#aboriton pill

[reasonsforhope]

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a bill Wednesday repealing the state's nearly century-old abortion ban.

Last month, the state's House and Senate passed HB 4006, a single-sentence bill, which revokes the 1931 law that criminalized abortion.

Specifically, the bill repealed Section 750.14, which makes it a felony -- punishable by up to four years in prison and/or a fine of up to $5,000 -- to administer drugs that induce a miscarriage unless the mother's life is in danger.

It also repealed Section 750.15, which makes it a misdemeanor to advertise, publish or sell "any pills, powder, drugs or combination of drugs" that can cause an abortion.

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, questions remained about whether or not the 1931 law would be put back in place...

A Michigan state judge ruled in September that the ban is unconstitutional, barring any state prosecutors from enforcing it.

Two months later, in the November mid-term elections, Michiganders voted in favor of a constitutional amendment that would add protections for reproductive rights...

The amendment defines reproductive freedom as "the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management and infertility care." ...

Whitmer has openly expressed her support for abortion access in and out of Michigan and signed an executive order in July refusing to extradite women who come to Michigan from other states seeking abortion and refusing to extradite providers for offering the procedure.

"In November, Michiganders sent a clear message: we deserve to make our own decisions about own bodies," Whitmer said in a statement provided to ABC News. "Today, we are coming together to repeal our extreme 1931 law banning abortion without exceptions for rape or incest and criminalizing nurses and doctors for doing their jobs."

-via ABC News, 4/5/23

[rapeculturerealities]

In the Supreme Court’s first ruling on abortion since the arrival of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court on Tuesday reinstated a federal requirement that women seeking to end their pregnancies using medications pick up a pill in person from a hospital or medical office.

The court’s brief order was unsigned, and the three more liberal justices dissented. The only member of the majority to offer an explanation was Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who said the ruling was a limited one that deferred to the views of experts.

The question, he wrote, was not whether the requirement imposed “an undue burden on a woman’s right to an abortion as a general matter.” Instead, he wrote, it was whether a federal judge should have second-guessed the Food and Drug Administration’s determination “because of the court’s own evaluation of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

“Here as in related contexts concerning government responses to the pandemic,” the chief justice wrote, quoting an earlier opinion, “my view is that courts owe significant deference to the politically accountable entities with the ‘background, competence and expertise to assess public health.’”

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, said the majority was grievously wrong.

“This country’s laws have long singled out abortions for more onerous treatment than other medical procedures that carry similar or greater risks,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “Like many of those laws, maintaining the F.D.A.’s in-person requirements” for picking up the drug “during the pandemic not only treats abortion exceptionally, it imposes an unnecessary, irrational and unjustifiable undue burden on women seeking to exercise their right to choose.”

She suggested that the next administration should revisit the issue.

“One can only hope that the government will reconsider and exhibit greater care and empathy for women seeking some measure of control over their health and reproductive lives in these unsettling times,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.

Julia Kaye, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the Supreme Court had taken an extraordinary step.

“The court’s ruling rejects science, compassion and decades of legal precedent in service of the Trump administration’s anti-abortion agenda,” she said in a statement. “It is mind-boggling that the Trump administration’s top priority on its way out the door is to needlessly endanger even more people during this dark pandemic winter — and chilling that the Supreme Court allowed it.”

Judge Theodore D. Chuang, of the Federal District Court in Maryland, had blocked the requirement in light of the coronavirus pandemic, saying that a needless trip to a medical facility during a health crisis very likely imposed an undue burden on the constitutional right to abortion.

The case concerned a restriction on medication abortions, which are permitted in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. About 60 percent of abortions performed in those weeks use two drugs rather than surgery.

The first drug, mifepristone, blocks the effects of progesterone, a hormone without which the lining of the uterus begins to break down. A second drug, misoprostol, taken 24 to 48 hours later, induces contractions of the uterus that expel its contents.

The contested measure requires women to appear in person to pick up the mifepristone and to sign a form, even when they had already consulted with their doctors remotely. The women can then take the drug when and where they choose. There is no requirement that women pick up misoprostol in person, and it is available at retail and mail-order pharmacies.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other groups, all represented by the A.C.L.U., sued to suspend the requirement that women make a trip to obtain the first drug in light of the pandemic. There was no good reason, the groups said, to require a visit when the drug could be delivered or mailed.

Judge Chuang blocked the measure in July, saying that requiring pregnant women, many of them poor, to travel to obtain the drug imposed needless risk and delay, particularly given that the pandemic had forced many clinics to reduce their hours.

He imposed a nationwide injunction, reasoning that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has more than 60,000 members practicing in all 50 states and that its membership includes some 90 percent of the nation’s obstetricians and gynecologists.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., refused to stay Judge Chuang’s injunction while an appeal moved forward. The Trump administration, which often seeks Supreme Court intervention on an emergency basis when it loses in the lower courts, asked the justices in August to stay the injunction.

