Support For Abortion (And Contraception) Remains Strong Among Voters

 

The charts above are from the Navigator Poll -- done between June 4th and 8th of a nationwide sample of 1,000 registered voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error.

Support Remains Strong For Abortion, Marriage Equality, And Affirmative Action

 

These charts reflect the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between March 27th and 30th of a nationwide sample of 1,679 adults (including 1,505 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.2 points for adults and 3.0 points for registered voters.

Support Remains Strong For Legal Abortion, Same-Sex Marriage, And Banning Assault Rifles

 

The charts above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between December 26th and 29th of a nationwide sample of 1,550 adults (including 1,420 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.6 points for adults and 3.1 points for registered voters.

Another Idiotic Texas Abortion Law Goes Into Effect On December 4th

 From The Texas Tribune

The View On Abortion In Each State

 

The charts above are from a survey by the Pew Research Center done between July of 2023 through March of 2024 of a nationwide sample of 36,908 adults, with a margin of error of 0.8 points.

Support For Legal Abortion Remains Strong Among U.S. Voters

 

The charts above are from the Navigator Poll -- done between June 5th and 9th of a nationwide sample of 1,000 registered voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error.

What Pregnant Texas Women Can Do To protect Themselves

The following is part of an article in CourierTexas.com:

“It’s like a knife straight to your stomach,” Dr. Todd Ivey, a Houston-based OB-GYN at an academic hospital, told Courier Texas about a third woman dying in the state during a miscarriage.

“It’s just like, we’ve got to stop this. We’ve got to do something to stop this. Pregnancy is high-risk enough without putting all these complications on top of it.”

The “complications” that Ivey is warning Texas women about are the state’s two abortion bans, which outlaw abortions in Texas from the moment of conception.

The laws impose such harsh penalties on doctors that they are “terrified that they’re going to be criminalized,” said Dr. Austin Dennard, a Dallas-based OB-GYN.

And why wouldn’t they be terrified when they face a sentence of up to 99 years in jail if they perform an abortion that’s considered illegal? They’ll also be stripped of their medical licence, have to pay a $100,000 fine, and can also be sued civilly by anyone who wants to claim a bounty of $10,000 if they can prove a doctor provided an abortion. . . .

Young women who are having complications miscarrying can appear healthy before getting “sick very quickly,” Ivey explained.

How women can protect themselves

“If you are experiencing serious symptoms while miscarrying, you have to move very quickly to prevent (your) organs from failing,” Ivey said. 

And while only three Texas women have been documented to have died from miscarriages since the state’s abortion ban has been in place, the number of Texas women who died from pregnancy or labor complications soared 56% from 2019 to 2022, according to a study by the Gender Equity Policy Institute.

Kaplan said he advises pregnant mothers in Texas to pack a “to go bag” so that “if you need to get out of this state to get the care you need, you’ll be ready to go. Always be thinking — if something were to go wrong, where am I headed outside of Texas.”

But what can a pregnant woman who can’t quickly leave Texas do if local hospitals or urgent care centers don’t appear to be taking the risk to their lives seriously?

“Go to the biggest city near you and go to the downtown-ist hospital and don’t care what it looks like,” Binford said. ”They have the most volumes of deliveries and with volume come pregnancy complications and that means experience in handling them.”

Binford also advised that hospitals affiliated with medical schools will have established ethics committees that will include a lawyer and that committee members will be reachable quickly if a doctor is unsure about whether they can go ahead with a procedure to remove a fetus from a woman’s body.

Texas health lawyer Leah Stewart, who advises doctors and hospitals about the abortion laws, agreed that if a woman thinks she is having a severe miscarriage or another dangerous complication like an ectopic pregnancy or if her water breaks long before viability, then she should go to a large urban hospital.

They see “every single thing that goes wrong … and are better equipped to connect the right provider and give the woman standard care.”

And if you aren’t getting the attention you need quickly, she added, “You have to keep ramping up your fit throwing.”

“You don’t think it’s going to happen to you,” said Ryan Hamilton, a Dallas-area father whose wife nearly died when she miscarried with what would have been their second child at 13 weeks pregnant.

After multiple visits to medical centers over three days and three rounds of treatment with misoprostol, Hamilton’s wife passed out unconscious on the bathroom floor in a pool of blood.

She only survived because Hamilton raced her to a hospital ER for treatment.

“”Women are dying… under the circumstances we went through.. If I wouldn’t have been home to find my wife, she would have been one of those women… I could have lost her….it’s like, ‘oh my God, I really could have.’ That’s reality and that’s hard,” Hamilton added.

