While S.B. 8 has succeeded in shutting down almost all abortions in Texas clinics, it has led to a surge in awareness of strategies for self-managing abortion that are all but imperceptible to anyone trying to enforce the law. Aid Access saw a spike in requests for services for about a week beginning on August 31, the day before the law took effect, a provider told me.

Patients like Hansen have benefited from a quiet but monumental shift in abortion access enabled by the covid-19 pandemic.

The nurses find themselves facing a bizarre and formidable foe: a multibillion-dollar corporation running a hospital where business executives sit beside Catholic leaders on the board of directors and where, despite more than two decades of for-profit ownership, reproductive health care is restricted by Catholic doctrine.

Clinics in hostile states scrambled to shift their protocols and protect staff. South Dakota’s last abortion clinic, which relies on fly-in providers from out of state, went dark for seven months. All of this provoked an onslaught of calls to staff members and volunteers at abortion funds, who engaged in acts of unseen heroism to preserve access.

There are two ways to tell him this story. One is: We failed you. But another is: We survived.

States that have passed the most abortion restrictions consistently have among the fewest policies to support families, and among the worst health and well-being outcomes for women and children. The coronavirus has laid bare the deadly implications of this absent safety net.

Catholic universities are relying on a religious exemption to avoid recognizing workers’ rights—and workers are appealing to Catholic values to fight back.

The movement for abortion access—not just rights—has arrived, and it’s winning fights across the country.

Last spring, several weeks after she was forced to lay off all six of her employees at Planned Parenthood’s North Austin Health Center, Katie Dickerson was summoned to a Zoom meeting. On the screen was a balding attorney named Michael Abcarian. His law firm, Fisher Phillips, helps employers with “maintaining your union-free status.” Dickerson would later write that the meeting left her so terrified for her job that she spoke of it only to her mother.

In Mexico, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, and public officials are all trying to prevent rape survivors from accessing legal abortion.

Washington lawmakers have enacted some of the country’s most progressive policies to protect reproductive health care. But these measures have run up against the state’s high concentration of religious facilities.

Documents obtained through a public records request revealed the state approved materials that encouraged parents to pray with their children, told men whose partners have had abortions to “handle your personal guilt before God,” and exhorted women to embrace the “blessing” of marriage.