session. Before she was introduced, she stood to the side, and I asked what she was thinking. She answered that she had got into the right frame of mind by listening to the raucous song “Know Your Enemy,” by Rage Against the Machine. (Lyrics: “I’ve got no patience now / So sick of complacence now.”) As she headed toward the lectern, she whispered, “I do know my enemy.”

Igler told the group the story of her pregnancy. “Her name is Nora Rose,” she began, “and she should be almost three and a half years old right now.” She said that she fears another ban on abortion in Wisconsin if Republicans win local elections, and a national ban if Trump wins. “Politicians like Trump do not have the expertise, knowledge, or understanding to make any of these medical decisions,” she said. “Why is our country headed back to the nineteen-fifties?” She ended with a firm warning: “Republicans have no idea the powerful rage they have unleashed in us. We are coming for those who seek to control and oppress us.”

In past years, such an event might have focussed on tax policy or school funding. Instead, for twenty-five minutes, Igler went on to answer questions about intimate details of pregnancy and abortion, including in-vitro fertilization, a procedure that she has used successfully since her abortion. One woman talked about period trackers. A man explained that his sister in Texas had suffered an ectopic pregnancy, and asked whether that termination would be called an abortion. (There is widespread confusion about this, and, as a result, some doctors have delayed lifesaving care.) Later, Igler said that people often approach her after rallies to tell her their stories: “I consider it the start of another MeToo movement, with women coming out and saying publicly, ‘I had an abortion.’ ”

Even for some pro-choice women, this means talking about lingering shame and regret. As the volunteers rose to collect their door-knocking literature, Barbara Dorff, a former Green Bay city-council member who had been listening thoughtfully from the second row, said that the word “abortion” saddens her. Now sixty-nine, she explained that she had lost a pregnancy in 1982. “You think you’re safe after twelve weeks, right?” she said. “And then one day I just started bleeding.” Her fetus had died. A doctor performed a dilation and curettage to clean her womb. When the nurse referred to the procedure as an abortion, Dorff was devastated. To her, the word suggested that she had made a choice to abort her child, and that she had done something wrong. “It’s a hard word, it’s a harsh word,” she said. “There is a feeling or a weight behind that word.”

That afternoon, I trailed Christy Welch, the chair of the Brown County Democratic Party, as she met voters in the Green Bay suburb of Allouez. Linda Wallenfang, a sixty-four-year-old former union member at Georgia-Pacific, who is now retired, invited Welch into her living room and took a seat on the couch. When the topic turned to abortion, Wallenfang said that she has qualms about the issue but believes it’s none of the government’s business. She volunteered a story about the shame her late mother felt after having two abortions in the fifties, the first when she was a teen-ager and the second when she already had two young children and was feeling overwhelmed. “My mom went to her grave thinking she was a murderer. We told her God forgave her,” Wallenfang said. When people hear stories about “what happens to real women,” she added, “it changes your perspective.”

To say that abortion politics in Wisconsin have intensified since Dobbs is to understate the case. The return of the 1849 law, which remained in place for more than a year, activated many voters who had taken abortion access for granted. This was most evident in the 2023 contest for control of the state Supreme Court. The race became, by a factor of four, the most expensive judicial election in U.S. history. Though the race was officially nonpartisan, the winner, Janet Protasiewicz, ran on a platform of preserving abortion rights and reforming the state’s gerrymandered voting maps. She won by eleven points , giving pro-choice forces a majority on the court for the first time in years. Several times this year, Harris has been to Wisconsin and spoken about abortion, including a visit to La Crosse, on the Mississippi River. “Ten years ago,” Bjork, the Democratic strategist, said, “you would not send anybody to La Crosse just to talk about abortion.”

To skeptics who say that the economy and other issues outrank abortion in importance, Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party leader, says that surveys paint an incomplete picture. When asked what is on their minds, voters will often name inflation or the economy, he said, but “if you engage in a conversation with a voter and you say, ‘Would you ever vote for someone who thinks that politicians should be able to override your own medical decisions when it comes to abortion?’ they will answer, ‘Absolutely not.’ ” Such framing is designed to resonate with Republicans and independents who resent government intrusion in their personal affairs. “It’s about freedom,” Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told me during his visit to the Wisconsin Democrats’ annual convention. “It’s about good people in this country who believe that women should have the right to control their own bodies.”

The “freedom” formulation proved particularly effective in the first post-Dobbs electoral test for abortion rights, in Kansas . In August, 2022, a coalition called Kansans for Constitutional Freedom helped defeat an effort to remove abortion protections from the state constitution. Harris has now made freedom a central theme of her campaign, seizing a word that Republican politicians since Ronald Reagan have tried to claim for themselves. On August 7th, addressing a large crowd in Eau Claire alongside her new running mate, Tim Walz, she spoke of “the sacred freedom to vote,” the freedom to join a union, and “the freedom to live safe from gun violence.” Her voice rising to a shout, she reminded the crowd of an ongoing assault on “the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body.”

Harris often speaks in optimistic terms, of “freedom to .” It is then up to the storytellers to show voters what an absence of reproductive freedom means. Zurawski, who filmed the “Willow’s Box” ad, recalled that, when the campaign asked if she would like to help, she didn’t hesitate. “I’m terrified of the alternative, as I think all Americans should be,” she said. “I couldn’t sit back and not fight back. There are a lot of folks who can’t tell their stories, or they don’t want to publicly, and I can. I had one woman tell me that she had had an abortion and literally no one in her life knows.”

At the Madison rally with Warren, Zurawski told the story, again, of her delayed abortion, to supportive cheers from the crowd. She said how hard it was to film the campaign ad and talked about why she was there. If it could help protect other women, she asked, “how could I not go to my most vulnerable place?” ♦

New Yorker Favorites

As he rose in politics, Robert Moses discovered that decisions about New York City’s future would not be based on democracy .

The Muslim tamale king of the Old West .

Wendy Wasserstein on the baby who arrived too soon .

An Oscar-winning filmmaker takes on the Church of Scientology .

The young stowaways thrown overboard at sea .

Fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri: “ A Temporary Matter .”

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• Secondary School

Write an argumentative essay on abortion

Abortion is a hard and extremely sensitive topic, and to choose to be pro-life or pro-choice is a big statement of opinion, but one debate out there is whether or not abortion should be legal in the united states. Abortion is a highly controversial issue that is affecting our society. People feel that abortion is evil because it is killing an unborn child. On the other hand, people believe it is a woman's constitutional right to choose, but if one were to end an innocent child's life is not only unethical and inhumane, but it is also morally wrong.

Abortion is the killing of a human being, which defies the word of God, spoken from the Bible. The Bible states “Thou shalt not kill,” in Exodus 20:13. In all countries and among peoples, a natural instinct or an unwritten tradition placed murder among the worst crimes, and made its penalty death. According to the Bible, there is no fine line or conclusion drawn between a fetus or a baby. By definition, a fetus is an unborn offspring of a mammal, in particular, an unborn human baby more than eight weeks after conception, whereas a baby is defined as a very young child, especially one newly or recently born. Donna J. Harrison, MD, president of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, argues that if the prenatal being "is nourished and protected, it will proceed uninterrupted through the developmental stages of the embryo, fetus, newborn, toddler, child, teen, adult and aged adult: one continuous existence… The real argument in the abortion debate is whether or not this human being is a 'person,' with all the…protections of 'personhood.'" She compares the exclusion of prenatal beings from personhood to the exclusion of African-Americans. Other pro-lifers connect the exclusion of prenatal life forms from personhood to the exclusion of other groups, such as women, Latinos, Native Americans, people with disabilities, LGBT persons, the poor, and death row prisoners. In other beliefs other than Christianity and catholicism, traditional Buddhism also rejects abortion because it involves the deliberate destroying of a life. Buddhists are expected to take full personal responsibility for everything they do and for the consequences that follow. The decision to abort is, therefore, a highly personal one and one that requires careful and compassionate exploration of the ethical issues involved, and a willingness to carry the burden of whatever happens as a result of the decision. The ethical consequences of the decision will also depend on the motive and intention behind the decision, and the level of mindfulness with which it was taken.

Our world today is full of unsolved, decisive and controversial issues. Most of them relate to our morals, ethics, and religion, thus creating a very strong yes’ or no’, or good’ and bad’ side. Like the Chinese yin and yang sign, abortion has a very prominent black and white side but also contains traces of each in the alternating color. This shows that if you were to come to any kind of conclusion on abortion, there would be a downside to it,and that is primarily why the world cannot agree on this sensitive and emotional issue. Since nearly 60% of women experience at least one unintended pregnancy between the ages of 14 and 44 (a percentage that includes women who don’t have sex at all, or who don’t have sex with men, or who can’t conceive, which means that women who are actually at risk of an unintended pregnancy have an even higher chance of experiencing one) and 43% of women (again, a percentage which includes those who don’t have sex, don’t have sex with men, or who can not conceive) will have at least one abortion at some point during their fertile years, we’re talking about an extremely common dilemma and decision. While the majority of pregnancies are the result of consensual sex, women periodically become pregnant as a result of rape. Should a woman who involuntarily engaged in sex be forced to carry a child to term as a result? Pro-life Advocates say absolutely! They believe that a woman must never terminate a pregnancy, no matter what the circumstances.

Explanation:

♥♥ The topic of abortion is highly debated among various groups of people all around the world. Abortion is a synthetic way of ending a pregnancy by extraction or removal of an embryo before it can live outside the womb.

♥♥ Because of the moral subsoil of the question, it is fiercely discussed even in the countries where such medical procedure is allowed by the government

♥Everybody has a basic fundamental right to do anything with own body.

♥It is crucial for a woman’s independence to decide whether she wants to have a child.

♥Some scientists claim that personhood starts when a fetus is able to live outside the womb, so after the birth.

♥Most neuroscientists believe that fetuses can’t feel pain when the abortion is done.

♥Legal and professional abortions reduce women’s injury or even death from illegal backstreet abortions.

♥Modern methods of abortion won’t cause infertility and other lasting health problems.

hope it helps u.....