Texas (And Georgia) Won't Investigate Deaths Due To Their Abortion Ban

The following is part of an article by Susan Rinkunas at MSNBC.com:

Since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision two and a half years ago, state abortion bans have restricted pregnant women’s access to emergency medical care. And as the predictable harms — up to and including death — come to light, some states are acting as if they want to hide them from the public.

Last week, ProPublica reported on Porsha Ngumezi, the third known Texas woman to have died under that state’s abortion ban. In June 2023, Ngumezi lost so much blood from miscarrying at 11 weeks that she needed two transfusions. The hospital delayed providing a procedure called dilation and curettage to clear the uterus, with doctors instead giving her a drug to stop the bleeding. She died of hemorrhaging three hours later. More than a dozen doctors who reviewed a summary of her case told ProPublica that Ngumezi’s death could have been averted with a D&C.

The very next day, The Washington Post reported that Texas’ Maternal Mortality Review Committee (MMRC) wouldn’t examine any pregnancy-related deaths from 2022 and 2023, citing a backlog of cases on top of the two-year delay that is typical of such committees. That means Texas won’t investigate any deaths from the past two years that are potentially linked to abortion bans, like Ngumezi’s. . . .

Maternal mortality committees review women’s deaths not to publicize individual cases but to make recommendations to prevent future harm. This refusal to review pregnancy-related deaths from the first post-Dobbs years means we may never have a full picture of the harm caused by an abortion ban in the second-most-populous state — one that has a long-standing crisis of women dying from pregnancy. An analysis published in September by the Gender Equity Policy Institute found that, from 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal deaths in Texas increased by 56%, compared with 11% nationwide. But rather than investigate, the state is essentially admitting that the bodies are piling up faster than the state can address them. Its solution is not to dedicate more time and effort — like, perhaps, increasing the size of the 23-member committee — but to simply brush these women’s lives under the rug and skip ahead to 2024.

Texas isn’t the only state engaging in this sordid interference. ProPublica has found at least five women who’ve died under abortion bans: three in Texas and two in Georgia. After the outlet reported that Georgia’s MMRC had determined the two deaths were preventable, state officials responded by firing all of its 32 members. The commissioner of Georgia’s Public Health Department wrote in a letter to members that because the department wasn’t able to figure out who shared confidential information with ProPublica, it was dismissing the whole committee and would seek applications for replacements. This ruthless move will undoubtedly delay the work of the committee, but it seems leaks to the media are more important than urgent investigations of these women’s deaths. . . .

Unfortunately, things could get worse before they get better. Lawmakers in Texas and other states are threatening to copy a Louisiana controlled substances law that makes it harder to dispense medications used to treat postpartum hemorrhaging because the drugs are also used for abortions. The law targets the medication the hospital gave to Ngumezi instead of a D&C, and experts warn it could kill even more women in childbirth. 

Michelle Obama Makes The Case For Women's Health And Reproductive Rights

 No one has made the case for women's health and reproductive rights better than Michelle Obama.

The following is excerpted from Mrs. Obama’s speech on Saturday at a Kamala Harris rally in Kalamazoo, Mich.

I want you to think about which presidential candidate could possibly care more about our reproductive health.

I just want to take a moment with this particular question, because there is so much that gets lost in the conversation about women’s reproductive rights. I want the men in the arena to bear with me on this. Because there’s more at stake than just protecting a woman’s choice to give birth.

Sadly, we as women and girls have not been socialized to talk openly about our reproductive health. We’ve been taught instead to feel shame and to hide how our bodies work. Some young girls enter puberty not knowing what to expect. Too many of us suffer with severe cramps and nausea for several days every single month.

Then on the other end of the reproductive timeline, too many women my age have no idea what’s going on with our bodies as we battle through menopause and debilitating hot flashes and depression.

See, fellas, most of us women, we suck up our pain and deal with it alone. We don’t share our experiences with anyone, not with our partners, our friends or even our doctors.

Look, a woman’s body is complicated business, y’all. Yes, it brings life, and that’s a beautiful thing, but even when we are not bearing children, there is so much that can go wrong at any moment.

Every woman here knows what I’m talking about: an unexpected lump, an abnormal pap smear or mammogram, an infection, a blockage, all of which could be early signs of a variety of life-threatening cancers.

In those terrifying moments when something goes wrong, y’all, which will happen at some point to the vast majority of women in this country, let me tell you, it feels like the floor falls out from under us.

Look, I don’t expect any man to fully grasp how vulnerable this makes us feel, to understand the complexities of our reproductive health experiences. In all honesty, most of us as women don’t fully understand the breadth and depth of our own reproductive lives.

That’s because our experiences are often neglected by science. There’s a huge disparity in research funding for women’s health. If you happen to look like me and report pain, you’re more likely to be ignored, even by your own doctors, studies show.

