States that Allow Abortions Up Until Woman’s Due Date With No Restrictions Whatsoever

stfuproaborts:

Alaska
Colorado
Hawaii
Mississippi
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
Oregon
Vermont
West Virginia

Some people were under the idea that the post showing the pregnant woman smoking was not accurate, since abortions can’t be done that far along. Unfortunately, yes they can.

Legality does not translate to accessibility. There are two clinics in states without time limits that actually provide third-trimester abortions, and only four clinics in the entire US that will do so. Physicians in states with time limits can only perform abortions if there is a risk to the life/health of the pregnant person, or if the fetus will not survive or is already dead, so let’s not pretend pregnant people are running out to get elective later-term abortions like they’re having a two-for-one.

• Alaska: None.
• Colorado: The Boulder Abortion Clinic provides a four-day outpatient procedure for abortions past 26 weeks LMP, and can arrange for religious ceremonies, genetic studies, formal autopsy, private cremation or private burial upon request.
• Mississippi: None.
• New Hampshire: None.
• New Jersey: Four clinics provide abortions up to 24 weeks, and one up to 24 weeks and 6 days.
• New Mexico: Southwestern Women’s Options provides abortions past 28 weeks on a case-by-case basis.
• Oregon: The Lovejoy SurgiCenter is in Portland and provides a 3-day outpatient procedure for abortions from 20-24 weeks LMP, and Bours Health Center in Eugene provides abortions up to 23 weeks.
• Vermont: None.
• West Virginia: None.

People don’t wait to get an abortion because they just feel like it. Here are some reasons an abortion may be delayed:

• Denial of pregnancy (especially powerful after rape or incest, or in abusive situations)
• No symptoms of pregnancy
• No recognition of symptoms
• Raising money (look up “chasing the fee”)
• Arranging transportation
• Arranging care for dependents
• Getting time off work (if it’s even possible)
• Waiting periods
• Misinformation and delays by crisis pregnancy centers
• Dealing with the physical and psychological aftermath of rape
• Obtaining parental consent
• Unexpected life changes (losing a job, a home, insurance, a significant other)
• Health concerns in the pregnant person or fetus that don’t show up until later in the pregnancy

I know someone with the name “stfuproaborts” is more likely to plug their ears and jabber loudly over anyone who tries to give them real information, so this is mostly for the rest of you.

(Source: oh-snap-pro-lifers)

bebinn:

bebinn:

I’m currently working on a page that lists nearly every abortion clinic in the United States. This will be posted on the Abortion Assistance Blog. This is Day 3 of work, and I have 18 states left.

I just wanted everyone to know that I am vraiment fatiguée.

Finished New York and North Carolina (47 Planned Parenthoods that provide abortions in New York alone! 47!), then got to North Dakota.

One clinic.

Finished!

The court’s ruling on the Medicaid expansion makes today’s decision somewhat reminiscent of the Arizona immigration ruling – the court has left a depth charge inside its decision.

abaldwin360:

The Medicaid expansion would have offered health insurance coverage to 16 million people. Now states apparently can make up their own minds whether or not to accept the expansion – and that means if Florida, Texas and other big states knock it back, then there will be millions of Americans who will miss out on the benefits of the healthcare reforms.

On the Medicaid expansion: the court has ruled that the government can only offer a carrot in terms of higher funding, but not the stick of taking away all of a state’s Medicaid funding.

States have complained that the expansion costs them money, despite the extra funding they’ll receive. Now they can turn down the expansion, which offers the expansion of coverage to mainly low income people without health insurance.

We’ll need to see some analysis of the consequences of this decision, and which states may decide to snub their noses at the Medicaid expansion.

source

Anonymous asked: does arizona medical from the state-access- cover abortion

Are you asking about AHCCCS, Arizona’s Medicaid agency? It covers abortion services if the abortion is to preserve the life of the pregnant person, in the case of rape or incest, or if the pregnancy poses a non-life-threatening danger to the pregnant person’s mental or physical health.

You can read the details on ACCCHS’s website or on NARAL.

For everyone else, the Guttmacher Institute has newly-updated fact sheets on state policies:

• General fact sheets
• Information on state Medicaid coverage
• Policies restricting insurance coverage of abortion

stfuprolife:

The Geography of Abortion

(data from CDC and Guttmacher/infographic made by [source])

(Source: stfuprolifers)

Buried in a Republican bill to give states more say over health care funds is a provision that could block them from spending their own money on abortions. →

motherjones:

Here’s your morning must-read.

Hey, that’s like the opposite of the purpose of the bill! Funnily enough, it’s about abortion.

walk4choicesea:

Total anti-choice measures enacted in 2011:

• 26 states enacted 69 anti-choice measures in 2011.
• Arizona, Florida, and Kansas enacted the most antichoice legislation in 2011, with five measures each.
• Since 1995, states have enacted 713 anti-choice measures.