In October, in its first encounter with the case, the Supreme Court issued an unusual order returning the case to Judge Chuang, saying that “a more comprehensive record would aid this court’s review” and instructing him to rule within 40 days. In the meantime, the disputed requirement remained suspended.

Judge Chuang issued a second opinion on Dec. 9, again blocking the requirement. The “health risk has only gotten worse,” he wrote.

The Trump administration returned to the Supreme Court. Its brief focused mainly on data from Indiana and Nebraska, where state laws continued to require women to pick up the pills in person.

In those states, the administration told the justices, the number of abortions had increased compared to the previous year. That showed, the administration’s brief said, that the requirement did not amount to an unconstitutional burden on the right to abortion.

That argument, lawyers for the medical group wrote in response, “defies rudimentary principles of statistical analysis.” Many factors could account for the rise in the number of abortions in the two states during the pandemic, they wrote, including disruptions in access to contraceptives, unemployment and other circumstances “that have made unwanted pregnancy more likely and parenting less tenable for some.”

Justice Sotomayor was also unimpressed by the argument. “Reading the government’s statistically insignificant, cherry-picked data,” she wrote, “is no more informative than reading tea leaves.”

[trans-advice]

@officialkimzolciak

this is hypothetically what i would do this is not medical advice #reproductivejustice #triggerlawstates #abortionfund

♬ Melody (1983 Club Vinyl Mix) - Plustwo

tilda slayington AT officialkimzolciak FROM TikTok

video label

this is hypothetically what i would do this is not medical advice #reproductivejustice #triggerlawstates #abortionfund

Creator's pinned comments:

I ultimately do not condone attempts to self induce an abortion through ingesting herbs, plants, fruit etc. but I also recognize that (1)

(2) unsafe abortion methods are highly prevalent worldwide and have been attempted for centuries. There are no known efficacy studies for these

(3) alternative practices and methods and consuming anything that is not backed by clinical trials and studies is more likely to cause bodily harm to

(4) pregnant people than to be effective at terminating a pregnancy. Mifepristone and Misoprostol is the most effective and safe method for

(5) terminating a pregnancy (besides surgical abortions) with the fewest side effects. Mifepristone and Misoprostol are the same drugs that you would

(6) be given at an abortion clinic administering a medication abortion to you. They are approved by the FDA, backed by WHO, and widely used worldwide

Video Transcript:

as someone who may or may not have been a hotline volunteer for 5 years for reproductive justice organization that helps poor teens get an abortion without parental consent Allegedy, I am going to provide hypothetical scenarios for how I might go about receiving an aboriton if i lived in one of the 13 states with trigger bans: Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming.

these scenarios are hypothetical and specific to people who are low-income and do not have the privilege of being able to freely travel out of state for abortions. (How to hypothetically receive funding for traveling out of state to an abortion clinic,

step 1: make an appointment for an abortion at a clinic step 2: contact a funding org)

since a lot of state-specific abortion funds are pausing all funding due to legal reasons, I would Hypothetically contact the NAF (National Abortion Federation), or Planned Parenthood.

To receive funding & costs of transportation & hotel-stays completely paid for, I would Hypothetically ask Planned Parenthood if I qualify for the Justice Fund, and if I can't get enough funding through those, I would Hypothetically contact the WWRP Emergency Fund or the Tiller Fund.

So those cases are Hypothetical scenarios if I wanted to travel out-of-state to a clinic and I didn't have enough money to pay for transportation, hotel stays, and my Hypothetical abortion.

This next hypothetical scenario is if I didn't have the time or resources to travel out of state to get an abortion even if it was completely paid for. I would hypothetically go on plancpills.org and do what's called a self-managed abortion.

Mifepristone and Misoprostol are the abortion pill drugs and they are over 95% safe. These pills are regularly perscribed over-the-counter in some European countries for people who want to receive an abortion, um, just by pharmacist.

So you can actually recieve these pills mailed to you through information on plancpills dot org, and if you can't cover the cost, I would go on reddit slash abortion and make a post. And if you do not have a safe address to mail the pills to, like if your parents might find out & not allow you to take the pills or discard the pills for you, I would also go on reddit slash abortion and try and find someone who would allow for you to borrow their mailing address, Hypothetically.

