Portside

Women’s-health clinics have been under assault for years. Abortions make up just 3 percent of the services Planned Parenthood performs. Planned Parenthood estimates that 130,000 women in Texas go without preventive health care, like breast-cancer screenings, due to Texas' anti-abortion cuts to women’s-health-care funding, and a lot of those women will die as a result.

In recent years Eastern Europe has witnessed a push, in many cases driven by socially dominant Churches, to reinforce or tighten abortion legislation and deter access to them.

More than two months after the deadly explosion in West, Texas, the state has done almost nothing to prevent future disasters.

Fans of Wendy Davis, the Texas state senator whose marathon filibuster stopped an anti-abortion bill in its tracks, are expressing their sentiments in Amazon reviews of the shoes that Wendy wore.

Fueled by a race-baiting, national marketing campaign and the missionary-like evangelism of its affiliates, Care Net has turned the complex reality behind black abortion rates into a single, fictional story: poor black women who have abortions are the unwitting victims of feminists and morally deficient reproductive healthcare providers, embodied in sadists such as Gosnell. Crisis pregnancy centers, in this fable, are the best place those women can go to be saved.

The effort to restrict abortion has been a backlash, not just to the decision to end a pregnancy but the decision to treat women like full and equal participants in our society...At work while pregnant? Driving? Working with chemicals or heavy loads? In many states, if something were to happen to your pregnancy that could be traced to your behavior, you could find yourself dragged into jail under fetal protection or personhood laws.

Argentine Pope Will Make History, but Backs Vatican Line