New questions in English

The Hastings Center

• Bioethics and Policy—A History Daniel Callahan
• The Hastings Center Bioethics Timeline
• Abortion Bonnie Steinbock
• Aging Daniel Callahan
• Brain Injury: Neuroscience and Neuroethics Joseph J. Fins
• Clinical Trials Christine Grady, RN, PhD
• Climate Change David B. Resnik
• Conflict of Interest in Biomedical Research and Clinical Practice Josephine Johnston, Bethany Brumbaugh
• Conscience Clauses, Health Care Providers, and Parents Nancy Berlinger
• Disaster Planning and Public Health Bruce Jennings
• End-of-Life Care Kathy L. Cerminara, Alan Meisel
• Enhancing Humans Cristina J. Kapustij, Mark S. Frankel
• Environment, Ethics, and Human Health David B. Resnik, Christopher J. Portier
• Family Caregiving Carol Levine
• Genomics, Behavior, and Social Outcomes Daphne O. Martschenko, Lucas J. Matthews
• Law Enforcement and Genetic Data James W. Hazel, Ellen Wright Clayton
• Medical Aid-in-Dying Timothy E. Quill, Bernard Sussman
• Nature, Human Nature, and Biotechnology Gregory E. Kaebnick
• Neonatal Care Jennifer McGuirl, Alan R. Fleischman
• Newborn Screening Mary Ann Baily
• Organ Transplantation Arthur Caplan, Brendan Parent
• Pandemics: The Ethics of Mandatory and Voluntary Interventions
• Public Health Ethics and Law Lawrence O. Gostin, Lindsay F. Wiley
• Quality Improvement Methods in Health Care Mary Ann Baily
• Racism and Health Equity Keisha Ray
• Research in Resource-Poor Countries Voo Teck Chuan, G. Owen Schaefer
• Sports Enhancement Thomas H. Murray
• Stem Cells Insoo Hyun
• Torture: The Bioethics Perspective Steven H. Miles

From Bioethics Briefings

• Abortion remains controversial.
• In recent years, several states, including Texas and Oklahoma, have passed abortion bans early in pregnancy.
• For nearly 50 years, there was a Constitutional right to abortion in the United States, established by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973
• The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, eliminating the Constitutional right to abortion.
• A central ethical question in the abortion debate is over the moral status of the fetus.
• Opinions range from the belief that the fetus is a human being with full moral status and rights from conception to the belief that a fetus has no rights, even if it is human in a biological sense. Most Americans’ beliefs fall somewhere in the middle.
• Moral philosophers from various perspectives provide nuanced examinations of the abortion question that go beyond the standard political breakdowns.

Framing the Issue

Abortion has been one of the most divisive and emotionally charged issues in American politics. At one end of the debate are those who regard abortion as murder, a despicable and heinous crime. At the other end of the spectrum are those who regard any attempt to restrict abortion as an egregious violation of women’s rights to make their own decisions about their bodies and what is best for them and their families. Most Americans are somewhere in the middle.

A central philosophical question in the abortion debate concerns the moral status of the embryo and fetus. If the fetus is a person, with the same right to life as any human being who has been born, it would seem that very few, if any, abortions could be justified, because it is not morally permissible to kill children because they are unwanted or illegitimate or disabled. However, the morality of abortion is not settled so straightforwardly. Even if one accepts the argument that the fetus is a person, it does not automatically follow that it has a right to the use of the pregnant woman’s body. Thus, the morality of abortion depends not only on the moral status of the fetus, but also on whether the pregnant woman has an obligation to continue to gestate the fetus.

Ethical Considerations Around Abortion

Public opinion on abortion falls into three camps—conservative, liberal, and moderate (or gradualist)—each of which draws on both science and ethical thinking.

Conservative

Conservative opposition to abortion stems from the conviction that the fetus is a human being, with the same rights as any born human being, from the beginning of pregnancy onward. Some conservative groups—such as the Catholic Church—consider the fetus to be a human being with full moral rights even earlier than the beginning of pregnancy, which occurs when the embryo implants in the uterus. The Church regards the embryo as a full human being from conception (the conjoining of sperm and egg). This is because at conception the embryo receives its own unique genetic code, distinct from that of its mother or father. Therefore, Catholic doctrine regards conception, not implantation, as the beginning of the life of a human being.

Although conservatives concede that the fetus changes dramatically during gestation, they do not accept these changes as relevant to moral standing. Conservatives argue that there is no stage of development at which we can say, now we have a human being, whereas a day or a week or a month earlier we did not. Any attempt to place the onset of humanity at a particular moment—whether it be when brain waves appear, or when the fetus begins to look human, or when quickening, sentience, or viability occur —is bound to be arbitrary because all of these stages will occur if the fetus is allowed to grow and develop.

A secular antiabortion argument given by Don Marquis in 1989 differs from the traditional conservative view in that it is not based on the fetus’s being human, thus avoiding the charge of “speciesism.” Rather, Marquis argues that abortion is wrong for the same reason that killing anyone is wrong—namely, that killing deprives its victim of a valuable future, what he calls “a future like ours.” It is possible that some nonhumans (some animals or aliens) have a future like ours. If so, then killing them is also wrong.

This raises two questions about what it is to have a future like ours. First, what precisely is involved in this notion? Does it essentially belong to rational, future-oriented, plan-making beings? If so, then killing most nonhuman animals would not be wrong, but neither would killing those who are severely developmentally disabled. Second, at what point does the life of a being with a future like ours start? Marquis assumes that we are essentially human animals, so our lives start with the beginning of our organisms. But Jeff McMahan denies this, arguing that we are essentially embodied minds, and not human organisms. On McMahan’s view, our lives do not start until our organism becomes conscious, probably some time in the second trimester. Early abortion, on his view, does not kill someone with a future like ours, but rather prevents that individual from coming into existence – in much the way contraception does.

The pro-choice position on abortion is often referred to as the liberal view. Mary Anne Warren provides a classic statement of the liberal view. Warren does not dispute the conservative’s claim that the fetus is biologically human, but she denies that biological humanity is either necessary or sufficient for personhood and a right to life. She argues that basing moral standing on species membership is arbitrary, and maintains that it is the killing of persons , not humans, that is wrong. Indeed, Warren thinks that the conservative is guilty of a logical mistake: confusing biological humans and persons. Persons are beings with certain psychological traits, including sentience, consciousness, the capacity for rational thought, and the ability to use language. There may be some nonhuman persons (e.g., some animals, extraterrestrial aliens), and there may be biological humans that are not persons, including early gestation fetuses, who have no person-making characteristics. By the end of the second trimester, fetuses are probably sentient, but even late gestation fetuses are less personlike than most mammals who are not considered to be persons.

In 1971, Judith Thomson gave a completely different pro-choice argument from the classic liberal one, in which she maintained that even if the personhood of the fetus were granted, for the sake of the argument, this would not settle the morality of abortion because the fetus’s right to life does not necessarily give it a right to use the pregnant woman’s body. No one, Thomson says, has the right to use your body unless you give him permission—not even if he needs it for life itself. At least in the case of rape, the pregnant woman has not given the fetus the right to use her body. (Thus, Thomson’s argument, somewhat ironically for an article entitled “A Defense of Abortion,” provides those who are generally anti-choice with a rationale for making an exception in the case of rape, as do many pro-lifers—though not the Catholic Church.) Thomson maintains that whether a woman has a moral obligation to allow a fetus to remain in her body is a separate question from whether the fetus is a person with a right to life, and depends instead on the amount of sacrifice or burden it imposes on her.

In 2003, Margaret Little argued that while abortion is not murder, neither is it necessarily moral. A pregnant woman and her fetus are not strangers; she is biologically its mother which provides her with some reason to protect its life. However, she may have duties of care to others, such as her existing children, which would be more difficult to fulfill if she has another child. The typical abortion patient is already a mother, single, and low-income or poor. Although Little does not regard the fetus as a person, it is a “burgeoning human life,” and as such is worthy of respect. But abortion does not necessarily conflict with respect for human life. Many women regard bringing a child into the world when they are not able to care for it properly as itself disrespectful of human life.

The moderate, or gradualist, agrees with the classic liberal that an early fetus, much less a one-celled zygote, is not a person, but agrees with the conservative that the late-gestation fetus merits some moral concern because it is virtually identical to a born infant. Thus, the moderate thinks that early abortions are morally better than late ones and that the reasons for having one should be stronger as the pregnancy progresses. A reason that might justify an early abortion, such as not wanting to become a mother, would not justify an abortion in the seventh month to the moderate.

Fetal Development Timeline (pdf)

The Legal Perspective

In Roe v. Wade , the Supreme Court based its finding of a woman’s constitutional right to abortion prior to fetal viability on two factors: the legal status of the fetus and the woman’s right to privacy. Concluding that outside of abortion law, the unborn had never been treated as full legal persons, the Court then looked to see if there were any state interests compelling enough to override a woman’s right to make this momentous personal decision for herself. It decided that there were none at all in the first trimester of pregnancy. In the second trimester, the state’s interest in protecting maternal health allows for some restrictions, so long as these are actually related to maternal health and not the protection of the life of the fetus. The state’s interest in protecting potential life becomes “compelling,” and trumps the woman’s right to privacy only after the fetus becomes viable, which in 1973 was somewhere between 24 and 28 weeks. Today, some premature infants are being saved as early as 22 weeks. However, it appears that, absent development of an artificial placenta, 22 weeks represents an absolute lower limit on viability. After viability, states may prohibit abortion altogether if they choose, unless continuing the pregnancy would threaten the woman’s life or health.

Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992) pitted the Justices who wanted to reverse Roe against those who wished to preserve it. Neither side prevailed and the result was a compromise written by Justices O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter. It upheld Roe’s central finding, that women have a constitutionally protected right to choose abortion, prior to viability, while rejecting the trimester framework. Casey held that the State’s profound interest in protecting potential life existed at all stages of pregnancy, not just after viability. States may enact procedures and rules reflecting its preference for childbirth over abortion, so long as these rules and procedures do not constitute an “undue burden” on the woman’s choice.

The Court interpreted the undue burden standard as permitting a requirement that required doctors to provide information about the abortion procedure, the relative risks of abortion and childbirth, embryonic and fetal development, and available resources should the woman choose to carry to term, provided the information given to the woman is truthful and not misleading. This qualification has not always been followed. In several states, doctors are required to tell women seeking abortions that having an abortion increases their risk of breast cancer. While not exactly a lie, this is certainly misleading. Having a full term pregnancy can reduce the risk of breast cancer, but having an abortion does not increase a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer. The Court also upheld a waiting period of 24 hours, as its intent is to make the abortion decision more informed and deliberate. Yet the actual effect of waiting periods is often to make abortion access much more difficult, especially in places where women have to travel long distances to find an abortion provider.

After attempts to overturn Roe failed, a new strategy of restricting abortions was developed. This strategy included outlawing particular methods of abortion, such as partial-birth abortion, imposing time limits based on claims of fetal sentience, and imposing restrictions on clinics and doctors who perform abortions in the name of protecting maternal health.

Fetal Sentience

In 2010, Nebraska banned all abortion after 20 weeks, on the ground that the fetus at that stage can feel pain. Subsequently, more than a third of states passed similar laws. In 2015, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act passed the House of Representatives; the motion to consider the bill in the Senate was withdrawn. The bill prohibited a physician from performing an abortion after 20 weeks, except where necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman (excluding psychological or emotional conditions) or in cases of rape or incest against a minor.

Are 20-week old fetuses sentient? This claim is rejected by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which says it knows of no legitimate scientific information that supports the claim that a 20-week old fetus can feel pain. Other researchers think that while we do not know when fetuses become sentient, it might occur as early as 17 weeks. Utah became the first state to require doctors to give anesthesia to women having an abortion at 20 weeks or later. The law, which went into effect in May 2016, would not apply to women having abortions needed to save their lives, or in cases of rape or incest. An obstetrician-gynecologist in Utah, who spends half of a Saturday each month in an abortion clinic, protested, “You’re asking me to invent a procedure that doesn’t have any research to back it up. You want me to experiment on my patients.”

