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WARNING: Abortions Deadly DIY Past Could Soon Become Its Future
On Election Day, the most-searched issue on Google was abortion. According to the Washington Post, searches for “Trump on abortion” rose by more than 4,000 percent in the late afternoon of November 8. Perhaps these searchers were unclear on the position of the candidate who in his pre-political life had supported Planned Parenthood but during the campaign suggested that women should be punished for having illegal abortions and in the final debate talked about abortion providers who “rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby.” Or perhaps the frantic last-minute searching was a manifestation of collective anxiety about what would become an early flash point in the Trump administration—and a first test of whether much of the social progress of the past 40 years can be undone over the next four.
Any wishful thinking that President-elect Donald Trump might have just been pandering to Evangelical voters with his anti-choice rhetoric during the campaign seems downright fanciful at this point. He has since surrounded himself with—and appointed to power — ferocious opponents of both abortion rights and contraceptive access, starting with his vice-president, Mike Pence, who passed some of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws as governor of Indiana and, in Congress, co-sponsored so-called personhood legislation that defines life as beginning at conception and would thus make several forms of birth control illegal. Tom Price, Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has supported a nationwide ban on abortion after 20 weeks and is a proponent of so-called conscience clauses that would permit doctors and insurance companies to refuse to provide health-care services they don’t personally believe in. Trump’s attorney-general pick, Jeff Sessions, has voted to ban Health and Human Services grants to organizations that perform abortions and against a bill to reduce teen pregnancy through sex education and contraceptive access. Katy Talento, recently chosen by Trump as a health-care policy adviser, has written (falsely) that hormonal contraception causes miscarriage, cancer, and infertility, and called the idea of making birth control available over the counter tantamount to putting “dangerous, carcinogenic chemicals in the candy aisle at CVS.”
In September, Trump himself wrote a letter to supporters promising that if elected, he would sign a nationwide ban on abortions after 20 weeks, defund Planned Parenthood, make permanent the Hyde Amendment — the legislative rider that prevents Americans from using federal insurance programs like Medicaid to pay for abortions — and nominate “pro-life justices” to the Supreme Court. With one Supreme Court seat maddeningly open and three sitting justices over the age of 78, this last promise could have a long-lasting impact: It would take only two appointments to get to a Court that would likely overturn Roe v. Wade.
It’s difficult for many on the left to even wrap their heads around this possibility, which is at such sharp odds with how the country regards the rights of women to control their own reproductive systems. Poll after poll confirms that the vast majority of Americans continue to support legal abortion. A Pew study released the first week in January showed support for Roe at a record high of 69 percent, while a Quinnipiac survey conducted after the election put the percentage of respondents who believe abortion should be available in all circumstances at more than double the number who think it should not be legal in any circumstance. When it comes to contraception, the numbers are even more firmly on the side of reproductive freedom: Gallup found last year that 89 percent of Americans believe that birth control is “morally acceptable,” a higher percentage than believe the same about divorce, premarital sex, or gambling. And Planned Parenthood, one of the country’s largest providers of women’s health care, remains a pretty beloved organization; this summer, an NBC News–Wall Street Journal poll found its popularity to be 19 points higher than Donald Trump’s and 20 points higher than the Republican Party’s.
http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/01/reproductive-rights-abortion-access-in-america.html
Any wishful thinking that President-elect Donald Trump might have just been pandering to Evangelical voters with his anti-choice rhetoric during the campaign seems downright fanciful at this point. He has since surrounded himself with—and appointed to power — ferocious opponents of both abortion rights and contraceptive access, starting with his vice-president, Mike Pence, who passed some of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws as governor of Indiana and, in Congress, co-sponsored so-called personhood legislation that defines life as beginning at conception and would thus make several forms of birth control illegal. Tom Price, Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has supported a nationwide ban on abortion after 20 weeks and is a proponent of so-called conscience clauses that would permit doctors and insurance companies to refuse to provide health-care services they don’t personally believe in. Trump’s attorney-general pick, Jeff Sessions, has voted to ban Health and Human Services grants to organizations that perform abortions and against a bill to reduce teen pregnancy through sex education and contraceptive access. Katy Talento, recently chosen by Trump as a health-care policy adviser, has written (falsely) that hormonal contraception causes miscarriage, cancer, and infertility, and called the idea of making birth control available over the counter tantamount to putting “dangerous, carcinogenic chemicals in the candy aisle at CVS.”
In September, Trump himself wrote a letter to supporters promising that if elected, he would sign a nationwide ban on abortions after 20 weeks, defund Planned Parenthood, make permanent the Hyde Amendment — the legislative rider that prevents Americans from using federal insurance programs like Medicaid to pay for abortions — and nominate “pro-life justices” to the Supreme Court. With one Supreme Court seat maddeningly open and three sitting justices over the age of 78, this last promise could have a long-lasting impact: It would take only two appointments to get to a Court that would likely overturn Roe v. Wade.
It’s difficult for many on the left to even wrap their heads around this possibility, which is at such sharp odds with how the country regards the rights of women to control their own reproductive systems. Poll after poll confirms that the vast majority of Americans continue to support legal abortion. A Pew study released the first week in January showed support for Roe at a record high of 69 percent, while a Quinnipiac survey conducted after the election put the percentage of respondents who believe abortion should be available in all circumstances at more than double the number who think it should not be legal in any circumstance. When it comes to contraception, the numbers are even more firmly on the side of reproductive freedom: Gallup found last year that 89 percent of Americans believe that birth control is “morally acceptable,” a higher percentage than believe the same about divorce, premarital sex, or gambling. And Planned Parenthood, one of the country’s largest providers of women’s health care, remains a pretty beloved organization; this summer, an NBC News–Wall Street Journal poll found its popularity to be 19 points higher than Donald Trump’s and 20 points higher than the Republican Party’s.
http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/01/reproductive-rights-abortion-access-in-america.html
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