The climate emergency in Latin America is intensifying a long-standing yet underrecognized health crisis: reproductive harm due to agrochemical exposure, particularly for rural women. As shifting climate patterns threaten to exacerbate these harms, it is crucial to bring these issues into the focus of climate action. The region’s human rights framework — including landmark cases before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and reports by special procedures — has already addressed the realities of agrotoxins and their impact on health rights. In light of human rights obligations, building on these legal advancements by developing climate policy, like national adaptation plans, is essential to give effect to paragraph 12 of the Paris Agreement’s Preamble, which calls for respecting and promoting human rights, gender equality, and the empowerment of women.
Tag: reproductive health
Out of the Shadows: Menopause and the Law
by Rupa Palanki
In May 2024, a bipartisan group of female senators introduced the Advancing Menopause Care and Mid-Life Women’s Health Act. The bill allocates $275 million over five years toward strengthening and expanding federal research, health care provider training, and public health education on menopause and mid-life women’s health issues. If enacted, it would be the most comprehensive federal effort to improve health care related to menopause. However, further action related to the labeling of low-dose estrogen and workplace support is still necessary to support individuals experiencing menopause.
Unmet Needs for Legislative and Policy Action
Menopause is the natural stage of life when an individual has not had a menstrual period for twelve consecutive months, signifying the end of their fertile years. Half of the American population will eventually experience this transition. Currently, 75 million American individuals are either in menopause, perimenopause (the time before menopause when menstrual cycles may become irregular), or postmenopause (when an individual has not had a menstrual period for longer than a year). Another 6,000 reach menopause daily. Read More
Abortion Bans Threatening Pregnant Patients’ Lives Are Unconstitutional
By James G. Hodge, Jr., Jennifer Piatt, Erica N. White, Summer Ghaith, Madisyn Puchebner, and C. McKenna Sauer
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion, laws went into effect in multiple states that restrict when abortions may be provided, including during potentially life-threatening emergencies.
To the extent highly restrictive, amorphous, and indeterminate abortion bans contravene physician implementation of life-saving interventions for pregnant patients — and thus infringe upon the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of the right to life — they are unconstitutional.
Stemming Supreme Court Rights Reversals
By James G. Hodge, Jr.
Based on the May 2022 leak of an initial draft, most believe the Supreme Court will carry through some rescission of abortion rights later this month through its final opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Already, concerns have arisen over other freedoms the Court may seriously reconsider down the road, including rights to gay marriage, intimacy, contraception, and informational privacy.
A Brief History of Abortion Jurisprudence in the United States
By James R. Jolin
POLITICO’s leak of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization suggests that U.S. abortion rights are on the verge of a fundamental shift.
If the official decision, expected this month, hews closely to the draft, the constitutional right to abortion affirmed in Roe v. Wade (1973), Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), and other seminal Supreme Court rulings will disappear.
This brief history of abortion rights and jurisprudence in the United States aims to clarify just what is at stake in this case.
The Leaked Dobbs Opinion, Explained
By Chloe Reichel
On May 2, 2022, Politico published a leaked draft of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which showed the Supreme Court’s intent to overturn the right to abortion as decided in Roe v. Wade.
In response to the leak, the Petrie-Flom Center hosted a discussion with legal historian and Daniel P.S. Paul Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law Mary Ziegler and Petrie-Flom Center Faculty Director, James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law, and Deputy Dean I. Glenn Cohen.
Together, Cohen and Ziegler explained the background of the case, the contents of the draft opinion, and its potential implications not just for abortion access, but also for other constitutionally-protected rights, and for access to reproductive technologies, such as in-vitro fertilization.
The highlights of the conversation have been edited and condensed below.
Native Reproductive Justice: Practices and Policies from Relinquishment to Family Preservation
By Lauren van Schilfgaarde
Adoption can be, and frequently is, a celebrated extension of kinship ties within Native communities. But we cannot ignore the historical context of adoption as a tool to empty tribal communities and delete tribal cultures. Nor can we ignore the historical context of the simultaneous deprivation and weaponization of reproductive health care, both of which deny Native women reproductive self-determination.
It is these contexts in which anti-abortion proponents seek to ameliorate the further denial of health care through increased adoption. The proposal is eerily familiar.
Tennessee on My Mind: Reflections on the Reinstated Abortion ‘Reason Bans’
By Cathy Zhang
In February, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a one-sentence order allowing Tennessee’s “reason ban” abortion restrictions to go into effect. The restrictions make it a felony for a provider (or any other person) to perform an abortion if the provider “knows” the patient is seeking an abortion on account of the fetus’s sex, race, or probable diagnosis of Down syndrome.
The court below had previously enjoined the Tennessee law, which also includes a pre-viability abortion ban. This order leaves the previability ban in place while lifting the injunction on the reason bans; the reason bans will remain in effect until the Supreme Court makes a further ruling on abortion in Dobbs. In her dissent, Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore charged that the court’s order “subvert[s] the normal judicial process” and reflects a growing tendency of federal courts “to delay the adjudication of laws that significantly impair constitutional rights.”
Numerous health organizations, racial justice groups, and disability advocates alike have warned against the harms that the reason bans will inflict on people of color and disabled persons. Statements from these groups, along with 19 states and the District of Columbia, a host of constitutional law scholars, and other amici make clear that the law’s purported concern for marginalized groups belies an effort to restrict abortion access at the expense of pregnant people’s health and constitutional rights.
Brittney Poolaw and the Long Tradition of State-Sponsored Control of Women and Their Fertility
By Lauren Breslow
On October 5, 2021, a 20-year-old Native American woman, Brittney Poolaw, was convicted by an Oklahoma jury of manslaughter for the death of her 17-week-old, non-viable fetus.
Her conviction stands as a modern recapitulation of the historical violations that women, especially Black and Brown women, have endured regarding their fertility.
Health Justice Meets Reproductive Justice
By Rachel Rebouché
Over the past few weeks, the headlines have been dominated by the implementation of a Texas “heartbeat” law. The law, which prohibits abortions after detection of fetal cardiac activity, “shall be enforced exclusively through . . . private civil actions” and “no enforcement may be undertaken by an officer of the state or local government.” For that reason, the Fifth Circuit, and then the Supreme Court, declined to enjoin the law’s application because, in part, no one had yet to enforce it. The Court did not opine on the law’s constitutionality, even though the statute directly contradicts precedent protecting abortion rights before viability. Indeed, as the DOJ argued in its recent lawsuit against Texas, the state designed the law specifically to circumvent judicial review.
What does Texas’s abortion ban have to do with health justice? The answer may not seem obvious because of how the debate over Texas’s law has been framed. Commentary has focused on whether or not litigants have standing to challenge the law or whether the federal government could successfully intervene to stop enforcement of the law. And these are important questions, especially for the providers and those “aiding and abetting” them, who are subject to the lawsuits of private citizens suing for $10,000 per procedure in violation of the law.
The costs of this law, however, could far exceed these potential damages. A health justice perspective highlights those costs and how lack of access to abortion entrenches economic and racial inequality.