By Jordan Brooks and Tamar Ezer
Expanding access to midwives and doulas in the United States is a vital and often overlooked way to increase access to culturally-congruent birthing options during pregnancy and improve health outcomes for birthing individuals and their children.
By Katie Gu
In the post-Dobbs fight to safeguard reproductive healthcare, a new spotlight has been placed on two existing federal laws: the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA).
Guidance documents issued over the summer by federal agencies emphasize how these laws can be used to protect reproductive health privacy and access.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By Malinda L. Seymore
Adoption and abortion both rely on concepts of consent, each an exercise in autonomy. Yet in adoption, we rarely consider the constraints on autonomy that often preclude meaningful choice.
By Angie Swanson-Kyriaco
During opening remarks for Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on December 1, 2021, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated that the “obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy” and the “burden” of parenting are eliminated through adoption.
It is no surprise that a conservative, anti-abortion, adoptive parent would have an over-simplified opinion about adoption, expectant parents, and birth parents. In her remarks, Justice Coney Barrett demonstrated a common lack of understanding about the complexities of adoption, and a blithe unawareness about adoption ethics and the need for adoption reform.
As someone who worked for over a decade in the field of reproductive health and rights, and now as the executive director of one of the only nonprofit organizations in the country that exclusively serves first/birth mothers who have relinquished infants for adoption, I know both how detrimental the lack of access to abortion can be, and how significant the lifelong impact of an adoption can prove.
And, as a first/birthmother, I have a deep personal understanding of the significant trauma of placing my own child for adoption, and the lifelong grief and ambiguous loss that follows relinquishment.
By Rickie Solinger
The racial and gender coercions at the heart of adoption clarify the violence inherent in Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s wish to revitalize adoption in America as a substitute for abortion.
The mass practice of adoption, which started in the U.S. in the post-World War II era, pressed white unwed mothers to surrender their babies to a four-faceted cause: preserving the face of white chastity in the era of emergent feminism; bolstering the fraying institutions of white male authority; reinscribing the hegemony of the white family (as this institution, itself, began to weaken); and crucially, underscoring the difference between Black and white.