Pro-Choice Maryland

In June, a historic ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed women's constitutional right to access safe, legal abortion. The case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, struck down Texas' abortion restrictions.

Now, it’s time for Congress to do its part.

Fights to improve access to abortion care will continue. Nearly 300 new abortion restrictions have been enacted across the country in the past five years. When the nearest clinic is hundreds of miles away, when waiting periods require multiple clinic visits, when access to medication abortion is restricted — it becomes nearly impossible for some women to exercise their constitutional rights.

We need the Women’s Health Protection Act to prohibit states from imposing a range of restrictions on reproductive care that shame women for their decisions and limit access to safe, legal abortion care.

Sign the petition to your Congressperson now!

( Sponsers of the Petition )

Support for legal abortion in the U.S. has edged up to its highest level in the past two years, with an Associated Press-GfK poll showing an apparent increase in support among Democrats and Republicans alike over the last year.

Nearly six in 10 Americans — 58 percent — now think abortion should be legal in most or all cases, up from 51 percent who said so at the beginning of the year, according to the AP-GfK survey. It was conducted after three people were killed last month in a shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado.

( More )

Note: There is a second page to the article that I didn't put under the cut.

cross posted to we_r_the_middle

Mississippi lawmakers took steps to become the latest U.S. state to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy by passing a measure on Thursday that seeks to further restrict access to the procedure.

Legislation approved by the state's House of Representatives in a 89-22 vote asserts that a fetus can feel pain by 20 weeks of gestation, halfway through a full-term pregnancy, and that the state has a duty to protect the unborn child.

Abortions would be legal after 20 weeks only if a woman's life was in danger, according to the measure. Physicians who defied the law could lose their medical license.

( More )

Mississippi recorded 2,176 abortions in 2012, the latest year for which the state Department of Health made figures available. Eleven of the abortions occurred between the 16th and 20th weeks of gestation, and two after 20 weeks.

"People in Mississippi need to be demanding why they're considering legislation that has little impact on the state and is wasting taxpayer dollars," Derzis said. "This is grandstanding at its worst."

A pregnant 16-year-old Texas girl is suing her parents, claiming that her parents are attempting to force her to have an abortion.

The Texas Center for Defense of Life filed a lawsuit on the teen’s behalf on Sunday arguing that her parents “are violating her federal constitutional rights to carry her child to term by coercing her to have an abortion with both verbal and physical threats and harassment.”

The teen, identified in the lawsuit only as R.E.K. since she is a minor, was “beside herself” when she called the center for help, her lawyer Stephen Casey told ABCNews.com. The group claims it has previously represented teens in similar situations and won their cases.

“These girls are in a bind, particularly in a situation where their parents are forcing them to do something they don’t want to do,” Casey said. “Regardless of the [situation], that’s her parents and she should expect support from them in this situation, not resentment and anger.”

When the pregnancy was confirmed, the teenager’s father allegedly “became extremely angry, was insistent that R.E.K. was not having the baby, and that the decision was not up to her, according to the lawsuit. He stated he was going to take her to have an abortion and that the decision was his, end of story.”

The teen claims that her parents have taken away her phone, pulled her out of school, forced her to get two jobs and taken away her car in an effort to “make her miserable so that she would give in to the coercion and have the abortion,” the lawsuit said.

Yeah...I'm against women, regardless how old they are, being forced to have an abortion as much as I am against them being forced to carry a pregnancy to term. The fact that some people in the comments who claim to be pro-choice thinks this girl should've been forced to abort shocked me. That's NOT choice. The point of being pro-choice is the belief that every individual woman out there knows what's best for her, her body, and her life even if you fucking disagree with her choice. No one...whether if it's the goverment, society, her parents, or so-called pro-choicers...has the fucking right to tell any woman what's best for them especially if they aren't going through the pregnancy themselves. If you aren't the one that's pregnant, you should have no say in what she wants to do.

It's kind of like how once women reach my age (thirty) that they are expected to carry to term rather than have abortion because people feel that's the proper age to have a child. And no...I didn't carry to term because people expected me to. I carried because, and I can't stress this enough, I WANTED to.

Of course, the irony behind all this is if the situation had been different where she wanted to have the abortion and her parents wanted her to carry to term, it would be the parents' right to decide what the girl should do.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court unanimously vetoed a ballot measure that would have given embryos full personhood rights on Monday, ruling it "clearly unconstitutional" because it would block a woman's legal right to have an abortion.

The personhood measure would give embryos the same legal rights as people from the moment of fertilization, which opponents say would ban abortion and complicate the legality of in vitro fertilization and many forms of birth control. Enacting such a law would violate the U.S. Supreme Court's 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which allows states to pass some abortion restrictions but prevents them from overturning the constitutional right to end a pregnancy.

"The mandate of Casey is as binding on this Court today as it was twenty years ago," the Oklahoma Supreme Court wrote in its decision. "Initiative Petition No. 395 conflicts with Casey and is void on its face and it is hereby ordered stricken."
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( In Minnesota )
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( In Texas )

Considering all this happened yesterday, I wondered if the politicans and justices of America got a wake up call from all the "Unite against the War on Women" protests that happened this past weekend that women's reproductive rights shouldn't be messed with.