AuthorLisa Needham

The Trump administration last week suffered a loss in what is likely to be one of its last attempts to restrict the availability of abortion.  On Dec. 9, a federal district court judge in Maryland refused to lift an injunction against the Food and Drug Administration blocking the agency from enforcing rules that require a person to physically go to a clinic to obtain drugs for a medication...

President-elect Joe Biden has tapped Xavier Becerra, currently California’s attorney general, to be his head of Health and Human Services. While much of Becerra’s work at HHS will focus on the pandemic, his nomination represents an opportunity to restore reproductive health and abortion rights.  Much of the discussion of the future of abortion is focused on the Supreme Court, thanks...

Tennessee has long been very committed to ensuring its citizens don’t have access to safe and legal abortions. Now, the state got a major assist from the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which just ruled 2-1 that one of Tennesee’s abortion restrictions — a ban that forces doctors to interrogate patients — can be enforced.  The Tennessee law is very similar to a measure recently...

A recent review of maternal mortality in Alabama found that many of the deaths were entirely preventable. One of the ways to fix this, the report noted, was ensuring access to a broad range of women’s health services, including contraceptives and abortion care.  The Alabama Department of Public Health, along with the Alabama Maternal Mortality Review Committee, examined all maternal...

While the 2020 presidential election was a glimmer of hope for reproductive health initiatives at the federal level, anti-abortion Republicans picked up seats in state legislatures across the country. In 2021, expect to see a flurry of anti-abortion bills designed to eventually get a hearing at a Supreme Court that now has an anti-choice supermajority.  Leading the way is Texas, where the GOP...

Over the last four years, the Trump administration has decimated reproductive health care, from blocking all federal funding to Planned Parenthood, to expanding the global gag rule, which prohibits foreign non-governmental organizations that receive federal funding from even mentioning abortion.  President-elect Joe Biden has said it’s a priority of his to roll back these harmful...

With Donald Trump’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett, an anti-abortion right-wing radical, to the U.S. Supreme Court, anti-abortion legislators in conservative states are looking to push through extreme abortion bans in the event Roe v. Wade is overturned by the court.   In Ohio, for example, legislators are using the lame-duck session to push a “trigger ban,” a type of law that...

Donald Trump spent the 2020 election courting Christian conservatives, hoping his anti-abortion stance would win over both evangelicals and conservative Catholics. For the latter group, that may have been a miscalculation. An election night analysis by Catholics for Choice showed that Catholic voters are not as single-minded about abortion as Trump assumes. Trump did everything he could to...

For more than four decades, the Hyde Amendment has blocked federal funding for abortion. It’s a law that harms poor women, particularly women of color.  But unlike Donald Trump, President-elect Joe Biden opposes Hyde, and his election doesn’t bode well for  the discriminatory law. The amendment, named for former GOP Rep. Henry Hyde, a staunch opponent of abortion rights, first became...

With Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the Supreme Court, the court now has a solid 6-3 anti-abortion majority. Roe v. Wade will likely be seriously compromised over time, if not outright overruled. However, restricting access to abortion, a recent study shows, doesn’t mean fewer abortions. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.  A recent report authored in part by researchers at the...