Protecting Women’s Health

Casey allowed states to restrict abortions based on a concern for women’s health, so long as the restrictions did not impose an undue burden on the choice. A key issue raised by the Supreme Court case Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, decided in 2016, was how judges should evaluate such health-justified restrictions. The case concerned a 2013 Texas law that required any physician performing an abortion to have admitting privileges at a hospital not further than 30 miles from the abortion facility, and required any abortion facility to meet the minimum standards for ambulatory surgical centers. The District Court said that the law was unconstitutional because of its impact on access to abortion in Texas. Many abortion facilities would be unable to meet these requirements and would be forced to close, thereby severely limiting access to abortion. Moreover, the law’s provisions were unnecessary to protect women’s health. Abortion is an extremely safe medical procedure with very low rates of complications and virtually no deaths. In fact, although childbirth is 14 times more likely than abortion to result in death, Texas law allows a midwife to oversee childbirth in the patient’s own home. Thus, the new law was a solution to which there was no problem.

The Fifth Circuit reversed the District Court decision. One of its more startling claims was that states are entitled to impose health-justified restrictions, which are not subject to judicial review. In a 5-3 decision, the Supreme Court roundly rejected this claim. Writing for the majority, Justice Breyer said, “. . . the Court, when determining the constitutionality of laws regulating abortion procedures, has placed considerable weight upon evidence and argument presented in judicial procedures.” In other words, states may not simply assert that the restrictions are necessary, but must have factual evidence to show that they are. Moreover, the Court has an independent constitutional duty to review factual findings where constitutional rights are at stake.

Despite new restrictions on abortion, the core principle of  Roe  and  Casey– that the right to abortion is protected by the Constitution — was upheld. But that was soon to change.

The Change in the Composition of the Supreme Court

Between 1991 and 2020, five Justices openly hostile to abortion (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Barrett) were appointed to the Court, making the 6-3 decision to reverse Roe possible.

The change in the Court’s composition emboldened several states to pass abortion bans much earlier than viability. One of the most restrictive, signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott in May  2021, prohibits abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, usually after six weeks of pregnancy. About a year later, Oklahoma adopted a similar restriction and made illegal abortion a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. A bill introduced in Louisiana (House Bill 813) in May 2022 allowed criminal charges for murder to be brought against those who perform or have abortions. Its sponsor, Republican Danny McCormick, justified the bill by saying, “it is actually very simple: Abortion is murder.” Louisiana Right to Life did not support the bill, since their policy is that “abortion-vulnerable women” should not be treated as criminals. The group also called the bill unnecessary since Louisiana already had a trigger law that would outlaw abortion, except when necessary to save the life of the mother, if Roe were overturned. An amended version of HB 813, which removed the language about charging women having abortions with murder and exempted birth control from being outlawed, did pass the House.

Overturning Roe and Casey

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health (June 2022) .  The case concerned a Mississippi law banning all abortions after 15 weeks gestational age except in medical emergencies and in the case of severe fetal abnormality. Characterizing the decisions in Roe and Casey as “egregiously wrong,” the majority held that:

“. . . Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely — the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”

With the overturning of Roe and Casey , the matter of abortion has been returned to the states. Most abortions are banned in 14 states, while protected by state law or constitution in 21 states. (For updates, see Kaiser Health News Abortion Policy Tracker .) Abortion providers and advocates have challenged abortion bans in many states as violating the state constitution or another state law.

In his concurrence, Chief Justice Roberts said that while he agreed with the majority’s conclusion to uphold Mississippi’s law, he would have preferred a narrower approach based on the principle of judicial restraint. Instead of “repudiating a constitutional right we have not only previously recognized, but also expressly reaffirmed applying the doctrine of stare decisis “, the Court could simply have rejected viability as the point at which the state’s interest in protecting potential life outweighed the woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy, and upheld Mississippi’s right to ban abortions after 15 weeks. The majority rejected this approach, in part because it “would only put off the day when we would be forced to confront the question we now decide. The turmoil wrought by Roe and Casey would be prolonged. It is far better–for this Court and the country–to face up to the real issue without further delay.”

Abortion After Dobbs

The claim that Dobbs will end the turmoil over abortion is dubious. Abortion rights activists have challenged trigger bans in a dozen states. Some have already been rejected by judges, but other cases continue. Most of the legal challenges nationwide seek to establish that state constitutions protect a right to abortion. President Biden has signed an executive order designed to ensure access to abortion medication and emergency contraception, leaving the details up to the secretary of health and human services.

Court cases have challenged the availability of medication abortion . Another issue likely to result in lawsuits is whether states can prevent their residents from traveling to other states to have abortions. Nor are legal battles necessarily limited to the states. Some anti-abortion activists are pushing for a federal ban on abortion, while some pro-choice advocates are pushing for a federal law to protect the right to abortion. Neither side has the 60 votes necessary, but that could change in the future.

The Supreme Court expressly noted that its opinion “is not based on any view about if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth.” That leaves open the question whether states may confer legal personhood on embryos. May they punish women who have abortions under their homicide statutes, even executing them in death penalty states?

The extreme conservative position, taken by the official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, regards even abortions necessary to save the life of the pregnant woman as illicit, since it is forbidden to kill one innocent human being in order to save the life of another. As of July 2022, all of the state anti-abortion laws and proposed laws make an exception for “medical emergencies,” but nothing in Dobbs requires states to make this exception. Moreover, the determination of what counts as a medical emergency can be extremely subjective. A pregnant woman may develop a condition that might be, but is not definitely, life-threatening. May a doctor perform an abortion in that case? Five women in Texas have filed a lawsuit saying that they were denied medically necessary abortions. Joined by two ob-gyns, they are seeking to clarify when abortion is permissible under state law.

Questions abound. How close to death must a woman be for doctors to act? Will doctors be willing to take the risk of possible jail time if they make a call that is later questioned?

Complications can arise in any pregnancy, but the inability to get an abortion for medical reasons is likely to impose particular burdens on pregnant patients with chronic illnesses and disabilities, including psychiatric conditions, diabetes, and heart conditions. Pregnancy may take years off their lives, but this would not be enough for them to get an abortion in states that provide an exemption only in the case of a “medical emergency” that “necessitate[s] the immediate performance or inducement of an abortion.”

Thus, Dobbs is likely to have a deleterious impact on the ability of doctors to care properly for their pregnant patients, as well as for some women who are not pregnant. The AMA condemned the decision as “an egregious allowance of government intrusion into the medical examination room, a direct attack on the practice of medicine and the patient-physician relationship, and a brazen violation of patients’ rights to evidence-based reproductive health services.” In the weeks after the Dobbs decision, there were reports of profound changes in other medical care, including for ectopic pregnancies and for women with lupus, which is treated with a medicine that can cause miscarriage.

There are no exceptions for pregnancies that result from rape or incest in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, or Texas. The rationale is that it is unjust to end a pregnancy because its father is a rapist. Those who favor exceptions for rape and incest regard it as equally unjust to force women to continue a pregnancy for which they have no responsibility.

The Impact of Dobbs Beyond Abortion

The loss of abortion rights is real and of great concern to many Americans, not only because of the impact this will have on the lives of women and their families, but also because a rejection of the constitutional right to privacy and substantive due process could have effects beyond abortion. On the face of it, the analysis in Dobbs applies to other rights that the Supreme Court has upheld, including the right of both married and unmarried couples to use contraceptives ( Griswold v. Connecticut , 1965, and Eisenstadt v. Baird , 1972), the right to marry a person of a different race ( Loving v. Virginia , 1967), the right to engage in private, consensual sexual acts ( Lawrence v. Texas , 2003), and the right to marry a person of the same sex ( Obergefell v. Hodges , 2015). None of these rights are mentioned in the Constitution, nor are they deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition. This means, in the words of the dissenters (Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) that “one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.”

The majority insisted that its decision “concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” But if other precedents fail the test for determining constitutional rights provided in Dobbs , why aren’t these cases also wrongly decided?

Same-Sex Marriage

In his separate concurring opinion, Justice Thomas forthrightly accepted this implication, saying, “in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold , Lawrence , and Obergefell .” Thomas, unsurprisingly, did not mention Loving , perhaps because he assumes that discrimination based on race is prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. The dissenters, however, note that the right to marry someone of a different race was not protected at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment any more than the rights to abortion, contraception, to engage in private, consensual acts, or to marry a person of the same sex.

While anti-miscegenation laws are unlikely to garner much public support, the same may not be true for LGBTQ rights protected by Lawrence and Obergefell . Some far-right Republicans have expressed an interest in ending same-sex marriage . Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has said that he would defend the state’s defunct sodomy law if the Supreme Court were to follow Thomas’s suggestion and revisit Lawrence .

Contraception, IVF

It seems unlikely that there would be much enthusiasm in the states for banning contraceptives in general, although some conservatives might favor rolling back the sexual revolution that stemmed from the Pill. Presumably, that would satisfy the rational-basis test that the Court identified as the standard for abortion restrictions or prohibition. Moreover, some forms of contraception, such as IUDs, that prevent a fertilized egg from implanting, might be prohibited under laws like Oklahoma’s that define persons as human beings from conception onwards.

IVF could also be adversely affected by Dobbs , because of the routine practice of discarding embryos. This occurs for two reasons. First, the creation of excess embryos enables fertility doctors to implant only one or two embryos per cycle, and to freeze the remainders for future use. This protects women from having to go through the onerous process of egg retrieval in future pregnancies. Freezing embryos has also facilitated single embryo transfer for good-prognosis patients, which has resulted in fewer twins and higher-multiple births, which are riskier for both mothers and babies than singleton births.

Second, it is now routine in IVF to test embryos for chromosomal defects and to discard affected embryos. This improves the chances for a successful pregnancy since embryos with chromosomal defects are less likely to implant and to miscarry. At this point, embryos created in labs are not explicitly targeted by state laws that ban abortion. Trigger laws in most states are aimed at preventing the termination of pregnancy, not regulating IVF embryos. That could change. A spokeswoman for Students for Life Action, a large national anti-abortion group, says that they are looking at IVF : “Protecting life from the very beginning is our ultimate goal, and in this new legal environment we are researching issues like IVF, especially considering a business model that, by design, ends most of the lives conceived in a lab.”  Ironically, laws intended to prevent the termination of pregnancies might deprive infertile couples from having a successful pregnancy.

On February 16, 2024, the Supreme Court of Alabama held that frozen embryos are children with respect to Alabama’s wrongful-death statutes. Some have claimed that this will disallow the discard of embryos by IVF clinics, but that is not obvious. Wrongful-death suits must demonstrate negligence, not simply causing death. Nevertheless, the implications of the court’s decision are unclear, creating anxiety among IVF providers and patients. The University of Alabama health system is pausing in vitro fertilization treatments while considering the implications of the court’s decision.