So let me take a minute to help folks, especially the men in our lives, get a better sense of what could happen if we keep dismantling parts of our reproductive care system piece by piece, as I fear Donald Trump will do. I want folks to understand the chilling effect, not just on critical abortion care, but on the entirety of women’s health, all of it.

There are good reasons why so many women and physicians are horrified by what’s happened since Donald Trump’s justices overturned Roe v. Wade. We’re seeing women scrambling across state lines to get the care they need. Just this week, a major medical journal reported that after Roe was overturned, infant mortality in this country rose. One woman spent 22 days in jail on murder charges after she miscarried in her own bathroom.

We are seeing doctors unsure if they can treat ectopic pregnancies, doctors being told that they can’t treat a woman until she becomes so close to death that only a “life of the mother” exception will allow them to act.

Just imagine the profound effects for all of us if Donald Trump wins the election.

In states that are already putting abortion bans into effect, his F.D.A. could further outlaw patchwork systems of telehealth appointments and mail-order pills, thereby eliminating the last remaining protections for women in those states.

He could take actions that effectively ban abortion nationwide, which would put all of us in danger, no matter what state we live in.

We will see more doctors hesitating or shying away from providing lifesaving treatments because they are worried about being arrested; more medical students reconsidering even pursuing women’s health at all; more clinics without enough doctors to meet demand, closing their doors, leaving untold numbers of women in communities throughout the country without a place to go for basic gynecological care, which in turn will leave millions of women at risk of undiagnosed medical issues like cervical and uterine cancers. This is real.

Do you think Donald Trump is thinking about the consequences for the millions of women who will be living in medical deserts? Does anyone think he has the emotional maturity and foresight to come up with a plan to protect us?

Y’all, we are teetering on the edge.

Even before these state bans, America was already lagging behind every other wealthy nation on measures like maternal mortality and paid leave.

We could be right back to the days before Roe, which many young people don’t even remember, the days when abortion wasn’t as safe as it is today, the days when the number of mothers of color dying in childbirth was higher.

So to the men who love us, let me just try to paint a picture of what it will feel like if America, the wealthiest nation on Earth, keeps revoking basic care from its women, and how it will affect every single woman in your life.

Your girlfriend could be the one in legal jeopardy if she needs a pill from out-of-state or overseas, or if she has to travel across state lines because the local clinic closed up.

Your wife and mother could be the ones at higher risk of dying from undiagnosed cervical cancer because they have no access to regular gynecological care.

Your daughter could be the one too terrified to call the doctor if she’s bleeding during an unexpected pregnancy.

Your niece could be the one miscarrying in her bathtub after the hospital turned her away.

This will not just affect women. It will affect you and your sons. The devastating consequences of teen pregnancies won’t just be borne by young girls, but also by the young men who are the fathers. They, too, will have their dreams of going to college, their entire futures totally upended by an unwanted pregnancy.

If you and your partner are expecting a child, you’ll be right by her side at the checkups, terrified if her blood pressure is too high, or if there’s an issue with the placenta, or if the ultrasound shows that an embryo has implanted in the wrong place, and the doctors aren’t sure that they can intervene to keep her safe.

If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late. You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.

Then there is the tragic but very real possibility that in the worst-case scenario, you just might be the one holding flowers at the funeral. You might be the one left to raise your children alone.

See, these are just some of the ways women die during childbirth. I don’t want to be a downer, y’all, but in many cases, there is no warning, and things can go bad very quickly. When it happens, every second of hesitation or delay can lead to devastating outcomes.

I am asking you, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously. Please do not put our lives in the hands of politicians, mostly men, who have no clue or do not care about what we as women are going through, who don’t fully grasp the broad-reaching health implications that their misguided policies will have on our health outcomes.

The only people who have standing to make these decisions are women with the advice of their doctors. We are the ones with the knowledge and experience to know what we need.

So please, please do not hand our fates over to the likes of Trump, who knows nothing about us, who has shown a deep contempt for us. Because a vote for him is a vote against us, against our health, against our worth.

Let me tell you all to think that the men that we love could be either unaware or indifferent to our plight is simply heartbreaking. It is a sad statement about our value as women in this world. It is both a setback in our quest for equity and a huge blow to our country’s standing as a world leader on issues of women’s health and gender equity.

So fellas, before you cast your vote, ask yourselves: What side of history do you want to be on?

Poll Shows Abortion Still A Bad Issue For Republicans

 

The charts above are from the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between July 27th and 30th of a nationwide sample of 1,605 adults, with a 3 point margin of error.

Abortion Is Still A Powerful Force In This Election

These charts are from the CBS News / YouGov Poll -- done between June 17th and 21st of a nationwide sample of 2,460 adults, with a 2.8 point margin of error.