[gwsseuphoria]

Episode 2, “Stuntin’ Like My Daddy” - Melissa Merdzo

Here is a little recap of what happens in Episode 2, Season 1 of Euphoria. Rue, the main character (who is played by Zendaya, a mixed (half Black half white) cisgender female actress), had her first day of school after summer and panicked when she was put on the spotlight to talk about her summer, which consisted of her overdosing on drugs and her younger sister finding her passed out. Later on in the episode, Rue showed up to her drug dealer friend Fez’s house to get drugs at the wrong time and was pressured into taking Fentanyl by Fez’s supplier. This episode we also learned a ton about another important character, Nate, who is played by a white cis gender male. During Nate’s childhood, he found and watched his fathers porn collection, which consisted of his dads personal sex tapes with queer men and transgender women. This was when Nate found out his dad was into penis, as he is married to Nate’s mom, a cis gender woman. Nate’s girlfriend, Maddy, who is played by a mixed (half white half Mexican) cisgender woman, falsely accuses a man of raping her while she was “blacked out,” even though it was consensual sex, because she doesn’t want to upset Nate by admitting she had sex with another man named Tyler. This causes Nate to lash out, and due to the fact that he is obsessive, possessive and insane, he stalks Tyler for days and finds out where he works and lives. He breaks into Tyler's apartment while he’s gone and when Tyler comes home, Nates ties him up and beats the shit out of him for “raping” Maddy. To be fair - Maddy was 17 when they had sex and Tyler was 22, so although he wasn’t aware, he did have sex with a minor which is illegal and makes him a pedofile. Jules, Rue’s best friend in the show, is played by a transgender white woman. She is using a dating app and starts talking to a guy who keeps himself anonymous and lies to her about who he is - but in the end of the episode, it is revealed that the guy is Nate, who turns out to also be closeted like his father and struggling with his own sexuality. Another important character that the episode focuses on is Kat, who is played by a white Brazilian cisgender woman. Kat loses her virginity to a stranger at a party because she feels pressured by stigma. Shortly after, her sex tape from that night got leaked to her school. She quickly has it taken down because it is child pornography. Even though the video got deleted, it got reposted by another user. Kat reads the comments under the new video and is inspired to sign up for the website's cam program.

I would say that the cast of Euphoria is decently diverse compared to other popular shows in this age. It showcases a spectrum of of different races, ethnicities, sexualities and gender identities, from white, Black, Hispanic to cisgender and transgender, to an array sexuality. We do see lack of Asian, Native and gender non conforming representation in season one. McKay is one of the only Black characters we see in Euphoria, who is there mainly showcased as Nate Jacobs (white man) best friend and Cassie's (white woman) boyfriend. He doesn’t have much of his own storyline, but it is a bit of a stereotypical role as we see him forced into college football by his dad. Moving on to gender indentity, it’s rare to see transgender people in television and I think that the transgender character Jules is represented in a non harmful way and it’s a really great, positive thing that Euphoria included this character. Also, sexuality is represented very well in Euphoria I would say. I don’t think I could pin down Nate and his fathers sexuality, but neither of them are straight which shows a spectrum of sexuality in Euphoria. Nate and his dad are shown struggling with internalized homophobia, fear and sexual confusion, and they deal with that through violence. Later on in Euphoria, Rue and Jules end up catching feelings for each other and making out so we can conclude that neither of them is straight as well. Something we see in this show later on is Rue’s mom accepting Rue’s sexuality, which breaks typical stereotypes for queer characters in televesion as we are typically fed the idea of parents being non accepting of their childrens sexuality. It’s great for LGTBQ+ representation that these character are multidimensional and being queer or trans is not their only personality trait - they all have incredible background stories and struggles that they deal with aside from their sexuality and gender identity. Next to cisgender characters in Euphoria, Jules (transgender woman - the only non cisgender character in the show) has a ton of speaking parts in the show as she is one of the main characters. Jules has her own storyline like other main characters - there is an episode glimpsing into her own pre-transition and traumatic experiences. I believe that Euphoria definitely shatters a ton of stereotypes seen in society. One take on this is Rue, a cisgender woman, hating the idea of gender roles and being feminine - we see her saying she hates the idea of wearing a dresses. Although some characters break stereotypes, Nate Jacobs is the epitome of toxic masculinity and gender roles. He believes that girls need to act, dress and extremely stereotypically feminine, as well as be “pure” virgins for him to have sex with them.

I think that the television show Euphoria does not touch on political issues very much, although it does touch on some issues that seem private but do have political implications, such as drug abuse, mental health issues and abortion. Rue is shown dealing with her own drug abuse journey throughout the season, which began with her mental health issues. Rue suffers from depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, ADD and OCD. When she was younger and her father was struggling with cancer, she took one of his pills and that's where her drug journey began. After her father passes, she uses drugs as a coping mechanism and becomes addicted. On the other hand, Euphoria showcases abortion near the end of the season when character Cassie ends up in a teen pregnancy after finding out her boyfriend impregnated her. When she opens up to him about being pregnant, he freaks out and tells her he isn’t ready to be a father and he pressures her to get an aboriton. Later on, Cassie breaks down to her mom asking her for advice as she is unsure if she wants to keep the baby, like she wants, or get an abortion, as her boyfriend McKay wants.

Levinson, Sam. “Euphoria - Stuntin’ Like My Daddy” Episode. HBO Max 1, no. 1. New York, New York: HBO, June 16, 2019.