Care for Miscarrying Patients

Another area of concern is the medical care given to women with wanted pregnancies who miscarry. In what is known as a “missed miscarriage,” the fetus dies in the womb but is not expelled from the woman’s body. In an “incomplete miscarriage,” not all of the fetal tissue is expelled. These situations can cause infection that poses a threat to the woman’s life. The medical options are waiting and hoping that the woman miscarries naturally or intervening medically with either a surgical procedure (D&C) or abortion medication to remove the fetus or fetal tissue. Because these interventions are also used in abortion procedures, outlawing abortion could have a chilling effect on what doctors are willing to do.

In states with abortion bans, there are reports of doctors declining to perform any procedure that could be seen as an illegal abortion. In some cases, women have had to wait to miscarry, which could take weeks. Not only does this impose added emotional stress on women who have lost a wanted pregnancy, but it could even cost their lives. This happened in Ireland in 2012. Savita Halappanavar, 17 weeks pregnant, was admitted to hospital after a miscarriage was deemed inevitable. When she did not miscarry after her water broke, she discussed having a termination with the attending physician. This was denied because Irish law at the time forbade abortion if a heartbeat was still detectable. While they waited for the fetus’s heart to stop, Savita developed sepsis and died. The case was instrumental in getting abortion legalized in Ireland.

So far, no woman in the U.S. has died as a result of restrictive abortion laws, but some have come close. An ob-gyn in San Antonio, Tx., had to wait until the fetal heartbeat stopped to treat a miscarrying patient who had developed a dangerous womb infection. The delay caused complications which required her to have surgery, lose multiple liters of blood, and be put on a breathing machine. Texas law essentially requires doctors to commit malpractice.

Landmark cases like Quinlan (1976) and Cruzan (1990) relied on a constitutional right of privacy and substantive due process. The rejection by the Court of these principles could threaten well-established rights of patients to refuse life-saving care and to stipulate their wishes in that regard in advance directives.

At this point, it is impossible to predict all of the effects of overturning Roe and Casey . This much is clear: the battle over abortion rights is far from over.

Bonnie Steinbock , PhD, a Hastings Center fellow, is professor emeritus of philosophy at The University at Albany/State University of New York.

• Symposium: Seeking Reproductive Justice in the Next 50 Years. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 51 (Fall 2023): 455.
• Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel, “Casey and the Clinic Closings: When ‘Protecting Health’ Obstructs Choice,” Yale Law Review 125 (2016): 1428-1531.
• Bonnie Steinbock, Life Before Birth: The Moral and Legal Status of Embryos and Fetuses, 2nd edition (Oxford University Press, 2011).
• Ronald Dworkin, “The Court and Abortion: Worse Than You Think,” New York Review of Books, May 31, 2007.
• Margaret Olivia Little, “The Morality of Abortion,” in Christopher Wellman and R.G. Frey, eds., A Companion to Applied Ethics (Blackwell Publishing, 2003).
• David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
• Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford University Press, 2002).
• Susan Dwyer and Joel Feinberg, eds. The Problem of Abortion (Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1996).
• Sidney Callahan and Daniel Callahan, eds. Abortion: Understanding Differences (Plenum, 1984).
• Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (University of California Press, 1984).
• Don Marquis, “Why Abortion Is Immoral,” Journal of Philosophy, April 1984.
• Donald H. Regan, "Rewriting Roe v. Wade." Michigan Law Review, August 1979.
• Mary Anne Warren, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” The Monist, January 1973.
• Judith Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Winter 1971.
• Ethics and Abortion Resources from The Hastings Center
• Bonnie Steinbock, PhD Hastings Center Fellow and professor emeritus of philosophy at The University at Albany/State University of New York [email protected]
• Thomas H. Murray, PhD President Emeritus and Fellow, The Hastings Center [email protected]
• Maggie Little, BPhil, PhD Director, The Kennedy Institute of Ethics; Hastings Center Fellow [email protected]
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Respect for Unborn Human Life: The Church's Constant Teaching

Fact sheet by the usccb committee on pro-life activities.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: "Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law" (No. 2271). 

In response to those who say this teaching   has   changed or is of recent origin, here are the facts:

From earliest times, Christians sharply distinguished themselves from surrounding pagan cultures by rejecting abortion and infanticide.  The earliest widely used documents of Christian teaching and practice after the New Testament in the 1st and 2nd centuries, the   Didache   (Teaching of the Twelve Apostles) and   Letter of Barnabas , condemned both practices, as did early regional and particular Church councils.   

To be sure, knowledge of human embryology was very limited until recent times.  Many Christian thinkers accepted the biological theories of their time, based on the writings of Aristotle (4th century BC) and other philosophers.  Aristotle assumed a process was needed over time to turn the matter from a woman's womb into a being that could receive a specifically human form or soul.  The active formative power for this process was thought to come entirely from the man – the existence of the human ovum (egg), like so much of basic biology, was unknown.   

However, such mistaken biological theories never changed the Church's common conviction that abortion is gravely wrong at every stage.  At the very least, early abortion was seen as attacking a being with a human destiny, being prepared by God to receive an immortal soul (cf. Jeremiah 1:5: "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you").

In the 5th century AD this rejection of abortion at every stage was affirmed by the great bishop-theologian St. Augustine.  He knew of theories about the human soul not being present until some weeks into pregnancy.  Because he used the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, he also thought the ancient Israelites had imposed a more severe penalty for accidentally causing a miscarriage if the fetus was "fully formed" (Exodus 21: 22-23), language not found in any known Hebrew version of this passage.  But he also held that human knowledge of biology was very limited, and he wisely warned against misusing such theories to risk committing homicide.  He added that God has the power to make up all human deficiencies or lack of development in the Resurrection, so we cannot assume that the earliest aborted children will be excluded from enjoying eternal life with God.  

In the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas made extensive use of Aristotle's thought, including his theory that the rational human soul is not present in the first few weeks of pregnancy.  But he also rejected abortion as gravely wrong at every stage, observing that it is a sin "against nature" to reject God's gift of a new life.

During these centuries, theories derived from Aristotle and others influenced the grading of penalties for abortion in Church   law .  Some canonical penalties were more severe for a direct abortion after the stage when the human soul was thought to be present.  However, abortion at all stages continued to be seen as a grave moral evil.   

From the 13th to 19th centuries, some theologians speculated about rare and difficult cases where they thought an abortion before "formation" or "ensoulment" might be morally justified.  But these theories were discussed and then always rejected, as the Church refined and reaffirmed its understanding of abortion as an intrinsically evil act that can never be morally right.

In 1827, with the discovery of the human ovum, the mistaken biology of Aristotle was discredited. Scientists increasingly understood that the union of sperm and egg at conception produces a new living being that is distinct from both mother and father.  Modern genetics demonstrated that this individual is, at the outset, distinctively human, with the inherent and active potential to mature into a human fetus, infant, child and adult.  From 1869 onward the obsolete distinction between the "ensouled" and "unensouled" fetus was permanently removed from canon law on abortion.

Secular laws against abortion were being reformed at the same time and in the same way, based on secular medical experts' realization that "no other doctrine appears to be consonant with reason or physiology but that which admits the embryo to possess vitality from the very moment of conception" (American Medical Association,   Report on Criminal Abortion , 1871).

Thus modern science has not changed the Church's constant teaching against abortion, but has underscored how important and reasonable it is, by confirming that the life of each individual of the human species begins with the earliest embryo.

Given the   scientific   fact that a human life begins at conception, the only moral norm needed to understand the Church's opposition to abortion is the principle that   each and every human life has inherent dignity, and thus must be treated with the respect due to a human person .  This is the foundation for the Church's social doctrine, including its teachings on war, the use of capital punishment, euthanasia, health care, poverty and immigration.  Conversely, to claim that some live human beings do   not   deserve respect or should   not   be treated as "persons" (based on changeable factors such as age, condition, location, or lack of mental or physical abilities) is to deny the very idea of   inherent   human rights.  Such a claim undermines respect for the lives of many vulnerable people before and after birth.

F or more information :  Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,   Declaration on Procured Abortion   (1974), nos. 6-7; John R. Connery, S.J.,   Abortion: The Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective   (1977); Germain Grisez,   Abortion: The Myths, the Realities, and the Arguments   (1970), Chapter IV; U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops,   On Embryonic Stem Cell Research   (2008); Pope John Paul II,   Evangelium Vitae   (1995), nos. 61-2.

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Gun Violence—A Black Feminist Issue: An Excerpt From Roxane Gay’s New Essay, ‘Stand Your Ground’

“in some ways, feminism and gun ownership seem like a good fit. … but guns can be as disempowering as they are empowering.”.

Bold and personal, Roxane Gay unpacks gun culture and gun ownership in America from a Black feminist perspective in her latest work, “Stand Your Ground.” The essay is the capstone to  Roxane Gay &, a curated series of ebooks and audiobooks that lift up other voices , available exclusively on subscription hub Everand. 

In “Stand Your Ground,” Gay writes about power, agency and gun ownership: “I own a gun, but I have more questions than answers,” as she acknowledges the complexity of these issues through Audre Lorde’s famous quote: “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” 

The following is an excerpt from “Stand Your Ground: A Black Feminist Reckoning with America’s Gun Problem” copyright © 2024 by Roxane Gay, used by permission from Everand Originals and available exclusively through Everand .

Too many politicians made no efforts to codify [the right to abortion] federally. They assumed they were standing firmly on solid ground when such was not the case.

I’m a Black feminist, a bad feminist, a woman who believes a more equitable present and future are possible.

I’m not an optimist, but I have seen the change we are capable of when people work together and persist. I have also seen what we lose when we take the ground upon which we stand for granted or we don’t stand our ground firmly enough.

In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4, in Dobbs v. Jackson , that the Constitution does not endow people with a right to abortion. Many Americans were shocked because the right to abortion was the law of the land for nearly 50 years. An entire generation grew up understanding that they could make choices for their bodies without legislative intervention, though in more conservative states, that right was always contingent. And then, in an arbitrary legal decision, a judicial body took that right away from millions of people with uteruses. It happened because too many Americans assumed that the right to abortion was unimpeachable. Too many politicians made no efforts to codify that right federally. They assumed they were standing firmly on solid ground when such was not the case.

It is appalling that women and people with uteruses have lost such a fundamental right to bodily autonomy. And it is not lost on me that women in many states have more rights as gun owners than they do as women. The power to take a life is more constitutionally and culturally valuable than a woman’s right to live freely. I do not know how to reconcile this reality with my feminism.

I have no fondness for guns. They are, in most hands, incredibly destructive. Every year, the number of mass shootings increases. With each new atrocity, the details are more horrifying.

A concert in Vegas. An elementary school in Connecticut. An elementary school in Texas. Staggering numbers of young children, dead before they know what it means to live. A parade in a Chicago suburb. A synagogue. A grocery store. A gay nightclub. A church. Another church. So many high schools. Shopping malls. Movie theaters.