Supreme Court Rules Abortion Pill Is Still Legal In All States

In a unanimous ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned lower court rulings that would have banned or restricted the sale of mifepristone (the abortion pill). That means the pill is still legal in all 50 states.

This is a good thing, but it's not time to celebrate yet. The court did NOT rule that women have a right to the pill. They simply ruled that those who filed the case (a group of anti-abortion doctors) did not have standing to bring the case. That means the decision might be different if the case is filed again by someone the court believes does have standing.

The six right-wing justices just avoided the question in this ruling. If actually forced to rule on the legality of the abortion pill, they might vote very differently. And you can be sure the anti-abortion crowd will try again (as many times as they can). It took them 50 years to get Roe vs. Wade overturned, and they will not soon give up on trying to ban the pill. 

And banning mifepristone is just the first step. Many on the right, both in Congress and the Supreme Court, have made it clear they would like to also ban contraception. And IVF (in-vitro fertilization) is also on the chopping block. The Alabama Supreme Court has already made a ruling that stopped IVF in that state. They are not alone. The largest evangelical church has just voted to make opposition to IVF a tenet of their religious organization.

Both the political right and the religious right seem determined to restrict women's rights in this country. The overturning of Roe vs. Wade was just the beginning.  We must be prepared for a long fight on these issues as long as the Republicans have the power to block efforts to make sure women have equal rights.

Fortunately, President Biden understands this. Here is part of the statement he released about this latest decision of the court:

It does mean that mifepristone, or medication abortion, remains available and approved. Women can continue to access this medication – approved by the FDA as safe and effective more than 20 years ago. 

But let’s be clear: attacks on medication abortion are part of Republican elected officials’ extreme and dangerous agenda to ban abortion nationwide. Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Republican elected officials have imposed extreme abortion bans in 21 states, some of which include zero exceptions for rape or incest. Women are being turned away from emergency rooms, or forced to go to court to plead for care that their doctor recommended or to travel hundreds of miles for care. Doctors and nurses are being threatened with jail time, including life in prison, for providing the health care they have been trained to provide. And contraception and IVF are under attack.

The stakes could not be higher for women across America. Vice President Harris and I stand with the vast majority of Americans who support a woman’s right to make deeply personal health care decisions. We will continue to fight to ensure that women in every state get the health care they need and we will continue to call on Congress to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade in federal law — that is our commitment.

Texas Voters Oppose Vouchers & Support Legal Abortion

 

The charts above are from the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation Poll -- done between April 5th and 10th of a nationwide sample of 1,600 likely Texas voters, with a 2.45 point margin of error.

GOP Candidates Trying To Hide/Change Their Abortion Views

Nearly half a century ago, when the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade, Republican officials were quick to take the anti-abortion side of the issue. They knew they couldn't do anything about it, but it gave them the opportunity to solidify the votes of anti-abortion voters in their corner. 

They claimed it was a moral principle to oppose abortion, because a human was created at the moment of conception - that meant abortion was killing a "person".

But an unexpected thing happened. A Republican president was installed in the White House, and he was able to appoint several Supreme Court justices. These new justices, combined with some right-wingers already on the court, overturned Roe v. Wade. 

That's when big troubles began for Republican candidates. They had not thought their stance through or realized how it would affect their party.

It turns out that the people they made happy by banning abortion were just a minority. Most Americans were happy with the Roe v. Wade decision and wanted to keep abortion legal. They believed abortion was a women's rights issue, and banning it put many women in danger medically.

Republicans were expecting a huge red wave in the 2022 election, but it didn't happen. Many Republicans were defeated because of the party's anti-abortion views. And several red states held votes on propositions that would legalize abortion, and those propositions won every time!

Then it got worse. The Alabama Supreme Court, acting on the GOP belief that life began at conception, riled that embryos in an IVF clinic could not be destroyed (even though they would never be implanted or born). That cast a chill on IVF, and many clinics stopped offering the procedure. The procedure is extremely popular with the public.

Now, facing another election where they stand opposed to abortion (and thereby IVF), many GOP candidates are either changing or trying to hide their views. It seems their "moral principle" is no longer valid when it threatens their election to office.

Many are now trying to find a middle ground, offering abortions legal until 6, 15, or 16 weeks. That makes no sense. Life either begins at conception or at birth (or viability), but it is not something that happens on a sliding scale of a certain number of weeks. They are now trying to compromise on an issue they once claimed could not be compromised.

It's one more principle that GOP candidates have abandoned. They are left with only two "principles" - more tax cuts for the rich and whatever Donald Trump wants. It's pathetic!