Five states that originally banned abortion have now resumed abortion services for the short term as judges block bans.
Following the chaos-inducing overturning of Roe v Wade last Friday, clinics in Texas, Louisiana and Utah have now resumed abortion services whilst the courts explore the legality of the bans. This was followed shortly by Kentucky, which had it’s trigger law, banning abortions, blocked by a judge until at least the 6th of July. On July 1st, a Florida judge ruled that a new state law banning abortions at 15 weeks is unconstitutional and he intends to block it from taking effect today.
Clinics like Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services in San Antonio had been forced to send patients home since last Friday, and they cancelled 25 scheduled abortions.
Clinics in the four states are figuring out next steps, and whether they can feasibly offer services in an indeterminate window of time.
Read more here: 19thenews.org
Tech companies are under pressure to protect privacy of people seeking abortion.
Private information collected and retained by companies could be weaponized to prosecute abortion seekers and providers. Abortion and civil rights advocates have warned that there are few federal regulations on what information is collected and retained by tech firms, making it easy for law enforcement officials to access incriminating data on location, internet searches and communication history. Smaller companies are also being targeted with questions over their data practices, as calls to delete period tracking apps went viral following the supreme court decision on Friday.
Read more here: The Guardian
Planned Parenthood removes marketing trackers on their abortion scheduling pages.
After intense criticism, Planned Parenthood has suspended its marketing trackers on abortion scheduling pages given new state level abortion bans. The change came as President Biden prepared a letter to the FTC asking it to protect reproductive health data.
Read more here: Washington Post
Searches for medical abortion pills soar.
Within 72 hours of Roe falling, searches for abortion medications on Google jumped 162% compared to the three days prior. The week of the POLITICO report on the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Americans conducted 350,000 searches for abortion pills, the highest level recorded in any equivalent time span, the researchers said at JAMA Internal Medicine.
Read more here: Politico
Amazon places limit on Plan B.
Plan B One-Step, a brand-name contraceptive that contains the active ingredient levonorgestrel, has been limited to three product purchases per customer on Amazon. Amazon’s decision to limit purchases of Plan B follows other retailers that placed their own limits on purchases of emergency contraceptive pills due to the rise in demand following the Supreme Court’s decision last week to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Read more here: Fortune
New York Times op-ed ‘Lessons From the Terrible Triumph of the Anti-Abortion Movement’ features Battleground
Michelle Goldberg’s bold op-ed in the New York Times this week features her responses to Battleground: The scene I keep revisiting features a Students for Life training session about “how you can change minds about abortion online,” in which members of the group learned how to draw young pro-choice people into debate in comment threads…
Cynthia Lowen, the director of “Battleground,” told me she was struck by the activists’ “strategy to get into environments and places, online and offline, where young, typically pro-choice people are,” and to try to create “doubts about their position.”
Salon Talks interviews Battleground director on how the anti-choice movement isn’t just driven by “old white men.”
Shortly before the overturning of Roe V Wade, Battleground director Cynthia Lowen spoke to Mary Elizabeth Williams on “Salon Talks”.
Cynthia Lowen: “Going into making this film, I had a lot of those notions that the anti-abortion movement was – as the girls in the hotel room say – old white men. I was really surprised to learn in making this film that the anti-abortion movement, they’re young women by and large. The movement has its eye very much on the next generation of anti-abortion activists. They’re really cultivating young people to be at the vanguard of the next stage of the movement. You hear these young people saying a lot, “We are the post-Roe generation,” and they’re taking on this identity of coming of age in a post-Roe America.”
Mary Elizabeth Williams: “It’s important for those of us on any side of a conversation to understand what our opponents look like, what they think like, how they are strategizing. It is easy to turn on the news and think that it’s just a guy in a Viking hat, storming the Capitol. That it’s a cult. It’s subtler and requires more thought to show a group of young women who look like they could be your neighbors, your friends, who are soft-spoken, who are polite, who are articulate, who are educated.”
Listen to the full podcast here: salon.com
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