With each successive tragedy, the details become more lurid, haunting, devastating, grim. And with each passing year, it feels more dangerous to spend time in public places, wondering if you are on the precipice of becoming a statistic. 

It has not always been this way. It shouldn’t be this way. It does not need to be this way. 

The power to take a life is more constitutionally and culturally valuable than a woman’s right to live freely. I do not know how to reconcile this reality with my feminism.

There is no single reason for mass shootings, though there are a few common denominators. The vast majority of mass shooters are men. Nearly 60 percent of mass shooters have a history of domestic violence. It feels like we cannot understand or predict mass shootings, that we cannot unravel the tangled threads of violence on a massive scale, but that isn’t necessarily true. And even if these crimes were unpreventable (they aren’t), we could certainly make it far more difficult for mass shooters to have access to the weapons that make their paths of destruction possible.  

In some ways, feminism and gun ownership seem like a good fit.

A lot of feminist rhetoric centers on empowerment— creating opportunities and conditions that allow women to use their power, be treated with respect, have bodily autonomy, live on their own terms. A lot of gun rhetoric is also centered around empowerment—guns as a means of taking back power after trauma or claiming power in the name of self-defense or embracing the power of keeping our families safe.

But feminists must also grapple with the reality that however empowering guns may be, they are used against women at alarming rates—whether women are being threatened, injured or killed by a gun. The statistics are even more dire for Black, Latina and other women of color. Guns can be as disempowering as they are empowering. 

Throughout the trial, and the many months leading up to the trial, Megan Thee Stallion was defamed and discredited for standing her ground and demanding justice.

On a July evening in 2020, rapper Megan Thee Stallion was in Los Angeles, sitting in a car with rapper Tory Lanez outside a party. There was some kind of disagreement that ended with Lanez shooting at Megan Thee Stallion’s feet multiple times, and taunting her, after she got out of the vehicle. Her injuries required surgery and a lengthy recovery.

Hours after the shooting, Lanez left a meandering voicemail for Kelsey Harris, Stallion’s former friend. In the message, he said, “I was just so fucking drunk, nigga, I just didn’t even understand what the fuck was going on, bruh. […] Regardless, that’s not going to make anything right and that’s not going to make my actions right.” Though he didn’t explicitly admit he shot Stallion, the implication of and the regret for his actions were there. 

Two years later, Lanez was found guilty of assault with a firearm, illegal possession of a firearm, and negligent discharge—and sentenced to 10 years in prison. But the damage was done. Throughout the trial, and the many months leading up to the trial, Megan Thee Stallion was defamed and discredited for standing her ground and demanding justice. The severity of her injuries and the aftermath of the crime were doubted and dismissed. Hip-hop journalists, radio hosts and bloggers spread lies and misinformation and came up with all kinds of conspiracy theories to believe anything but the truth—that a Black woman was harmed and deserved justice. Rapper 50 Cent, in social media posts, doubted Stallion’s story, though later apologized. In “Circo Loco,” Canadian rapper Drake said, “This bitch lie ‘bout getting shots, but she still a stallion.” Eminem also had bars for Stallion when, in “Houdini,” he said, “If I was to ask for Megan Thee Stallion, if she would collab with me, would I really have a shot at a feat?”  

These incidents bring Malcolm X’s prophetic words into stark relief: “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.” Culturally sanctioned misogynoir clarifies why addressing gun violence is not just a criminal justice issue—it is very much a Black feminist issue.

Women Rap Back: ‘It’s My Dance and It’s My Body’

The Abolitionist Aesthetics of Patrisse Cullors, Co-Founder of Black Lives Matter

Kamala Harris and the Legacy of Black Women’s Leadership

U.S. democracy is at a dangerous inflection point—from the demise of abortion rights, to a lack of pay equity and parental leave, to skyrocketing maternal mortality, and attacks on trans health. Left unchecked, these crises will lead to wider gaps in political participation and representation. For 50 years, Ms . has been forging feminist journalism—reporting, rebelling and truth-telling from the front-lines, championing the Equal Rights Amendment, and centering the stories of those most impacted. With all that’s at stake for equality, we are redoubling our commitment for the next 50 years. In turn, we need your help, Support Ms . today with a donation—any amount that is meaningful to you . For as little as $5 each month , you’ll receive the print magazine along with our e-newsletters, action alerts, and invitations to Ms . Studios events and podcasts . We are grateful for your loyalty and ferocity .

About Roxane Gay

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• John Reynolds-Wright
• Fourth Year Medical Student, The Medical School, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
• Correspondence to Mr John Reynolds-Wright, The Medical School, University of Sheffield, Beech Hill Road, Sheffield S10 2RX, UK; jjrw1989{at}gmail.com

https://doi.org/10.1136/jfprhc-2012-100427

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Introduction

Access to safe abortion has been labelled as a fundamental human right by the International Women's Health Coalition, who stated that:

A woman should have the choice to carry a pregnancy to term or not;

Abortion services should be part of a comprehensive sexual health programme;

Lack of funding and illegality do not reduce the number of abortions, they only serve to put the woman's health in danger. 1

In the USA, certain states have introduced laws requiring women to listen to fetal heart beat monitors or to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound scan before being permitted to proceed with an abortion, with the thinly-veiled intent to discourage them.

Recently in the UK, MP Nadine Dorries proposed an amendment to abortion legislation that would have prevented abortion providers, such as Marie Stopes International and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, from offering pre-abortion counselling to women on the basis that their advice was ‘not independent’. They would instead be directed to ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centres’ for supposedly independent counselling. However, many of these centres are run and funded by religious groups with prominent anti-abortion agendas. 2

The amendment was withdrawn due both to lack of support and to a national campaign against it. But the motives behind the amendment, and the more extreme pieces of legislation being passed in the USA, call for the arguments of legality, morality and access to be re-evaluated.

Traditional arguments

Against abortion.

A common argument against abortion is that it is equivalent to murder – specifically infanticide – and in this way it is immoral and unjustifiable.

One of the best known philosophical arguments to this effect is that of Don Marquis, who claimed that murder is illegal because …

Funding None.

Competing interests None.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Linked Articles

• Highlights from this issue In this issue British Medical Journal Publishing Group BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health 2013; 39 1-1 Published Online First: 07 Jan 2013. doi: 10.1136/jfprhc-2012-100558

Read the full text or download the PDF:

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Abortion, shingles, extreme heat, and sudden cardiac arrest

By Theresa Gaffney Aug. 14, 2024

Want to stay on top of health news?  Sign up  to get our Morning Rounds newsletter in your inbox.

Good morning! See how I write these newsletter items? Very demure, very mindful. (If you don’t understand what I am referencing here, consider yourself blessedly more offline than me and many of my colleagues.)

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Can scientists improve the odds for surviving sudden cardiac arrest?

It’s the “sudden” in sudden cardiac arrest that makes it so scary — a seemingly healthy person can simply collapse. If they’re lucky, medical help is nearby and can restart their heart before it’s too late. But for decades, only about 10% of people who experience sudden cardiac arrest outside of a hospital have been lucky enough to survive.

There’s bystander CPR and automated external defibrillators. There are implantable cardioverter defibrillators that can shock a heart back to normal within eight to 10 seconds. And of course there are medications for people with heart failure. But none of it is enough.

“It affects a thousand Americans a day,” cardiologist Sumit Chugh told STAT’s Liz Cooney. “But if you look in the community it’s still rare. It’s not like high blood pressure or diabetes. It’s 50 people per 100,000 people.” Read Liz’s deep dive into the confounding condition and how scientists are working both to better understand the risk factors involved and to create better interventions like cell-based therapies.

Most reproductive-age women are worried about abortion access, survey says

One in seven reproductive-age women in the U.S. report that they’ve had an abortion, according to new data from KFF’s nationally representative Women’s Health Survey . Nearly 4,000 women ages 18 to 49 responded to the survey on abortion and reproductive health after the fall of Roe v. Wade. Here are a few takeaways that caught my eye:

• Most reproductive-age women (74%) believe that abortion policies should not be determined at the state level. This is true across political affiliations, with 54% of Republican, 86% of Democrat, and 73% of independent women in agreement.
• More than six in 10 survey respondents are concerned that either they or someone they’re close to would not be able to get an abortion if needed to save one’s life or preserve health.
• The report also looked specifically at Florida and Arizona , where voters may soon see abortion on the ballot. In Florida, only one in five respondents were aware that medication abortion is still legal in the state until the sixth week of pregnancy. In Arizona, just over one in 10 were aware that medication abortion is legal and can be obtained online.
• 17% of respondents in the U.S. reported changing their contraceptive practices as a result of Roe being overturned. This included starting or switching birth control, getting a sterilization procedure, or purchasing emergency pills to have on hand.

How to restore America’s confidence in vaccines

It was only two hours after receiving the second dose of the Covid vaccine that virologist Gregory A. Poland heard a sudden ringing in his ear while driving. “The shock of a sudden loud and high-pitched whistling nearly caused me to veer off the road,” he writes in a First Opinion essay. He’d had intermittent tinnitus before, but never like this. It got even worse after his third dose later that year, and the noise has continued to this day.

As someone who has studied vaccines for 40 years, Poland knows that all types of vaccines have saved millions upon millions of lives. But some number of people like him have also suffered unexpected effects on their health and well-being. Poland argues that understanding how this happens would not only be a first step toward reducing these rare risks, but it would help combat vaccine hesitancy. Read more .

Is ultra-processed food the tobacco of the 21st century?

Oncologist Nicholas DeVito says yes. Ultra-processed foods — which include packaged meals, snacks, candies, sodas and more — are more relevant to his work treating cancer than one might think. An estimated 40% of cancers in the U.S. are caused by risk factors that can be changed like using tobacco products, a sedentary lifestyle, and consuming ultra-processed food.

In a First Opinion essay, DeVito argues that, just like tobacco before it, ultra-processed foods have flooded onto our shelves due to a lack of regulation. And just like increased tobacco use over the 20th century was linked to lung cancer, these foods have emerged as a potential cause for gastrointestinal cancers. Read more .

Airport workers rally to protest dangerous heat conditions

Airport workers in Charlotte, N.C. and Phoenix held rallies yesterday to demand better workplace protections from extreme heat, including easy access to water, cool break rooms, and training on heat illness. Last summer was the hottest the northern hemisphere has seen in 2,000 years , and this year is already predicted to break records again.

“Workers like me have been risking our lives every day in brutal conditions, and we’re quite literally sick and tired,” Cecilia Ortiz, a passenger service agent at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, said in a press release.

Extreme heat can have serious detrimental health effects , especially when it comes to cardiovascular health . Earlier this summer, the Biden administration proposed a new rule for the country’s first-ever federal regulations around heat safety at work. The rule would require employers to evaluate heat risk, develop prevention plans for excessive heat, and to ensure workers have access to cool water and paid rest breaks.