Anti-choice measures enacted in 2011 included:

• Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, and Oklahoma enacted pre-viability bans on abortion care after 20 weeks. None of these laws includes an adequate exception to protect women’s health or for cases in which the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest. These laws are clearly designed as a challenge to Roe v. Wade.
• Eight states - Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah, and Virginia - passed abortion-coverage bans. Some of these measures ban coverage of abortion in the state’s health-insurance exchange; others prohibit abortion coverage in the state’s entire private insurance market.
• Seven states enacted laws restricting state funds from going to Planned Parenthood or to any health center that provides abortion care: Indiana, Kansas, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. These attacks took several forms, ranging from a New Hampshire executive-council decision to refuse to honor an existing contract with Planned Parenthood to budget bills that barred Planned Parenthood from receiving any state funds.
• Kansas and Virginia imposed onerous regulations on abortion providers that are intended to shut down all clinics that offer abortion care. In Kansas, providers were given only two weeks to comply with numerous new construction and facilities requirements that are wholly unrelated to patient safety. In Virginia, the state now will regulate first-trimester abortion clinics as a type of hospital. This regulatory scheme includes extensive requirements that are impossible to meet without extensive renovations or new construction.
• Arizona passed a law that removes the charitable tax status of any organization that provides, refers for, or provides coverage of abortion. The measure is so broad that it could sweep in any hospital or non-profit health center that refers for abortion as a standard of care or a non-profit organization that provides its employees with a comprehensive health plan that includes abortion coverage.
• Arizona became the first state in the nation to enact a measure that imposes criminal penalties on doctors who provide abortion care with the knowledge that race or sex is a factor in the woman’s decision.
• South Dakota passed a first-of-its-kind biased-counseling mandate. Of the law’s many onerous provisions, it requires a woman seeking abortion care to submit to an in-person lecture at a so-called crisis pregnancy center, many of which are biased, anti-choice, anticontraception facilities. The law also includes a precedent-setting 72-hour mandatory delay before care. This law has been temporarily enjoined pending the conclusion of ongoing litigation.

Source: http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/government-and-you/state-governments/key-findings-threats-to-choice.html

These new laws restrict the rights of all people who can get pregnant, not just cis women.

walk4choicesea:

Living far from the nearest abortion provider is a problem especially for low-income women. Such women are less likely to have an employer who will give her a day off to travel to the clinic, less likely to get a paid sick day, and less likely to be able to afford to lose even a single day’s wages. She is also less likely to have a car, making it more difficult to get to a distant location, and less likely to have reliable day care for any existing children.

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/04/24/access-to-abortion-clinics-and-the-abortion-rate/

This also applies to those who don’t identify as women, but can still get pregnant.

This is DAY 44 of TEXAS HAVING MANDATORY TRANSVAGINAL ULTRASOUNDS before abortion

keepyourboehneroutofmyuterus:

While Texas is only state currently forcing people to undergo transvaginal ultrasounds, Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, AND VIRGINIA all have forced ultrasounds before an abortion. 

Oklahoma and North Carolina have passed similar laws to the one in Texas but they are not being enforced due to pending court decisions.

Guttmacher’s updated .pdf of what ultrasound laws are passed and in effect in which states.

(Source: keepyourbsoutofmyuterus)

INTERACTIVE MAP: The Most Restrictive Abortion Measures In The States →

prolongedeyecontact:

ThinkProgress has created an interactive map of the most restrictive measures moving through state houses around the country and has broken down the legislation into five categories:

– ULTRASOUND: Requires women to submit to or be offered ultrasounds before undergoing an abortion.

– REFUSAL: Allows health care providers to refuse to perform abortions and other medical procedures they may find morally objectionable.

– PERSONHOOD: Declares that life begins “at the moment of conception” and that zygotes have all the rights of citizens, effectively outlawing all abortions and even some methods of birth control.

– PLANNED PARENTHOOD: Targets and defunds Planned Parenthood by limiting funds to the organization.

– 20 WEEK BAN: Outlaws abortions after 20 weeks gestation and punishes providers with prison sentences and fines for failing to uphold the ban.

*pregnant people, not just cis women.

stfuhypocrisy:

What in the actual fuck is this shit? Are you proving some kind of point? Why do you use the same colours over and over? This makes no sense.

Don’t you love when people throw out random graphs and charts with no citations - hell, no labels or explanation of what any of it means, even?

This is a 2009 post from RealChoice, an anti-choice blog. The graph indicates the percentage of post-20 week abortions performed in the US, broken down by state. It’s not even labeled on their website what the other colors stand for. They’ve also fudged the numbers quite a bit. For instance:

Supposedly only about 100 abortions a year are done in the third trimester, but The American Journal of Public Health noted 86 third-trimester abortions in Georgia in just two years. If there are 43 third-trimester abortions a year performed in Georgia alone (which reported only 5% of the nation’s abortions), it’s hardly possible that fully 43% of third-trimester abortions are performed in Georgia. Though Georgia’s percentage of abortions after 21 weeks is 3.5%, above the 1.3% national average, it’s hardly the leader in late abortions. New York, in fact, is the leader[…]

The first link is a Fox article from 2003. The second link is information from 1979-80. That’s a 23-year difference, if anyone’s counting. Further, if you download the PDF of the report, you’ll see that there were only 3 third-trimester abortions, not 86.