Study: Getting shingles could increase risk of cognitive decline

It’s likely that you and just about everybody you know have either had chickenpox before or received the vaccine. Shingles is a reactivation of the same virus that causes chickenpox, which stays in your body, and can cause painful rashes. But the infection might be more than an unpleasant experience. A study published yesterday in Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy found that getting shingles was associated with about 20% higher long-term risk for subjective cognitive decline (when someone’s memory gets worse or they are getting confused more often).

Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital analyzed survey data from almost 150,000 people to assess the connection. It’s the first large study to look at shingles and the risk of subjective cognitive decline, the authors note. While previous research has shown mixed evidence on a link between shingles and dementia, the authors write that this may be due to study designs that used insurance claims or administrative diagnostic data, which only includes people who received medical attention for their shingles.

The authors don’t know exactly how the virus might be linked to cognition. The study also found that men (not women) who had gotten shingles and carry the APOE4 gene, a risk factor for dementia, had an even higher risk.

The Biden Cancer Moonshot’s next target is surgery

The president and first lady spoke in New Orleans at Tulane University in New Orleans yesterday, announcing $150 million dollars in ARPA-H awards to develop technologies that will improve cancer surgeries. Tulane University is one of the first eight grantees to receive one of these awards, and the funding will go towards the creation of methods that will allow surgeons to determine if a cancer surgery successfully removed all of a tumor in real time.

“There are no good technologies that can help determine during the surgery whether it has been successful, but rather days later when it is already too late to change the surgery,” J. Quincy Brown, a biomedical engineer at Tulane University, said in the moonshot announcement in New Orleans. “We should at least be able to give surgeons and patients the peace of mind and positive health benefits of a successful surgery every time. That’s the goal our team is working towards.”

This program will also require the new technology to be deployed in rural hospitals at the end of the project, Brown added during his remarks. “So, we can’t build a million-dollar device,” he said.

—  Angus Chen

What we’re reading

Hot summer threatens efficacy of mail-order medications, New York Times

California bill would require state review of private equity deals in health care, KFF Health News

• The politics of mifepristone in the 2024 election, STAT
• Her son died of an overdose in his dorm room. Where was the Narcan? NPR
• Illumina lays out plan to boost growth by helping scientists interpret sequencing data, STAT
• Following national funding cuts, ‘July was pure hell’ for abortion funds, Rewire News Group

About the Author Reprints

Theresa gaffney.

Morning Rounds Writer and Podcast Producer

Theresa Gaffney is the lead Morning Rounds writer and a podcast producer at STAT.

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Abortion is legal until 6 weeks in Saint Petersburg, FL

Abortion is legal in Florida, but isn't offered at this health center. To find out where you can get an abortion, check out the resources below or contact us at (727) 898-8199 .

More Resources

Restrictions in florida.

The following abortion restrictions are currently in effect.

Parental Consent

This state requires you to get permission from one parent to have an abortion if you're under 18 years old. Please call to speak to our staff about the steps you need to take to get permission.

Judicial Bypass

You may be able to get a judge's permission to have an abortion without involving your parents. Your local Planned Parenthood health center can help you with that. You can also get support from the  Judicial Bypass Helpline  (by referring you to this website, Planned Parenthood is not providing, or intending to provide, any legal or medical advice). 

Two Trips Required

This state requires you to go to a state directed information appointment in person, wait for 24 hours, and then go back for another appointment for your abortion. This means you must make at least two trips to the health center.

Abortion options

There are two kinds of abortion — the abortion pill and in-clinic abortion . You can find a list of providers for both of these options on abortionfinder.org or go to Plan C to learn more about abortion pills by mail.

Abortion Pill Available up to 11 weeks

Medication abortion, also known as the abortion pill, is a safe and effective way to end a pregnancy up to 11 weeks. You can visit a health center to get the pills, or get them mailed to you in some states.

In-Clinic Abortion Available up to 24 weeks

A safe and effective procedure done at a health center by a nurse or doctor and trained support staff.

Travel and paying for an abortion

If you need to travel out of state for your abortion, you may be feeling overwhelmed. Planning your travel, lodging, and appointment(s) ahead of time can help reduce stress. Bringing along a trusted friend or family member for emotional support can also help.

Paying for an abortion: Find out if your insurance covers abortion by calling your health insurance provider. If not, Abortion funds may be able to help cover some of your costs. You have to book your abortion appointment before you can apply for abortion funds.

Emotional support

Having a range of emotions after an abortion is completely normal. All-Options and Exhale are both non-judgmental and private emotional support resources.

Even if certain services are not available in your area, you still have options to seek care elsewhere.

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This health center supports and welcomes all people regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity or biological sex, including but not limited to lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, questioning, and intersex clients. All services are provided in a respectful and professional manner.

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Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion?

You must join the virtual exhibition queue when you arrive. If capacity has been reached for the day, the queue will close early.

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Saint petersburg.

Ewer and basin (lavabo set)

Probably made at Chisinau Court Workshop

Andrei Nikiforovich Voronikhin

Alexander Danilovich Menshikov (1673–1729)

Unknown Artist, Swiss, Austrian, or German, active Russia ca. 1703–4

Samuel Margas Jr.

The Empress Elizabeth of Russia (1709–1762) on Horseback, Attended by a Page

Attributed to Georg Christoph Grooth

Table snuffbox

Niello scenes after a print entitled Naufrage (Shipwreck) by Jacques de Lajoüe , published in Paris 1736

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) (1694–1778)

Jean Antoine Houdon

Imperial Porcelain Manufactory, St. Petersburg

Cup with cover and saucer

Two bottle coolers

Zacharias Deichman the Elder

Catherine II The Great, Empress of Russia

Jean-Baptiste Nini

Coffee service

Johan Henrik Blom

Tureen with cover

Tureen with cover and stand

Jacques-Nicolas Roettiers

Possibly by Pierre-François-Mathis de Beaulieu (for Jean Georges)

Pair of scallop-shell dishes

Sugar bowl (from a tea service)

Workshop of David Roentgen

Beaker and saucer

David Roentgen and Company in Saint Petersburg

Johann Friedrich Anthing

Drop-front desk (secrétaire à abattant or secrétaire en cabinet)

Attributed to Martin Carlin

Pair of Flintlock Pistols of Empress Catherine the Great (1729–1796)

Johan Adolph Grecke

Gardner Manufactory

Center table

Imperial Armory, Tula (south of Moscow), Russia

Female Shaman

Pair of vases

Nikolai Stepanovich Vereshchagin

Jugate busts of Czarevitch Paul and Maria Feodorovna of Russia

James Tassie

Wolfram Koeppe Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2003

The Birth of Saint Petersburg Russia, or “Muscovy” as it was often called, had rarely been considered a part of Europe before the reign of Czar Peter I (Piotr Alexeievich), known as Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725). His supremacy marked the beginning of the country’s “Westernization,” whereby the political, economic, and cultural norms of the western European monarchies would become the basis for “civilizing” Russia. A radical transformation was needed to launch Russia into the modern world, a transformation later called the Petrine Revolution. The young czar, feeling oppressed by the medieval traditions and ecclesiastical patriarchy of seventeenth-century Moscow, wanted to Westernize Russia in a hurry, defying the sluggish pace of history.

Saint Petersburg was born on May 16, 1703 (May 5 by the old Julian Russian calendar). On that day, on a small island on the north bank of the Neva River, Peter cut two pieces of turf and placed them cross-wise. The setting was inauspicious. The area was a swamp that remained frozen from early November to March, with an annual average of 104 days of rain and 74 days of snow. The army, under the command of Alexander Menshikov ( 1996.7 ), had conquered the region shortly before. To show his gratitude, the czar later appointed Menshikov the first governor-general of Saint Petersburg. The fortification of the territory kept the Swedish enemy at bay and secured for Russia permanent access to the Baltic Sea. The partially ice-free harbor would be crucial to further economic development. All buildings on the site were erected on wooden poles driven into the marshy, unstable ground. Stones were a rare commodity in Russia, and about as valuable as precious metals.

The Dutch name “Piterburkh” (later changed to the German version, “Petersburg”) embodied the czar’s fascination with Holland and its small-scale urban architecture. He disliked patriarchal court ceremony and felt at ease in the bourgeois domestic life that he experienced during his travels throughout Europe on “the Great Embassy” (1697–98). However, the primary purpose of this voyage was to acquire firsthand knowledge of shipbuilding—his personal passion—and to learn about progressive techniques and Western ideas.

The victory over the Swedish army at Poltava in June 1709 elevated Russia to the rank of a European power, no longer to be ignored. Peter triumphed: “Now with God’s help the final stone in the foundation of Saint Petersburg has been laid.” By 1717, the city’s population of about 8,000 had tripled, and grew to around 40,000 by the time of Peter’s death in 1725. Saint Petersburg had become the commercial, industrial, administrative, and residential “metropolis” of Russia. By the 1790s, it had surpassed Moscow as the empire’s largest urban vicinity and was hailed as the “Venice of the North,” an allusion to the waterway system around the local “Grand Canal,” the Neva River.

Peter the Great’s Successors The short reign of Peter’s second wife, Empress Catherine I (r. 1725–27), who depended on her long-time favorite Menshikov, saw the reinstatement of the luxurious habits of the former imperial household. The archaic and ostentatious court display in the Byzantine tradition  that Peter had so despised was now to be restored under the pretext of glorifying his legacy. Enormous sums of money were lavished on foreign luxury items, demonstrating the court’s new international status and its observance of western European manners ( 68.141.133 ).

During the reigns of Empress Anna Ioannovna (r. 1730–40), niece of Peter I ( 1982.60.330a,b ), and her successor Elizabeth (Elizaveta Petrovna, r. 1741–62; 1978.554.2 ), Peter’s daughter, Saint Petersburg was transformed into a Baroque extravaganza through the talents of architect Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli (1700–1771) and other Western and Russian artisans. Foreign powers began to recognize Russia’s importance and competed for closer diplomatic relations. Foreign immigrants increased much faster than the local population, as scholars, craftsmen, artisans, and specialists of all kinds flocked to the country, and especially to Saint Petersburg ( 65.47 ; 1982.60.172,.173 ; 1995.327 ).

Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96) In a coup d’état assisted by the five Orloff brothers ( 33.165.2a–c ; 48.187.386,.387 ), Catherine II overthrew her husband, the ill-fated Peter III (r. 1762) and became empress. Catherine saw herself as the political heir of Peter the Great. A German-born princess of Anhalt-Zerbst who, after her marriage, became more Russian than any native, Catherine aimed at completing Peter’s legacy ( 52.189.11 ; 48.73.1 ). Having lived in isolation in the shadow of Elizabeth I since her marriage to the grand duke in 1745, the time had come to satisfy her thirst for life and her insatiable quest for culture and international recognition. An admirer of the Enlightenment and devoted aficionada of Voltaire’s writings, Catherine stimulated his cult in Russia ( 1972.61 ). In response, the French philosopher dedicated a poem to the czarina; her reply, dated October 15, 1763, initiated a correspondence that influenced the empress on many matters until Voltaire’s death in 1778. The hothouse cultural climate of Saint Petersburg during Catherine’s reign can be compared to the artistic and intellectual ferment in New York City in the second half of the twentieth century.

Catherine’s desire to enhance her fame and her claim to the throne was immortalized by her own witty play on words in Latin: “Petro Primo / Catharina Secunda” (To Peter the First / from Catherine the Second). This she had inscribed on the vast lump of granite in the form of a wave supporting the Bronze Horseman on the banks of the Neva in front of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. This triple-lifesize equestrian figure of Peter the Great took the French sculptor Falconet twelve years to complete, until it was finally cast—after three attempts—in 1782.

Catherine had military expansion plans for Russia and a cultural vision for its capital Saint Petersburg. Above all, she knew how to attract devoted supporters. Only nine days after the overthrow of her husband, Catherine wrote to Denis Diderot, offering to print his famous Encyclopédie , which had been banned in France. Catherine recognized the power of art to demonstrate political and social maturity. She acquired entire collections of painting ( Watteau , for example), sculpture, and objects. The empress avoided anything that could be called mediocre or small. With the help of sophisticated advisors, such as Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn, her ambassador in Paris, Denis Diderot, Falconet, and the illustrious Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, the empress assembled the core of today’s State Hermitage Museum. Catherine favored luxury goods from all over Europe ( 33.165.2a–c ; 48.187.386,.387 ; 17.190.1158 ). She commissioned Sèvres porcelain and Wedgwood pottery as well as hundreds of pieces of ingeniously conceived furniture from the German manufactory of David Roentgen in Neuwied ( 48.73.1 ). Furthermore, she encouraged and supported Russian enterprises and craftsmen, like local silversmiths ( 47.51.1–.5 ; 1981.367.1,.2 ) and the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory ( 1982.60.171 ; 1982.60.177,.178 ; 1982.60.175 ), as well as privately owned manufactories ( 1982.60.158 ). Catherine especially liked the sparkling decorative products of the Tula armory steel workshop ( 2002.115 ), genuine Russian art forms with a fairy-tale-like appearance, and in 1775 merged her large collection of Tula objects with the imperial crown jewels in a newly constructed gallery at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg.

Catherine’s son and successor Paul I (Pavel Petrovich, r. 1796–1801) disliked his mother and her aesthetic sensibility ( 1998.13.1,.2 ). As grand duke, he had spent most of his time with his second wife Maria Feodorovna ( 1999.525 ) outside of Saint Petersburg, in Gatchina Palace and Pavlovsk Palace. These they transformed into the finest Neoclassical architectural gems in Europe ( 1976.155.110 ; 2002.115 ).

Koeppe, Wolfram. “Saint Petersburg.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stpt/hd_stpt.htm (October 2003)

Further Reading

Cracraft, James. The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Koeppe, Wolfram, and Marina Nudel. "An Unsuspected Bust of Alexander Menshikov." Metropolitan Museum Journal 35 (2000), pp. 161–77.

Shvidkovsky, Dmitri, and Alexander Orloff. St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars . New York: Abbeville, 1995.

Additional Essays by Wolfram Koeppe

• Koeppe, Wolfram. “ Abraham and David Roentgen .” (June 2013)
• Koeppe, Wolfram. “ Hungarian Silver .” (February 2016)
• Koeppe, Wolfram. “ Collecting for the Kunstkammer .” (October 2002)

Related Essays

• Byzantium (ca. 330–1453)
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• Abraham and David Roentgen
• Antoine Watteau (1684–1721)
• The Decoration of Arms and Armor
• East and West: Chinese Export Porcelain
• Edward Lycett (1833–1910)
• Empire Style, 1800–1815
• European Tapestry Production and Patronage, 1600–1800
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• James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903)
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• The Neoclassical Temple
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List of Rulers

• List of Rulers of Europe
• Central Europe (including Germany), 1600–1800 A.D.
• Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, 1600–1800 A.D.
• France, 1600–1800 A.D.
• Iran, 1600–1800 A.D.
• Low Countries, 1600–1800 A.D.
• 17th Century A.D.
• 18th Century A.D.
• Architecture
• Baroque Art
• Eastern Europe
• French Literature / Poetry
• Gilt Silver
• Scandinavia

Artist or Maker

• Anthing, Johann Friedrich
• Beaulieu, Pierre-François-Mathis de
• Blom, Johan Henrik
• Bouillat, Edme François, I
• Carlin, Martin
• Chisinau Court Workshop
• Deichman, Zacharias, the Elder
• Feodorovna, Maria
• Gardner Factory
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• Houdon, Jean Antoine
• Imperial Armory, Tula
• Imperial Porcelain Manufactory
• Lajoüe, Jacques de
• Margas, Samuel, Jr.
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Online Features

• 82nd & Fifth: “Curls” by Wolfram Koeppe

Legalized Abortion and the Public Health: Report of a Study (1975)

Chapter: summary and conclusions.

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS The legal status of abortion in the United States became a heightened national issue with the January 1973 rulings by the Supreme Court that severely limited states' rights to control the procedure. The Court's decisions on the historic cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton precluded any state interference with the doctor-patient decision on abortion during the first trimester (three months) of pregnancy. During the second trimester, a state could intervene only to the extent of insisting on safe medical practices "reasonably related to maternal health." And for approximately the final trimester of a pregnancy—what the Court called "the state subsequent to viability" of a fetus—a state could forbid abortion unless medical judgment found it necessary "for the preservation of the life or health of the mother." The rulings crystallized opposition to abortion, led to the intro- duction of national and state legislation to curtail or prohibit it, and generated political pressures for a national debate on the issue. Against this background of concerns about abortion, the Institute of Medicine in 1974 called together a committee to review the existing evidence on the relationship between legalized abortion and the health of the public. The study group was asked to examine the medical risks to women who obtained legal abortions, and to document changes in the risks as legal abortion became more available. Although there have been other publications on particular relationships between abortion and health, the Institute's study is an attempt to enlist scholars, researchers, health practitioners, and concerned lay persons in a more comprehensive analysis of the available medical information on the subject. Ethical issues of abortion are not discussed in this analysis, nor are questions concerning the fetus in abortion. The study group recog- nizes that this approach implies an ethical position with which some may disagree. The emphasis of the study is on the health effects of abortion, not on the alternatives to abortion.

Abortion legislation and practices are important factors in the relationship between abortion and health status. In order to examine legislation and court decisions that have affected the availability of legal abortion in the U.S., the study group classified the laws and practices into three categories: restrictive conditions, under which abortion is prohibited or permitted only to save the pregnant woman's life; moderately restrictive conditions, under which abortion is per- mitted with approval by several physicians, in a wider range of circumstances to preserve the woman's physical or mental health, prevent the birth of a child with severe genetic or congenital defects, or terminate a pregnancy caused by rape or incest; and non-restrictive conditions, under which abortion essentially is available according to the terms of the Supreme Court ruling. Before 1967, all abortion laws in the United States could be classified as restrictive. Easing of restrictions began in 1967 with Colorado, and soon thereafter 12 other states also adopted moderately restrictive legislation to expand the conditions under which therapeutic abortion could be obtained. In 1970, four states (Alaska, Hawaii, New York, and Washington) removed nearly all legal controls on abortion. Non-restrictive conditions have theoretically existed throughout all fifty states since January 22, 1973, the date of the Supreme Court decision. There is evidence that substantial numbers of illegal abortions were obtained in the U.S. when restrictive laws were in force. Although some of the illegal abortions were performed covertly by physicians in medical settings, many were conducted in unsanitary surroundings by unskilled operators or were self-induced. In this report, "illegal abortion" generally refers to those performed by a non-physician or the woman herself. The medical risks associated with the last two types of illegal abortions are patently greater than with the first. A recent analysis of data from the first year of New York's non- restrictive abortion legislation indicates that approximately 70 percent of the abortions obtained legally in New York City would otherwise have been obtained illegally. Replacement of legal for illegal abortions also is reflected in the substantial decline in the number of reported complications and deaths due to other-than-legal abortions since non- restrictive practices began to be implemented in the United States. The number of all known abortion-related deaths declined from 128 in 1970 to 47 in 1973; those deaths specifically attributed to other-than-legal abortions (i.e., both illegal and spontaneous) dropped from 111 to 25 during the same period, with much of that decline attributed to a reduced incidence of illegal abortions. Increased use of effective con- traception may also have played a role in the decline of abortion-related deaths. Methods most frequently used in the United States to induce abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy are suction (vacuum aspiration) or dilatation and curettage (D&C). Abortions in the second trimester are usually performed by replacing part of the amniotic fluid that surrounds

the fetus with a concentrated salt solution (saline abortion), which usually induces labor 24 to 48 hours later. Other second trimester methods are hysterotomy, a surgical entry into the uterus; hysterectomy, which is the removal of the uterus; and, recently, the injection into the uterine cavity of a prostaglandin, a substance that causes muscular contractions that expel the fetus. Statistics on legal abortion are collected for the U.S. government by the Center for Disease Control. CDC's most recent nationwide data are for 1973, the year of the Supreme Court decision. Some of those figures are: — The 615,800 legal abortions reported in 1973 were an increase of approximately 29,000 over the number reported in 1972. These probably are underestimates of the actual number of abortions performed because some states have not yet developed adequate abortion reporting systems. — The abortion ratio (number of abortions per 1,000 live births) increased from 180 in 1972 to 195 in 1973. — More than four out of five abortions were performed in the first trimester, most often by suction or D&C. — Approximately 25 percent of the reported 1973 abortions were obtained outside the woman's home state. In 1972, before the Supreme Court decision, 44 percent of the reported abortions had been obtained outside the home state of the patient, primarily in New York and the District of Columbia. — Approximately one-third of the women obtaining abortions were less than 20 years old, another third were between 20 and 25, and the remaining third over 25 years of age. — In all states where data were available, about 25 percent of the women obtaining abortions were married. — White women obtained 68 percent of all reported abortions, but non-white women had abortion ratios about one-third greater than white women. In 1972, non-white women had abortion rates (abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age) about twice those of whites in three states from which data were available to analyze. A national survey of hospitals, clinics, and physicians conducted in 1974 by The Alan Guttmacher Institute furnished data on the number of abortions performed in the U.S. during 1973, itemized by state and type of provider. A total of 745,400 abortions were reported in the survey, a figure higher than the 615,800 abortions reported in 1973 to CDC. The Guttmacher Institute obtains its data from providers of health services, while CDC gets most of its data from state health departments.