It is not clear why women who had fetal deaths in utero were misclassified as having had induced abortions, particularly since almost all of these women had labor induced to expel a death fetus.

As far as I can tell, they are correct that abortion reporting isn’t at all consistent in the U.S. Some states, such as California, don’t report to the CDC at all, though the majority do (PDF). The CDC gets their information from voluntary state and area reports. The Guttmacher Institute, on the other hand, gets their information by directly surveying abortion providers, meaning their numbers are slightly higher and more accurate than the CDC’s.

If anyone can tell me how they got Georgia and New York’s numbers from (I’m assuming) this table, that’d be awesome, because I came up with different results.

There’s an updated CDC report from 2008, with slightly different numbers, if anyone’s interested.

(Source: reflections-of-shadows, via stfueverything)

r3dscarf:

A 15 year old needs to have her parents’ permission to get her ears pierced or go tanning but can legally get an abortion without them never knowing. How has legalized murder become more acceptable than a spray tan?

First off, that’s not true. Most states require some kind of parental notice, and about half require parental consent for a minor to get an abortion. You can read about state laws in this report (PDF) by the Guttmacher Institute.

There are lots of reasons parental notice/consent is a bad idea. It’s not the government’s place to regulate how much of our personal lives we share with our families. A teenager who’s comfortable telling their parents and asking for support will do so - a teenager who won’t probably has good reason not to.

Parents are not entitled to know the details of their child’s sex life. Even if a parent isn’t abusive, and the child doesn’t risk being verbally, physically or sexually assaulted, or kicked out of the house, legally mandating a child to tell them they are having sex is wrong and invasive. Children and teenagers deserve privacy just as much as grown adults. If parents want to know these things, it’s their responsibility to create a safe and comfortable environment for their kids.

hoechlinsexlin asked: I seriously love you. The way you cut down the anti-choicers is amazing. I have a question about abortion laws for minors. The age of majority in my state (MS) is 21, and until then, you must have both parents' permission to get an abortion. If I were 18 and needed an abortion, could I cross into Tennessee to get one or would they be obligated to follow Mississippi's laws and deny me service?

Aw shucks.

In answer to your question: Yep!

I found a nifty map indicating which states get the most out-of-staters coming in for abortions:

A bit from the table, just ‘cause I think it’s interesting. These are the percentages of abortions obtained by people coming from out of state:

(DC’s reporting isn’t mandatory, so take that one with a grain of salt.)

I’ma go ahead and plug the post on abortion funds by state, since some of them also offer lodging for people traveling long distances.

(Okay also I have to tell you that I just started watching Torchwood and oh my god I love it. LOVE. IT.)

Californians! Call To Show Your Support For AB 499!

prochoicemodesto:

How to Show Your Support:

Call Governor Brown: (916) 445-2841 or 1-855-468-2796

• Select 1 for English or 2 for Spanish
• Press 2 to voice opinion on a piece of legislation
• Press 2 to voice opinion about AB 499
• Press 1 to show you are calling in SUPPORT of AB 499 

If you get an “all circuits are busy” message or busy signal, please try again a few minutes later, or try the alternate phone number.

Report your call! Email sanjosepa@ppmarmonte.org with “I called” in the subject line!

Via PP Mar Monte; for more information about the bill, please see my previous post.  If you’re in California, PLEASE do this!  You don’t even have to say anything, for all you folks you are shy and/or not too good on the phone … just call and press a few buttons!

"

The Virginia Board of Health passed the most severe abortion clinic regulations in the nation on Thursday, which health advocates say could effectively close down all 22 abortion providers in the state.

The regulations, commissioned by the state legislature and written by the Virginia Department of Health, are largely unrelated to patient health and safety. They would treat abortion clinics as if they are hospitals if the clinics provide five or more first-trimester abortions a month and would enforce architectural design standards that will be almost impossible for most clinics to meet.

For instance, a clinic must have 5-foot-wide hallways, 8-foot-wide areas outside of procedure rooms, specific numbers of toilets and types of sinks and all of the latest requirements for air circulation flow and electrical wiring. Each clinic must also have a parking spot for every bed, despite the fact that first-trimester abortions don’t require an overnight stay. Further, Department of Health employees will be allowed to enter an abortion facility at any time without notice or identification.

"

Virginia Board Of Health Passes Strictest Abortion Clinic Regulations In The Nation (via becauseiamawoman)

(via razingcomplacency)