Risks of medical complications associated with legal abortions are difficult to evaluate because of problems of definition and subjective physician judgment. Available information from 66 centers is provided by the Joint Program for the Study of Abortion, undertaken by The Population Council in 1970-1971. The JPSA study surveyed almost 73,000 legal abortions. It used a restricted definition of major complications, which included unintended major surgery, one or more blood transfusions, three or more days of fever, and several other categories involving prolonged illness or permanent impairment. Although this study also collected data on minor complica- tions, such as one day of fever post-operatively, the data on major com- plications are probably more significant. The major complication rates published by the JPSA study and summarized below relate to women who had abortions in local facilities and from whom follow-up information was obtained. — Complications in women not obtaining concurrent sterilization and with no pre-existing medical problems (e.g., diabetes, heart disease, or gynecological problems) occurred 0.6 times per 100 abortions in the first trimester and 2.1 per 100 in the second trimester. — Complications in women not obtaining concurrent sterilization, but having pre-existing problems, occurred 2.0 times per 100 in the first trimester and 6.7 in the second. — Complications in women obtaining concurrent sterilization and not having pre-existing problems occurred 7.2 times per 100 in the first trimester and 8.0 in the second. — Women with both concurrent sterilization and pre-existing problems experienced complications approximately 17 times per 100 abortions regardless of trimester. The relatively high complication rates associated with sterilization in the JPSA study would probably be lower today because new sterilization techniques require minimal surgery and carry lower rates of complications. The frequency of medical complications due to illegal abortions cannot be calculated precisely, but the trend in these complications can be estimated from the number of hospital admissions due to septic and incomplete abortion—two adverse consequences of the illegal procedure.

The number of such admissions in New York City's municipal hospitals declined from 6,524 in 1969 to 3,253 in 1973; most restrictions on legal abortion in New York City were lifted in July of 1970. In Los Angeles, the number of reported hospital admissions for septic abortions declined from 559 in 1969 to 119 in 1971. Other factors, such as an increased use of effective contraception and a decreasing rate of unwanted pregnancies may have contributed to these declines, but it is probable that the introduction of less restrictive abortion legislation was a major factor. There has not been enough experience with legal abortion in the U.S. for conclusions to be drawn about long-term complications, particularly for women obtaining repeated legal abortions. Some studies from abroad suggest that long-term complications may include prematurity, miscarriage, or ectopic pregnancies in future pregnancies, or infertility. But research findings from countries having long experience with legal abortion are inconsistent among studies and the relevance of these data to the U.S. is not known; methods of abortion, medical services, and socio-economic characteristics vary from one country to another. Risks of maternal death associated with legal abortion are low—1.7 deaths per 100,000 first trimester procedures in 1972 and 1973—and less than the risks associated with illegal abortion, full-term pregnancy, and most surgical procedures. The 1973 mortality rate for a full-term pregnancy was 14 deaths per 100,000 live vaginal deliveries; the 1969 rate for cesarean sections was 111 deaths per 100,000 deliveries. For second trimester abortions, the combined 1972-73 mortality ratio was 12.2 deaths per 100,000 abortions. (For comparison, the surgical removal of the tonsils and adenoids had a mortality risk of five deaths per 100,000 operations in 1969). When the mortality risk of legal abortion is examined by length of gestation it becomes apparent that the mortality risks increase not only from the first to the second trimester, but also by each week of ges- tation. For example, during 1972-73, the mortality ratio for legal abortions performed at eight weeks or less was 0.5, and for those performed between nine and 10 weeks was 1.7 deaths per 100,000 legal abortions. At 11 to 12 weeks the mortality ratio increased to 4.2 deaths, and by 16 to 20 weeks, the ratio was more than 17 deaths per 100,000 abortions. Hysterotomy and hysterectomy, methods performed infrequently in both trimesters, had a combined mortality ratio of 61.3 deaths per 100,000 procedures. Some data on the mortality associated with illegal abortion are avail- lable from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and from CDC. In 1961 there were 320 abortion-related deaths reported in the U.S., most of them presumed by the medical profession to be from illegal abortion. By 1973, total reported deaths had declined to 47, of which 16 were specifi- cally attributed to illegal abortions. There has been a steady decline in the mortality rates (number of deaths per 100,000 women aged 15-44) associated with other-than-legal abortion for both white and non-white women, but in 1973 the mortality rate for non-white women (0.29) was almost ten times greater than that reported for white women (0.03).

Psychological effects of legal abortion are difficult to evaluate for reasons that include lack of information on pre-abortion psychological status, ambiguous terminology, and the absence of standardized measurements. The cumulative evidence in recent years indicates that although it may be a stressful experience, abortion is not associated with any detectable increase in the incidence of mental illness. The depression or guilt feelings reported by some women following abortion are generally described as mild and temporary. This experience, however, does not necessarily apply to women with a previous history of psychiatric illness; for them, abortion may be followed by continued or aggravated mental illness. The JPSA survey led to an estimate of the incidence of post-abortion psychosis ranging from 0.2 to 0.4 per 1,000 legal abortions. This is lower than the post-partum psychosis rate of one to two per 1,000 deliveries in the United States. Psychological factors also bear on whether a woman obtains a first or second-trimester abortion. Two studies in particular suggest that women who delay abortion into the later period may have more feelings of ambiva- lence, denial of the pregnancy, or objection on religious grounds, than those obtaining abortions in the first trimester. It is also apparent, however, that some second-trimester abortions result from procedural delays, difficulties in obtaining a pregnancy test, locating appropriate counseling, or arranging and financing the procedure. Diagnosis of severe defects of a fetus well before birth has greatly advanced in the past decade. Developments in the techniques of amniocen- tesis and cell culture have enabled a number of genetic defects and other congenital disorders to be detected in the second trimester of pregnancy. Prenatal diagnosis and the opportunity to terminate an affected pregnancy by a legal abortion may help many women who would have refrained from becoming pregnant or might have given birth to an abnormal child, to bear children unaffected by the disease they fear. Abortion, with or with- out prenatal diagnosis, also can be used in instances where there is reasonable risk that the fetus may be affected by birth defects from non-genetic causes, such as those caused by exposure of the woman to rubella virus infection or x-rays, or by her ingestion of drugs known to damage the fetus. Almost 60 inherited metabolic disorders, such as Tay-Sachs disease, potentially can be diagnosed before birth. More than 20 of these diseases already have been diagnosed with reasonaable accuracy by means of amniocentesis and other procedures. The techniques also can be used to identify a fetus with abnormal chromosomes, as in Down's syndrome (mongolism), and to discriminate between male and female fetuses, which in such diseases as hemophilia would allow determination of whether the fetus was at risk of being affected or simply at risk of being a hereditary carrier of the disorder.

In North America, amniocentesis was performed in more than 6,000 second-trimester pregnancies between 1967 and 1974. The diagnostic accuracy was close to 100 percent and complication rates were about two percent. Less than 10 percent of the diagnoses disclosed an affected fetus, meaning that the great majority of parents at risk averted an unnecessary abortion and were able to carry an unaffected child to term. There are many limitations to the use of prenatal diagnosis, especially for mass screening purposes. Amniocentesis is a fairly expensive procedure, and relatively few medical personnel are qualified to administer it and carry out the necessary diagnostic tests. Only a small number of genetic disorders can now be identified by means of amniocentesis and many couples still have no way to determine whether or not they are to be the parents of a child with genetic defects. Nevertheless, the avail- ability of a legal abortion expands the options available to a woman who faces a known risk of having an affected child. Abortion as a substitute for contraception is one possibility raised by the adoption of non-restrictive abortion laws. Limited data do not allow definitive conclusions, but they suggest that the introduction of non-restrictive abortion laws in the U.S. has not lead to any documented decline in demand for contraceptive services. Among women who sought abortion and who had previously not used contraception or had used it poorly, there is some evidence that they may have begun to practice contraception because contraceptives were made available to them at the time of their abortion. The health aspects of this issue bear on the higher mortality and mor- bidity associated with abortion as compared with contraceptive use, and on the possibility that if women rely on abortion rather than contraception they may have repeated abortions, for which the risk of long-term compli- cations is not known. The incidence of repeated legal abortions is little known because legal abortion has only been widely available in the U.S. for a few years. Data from New York City indicate that during the first two years of non-restrictive laws 2.45 percent of the abortions obtained by residents were repeat procedures. If those two years are divided into six-month periods, repeated legal abortions as a percent of the total rose from 0.01 percent in the first period to 6.02 percent in the last. Part of this increase is attributable to a statistical fact: the longer non-restrictive laws are in effect, the greater the number of women eligible to have repeated legal abortions. Perhaps, too, the reporting system has improved. In any case, some low incidence of repeated abortions is to be expected because none of the current contraceptive methods is completely failureproof, nor are they likely to be used with maximum care on all occasions.

8 A recent study has suggested that one additional factor contributing to the incidence of repeated abortions is that abortion facilities may not routinely provide contraceptive services at the time of the procedure. This is of concern because of recent evidence that ovulation usually oc- curs within five weeks and perhaps as early as 10 days after an abortion. The conclusions of the study group: — Many women will seek to terminate an unwanted pregnancy by abortion whether it is legal or not. Although the mortality and morbidity . associated with illegal abortion cannot be fully measured, they are clearly greater than the risks associated with legal abortion. Evidence suggests that legislation and practices that permit women to obtain abortions in proper medical surroundings will lead to fewer deaths and a lower rate of medical complications than restrictive legislation and practices. —• The substantial differences between the mortality and morbidity associated with legal abortion in the first and second trimesters suggest that laws, medical practices, and educational programs should enable and encourage women who have chosen abortion to obtain it in the first three months of pregnancy. — More research is needed on the consequences of abortion on health status. Of highest priority are investigations of long-term medical complications, particularly after multiple abortions the effects of abortion and denied abortion on the mental health and social welfare of individuals and families the factors of motivation, behavior, and access associated with contraceptive use and the choice of abortion.

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For about two and a half minutes, at least five Pennsylvania law enforcement officers converged around the warehouse where a gunman had clambered onto a roof near a rally held by former President Donald J. Trump, struggling to reach the attacker before he shot at Mr. Trump, newly released police videos and a social media video show.

The body-cam and dashcam footage, paired with an eyewitness video posted on YouTube, provide new insight into the presence of and the response by Pennsylvania law enforcement at the building where the gunman, Thomas Crooks, was positioned. They reveal for the first time the critical moments — starting around 6:08 p.m. — when officers establish Mr. Crooks’s location, frantically try to find a way to get onto the roof and determine that he is armed. By around 6:11, Mr. Crooks opens fire.

Before the release of the videos, the exact movements of nearby law enforcement officers — and the actions they took to address a newly identified threat — were unclear. Testimony from state police and Secret Service officials provided some details, but the footage obtained by The New York Times through a public records request gives the first second-by-second retelling from the perspectives of two of the officers near the gunman at the time of the shooting.

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The footage also raises more questions as to why the Secret Service failed to remove Mr. Trump from the stage in Butler, Pa., on July 13, while local law enforcement officers were scrambling to get to Mr. Crooks, even if they weren’t yet aware that he had a firearm.

The footage analyzed by The Times includes 12 videos released on Thursday by the Butler Township Police Department, showing at least three Butler officers and one Pennsylvania state trooper focused on the roof from where Mr. Crooks fired. Eyewitness footage previously published on YouTube shows that a fifth law enforcement officer was also responding in the same area.

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