Readings on Induced Abortion, Volume 1: Politics and Policies articles

Recent articles from Readings on Induced Abortion, Volume 1: Politics and Policies

The Abortion activists.(profiles of typical members of the National Abortion Rights Action League and the National Right to Life Committee)
January 1, 2000... Summary There are a number of distinctive differences in the characteristics and attitudes of the members of the two major organizations supporting and opposing legal abortion--the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and the...

The harassment of U.S. Abortion providers.
January 1, 2000... Summary In 1985, 47 percent of abortion providers experienced antiabortion harassment. The approximately 1,250 facilities that were affected served 83 percent of all abortion patients. Nonhospital facilities performing 400 or more...

The holy war.(religious right antiabortion groups and violence against abortion clinics)(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2000... "Direct action simply recognizes what in fact is taking place, that innocent human lives are being destroyed, and that the only appropriate response is one that stops this killing." (Curtis Beseda, convicted of four counts of bombing and arson...

Abortion: Understanding differences.(analyzing the stands of the pro-choice and pro-life movements)
January 1, 2000... Apart from some of the nastier reasons people impute to each other, just why is it that there are such profound differences about abortion? For at least 20 years, we have asked that question of each other, just as we have asked how our own...

The War between the women.(survey establishes profiles of pro-life and pro-choice activists)
January 1, 2000... Abortion and arguments about abortion have been a common feature of the American scene for at least the last century and a half. (1) The 19th century had its own right-to-life movement, made up of male physicians who argued that abortion was...

Half a loaf: A new antiabortion strategy.
January 1, 2000... The right-to-life movement is at a critical point in its crusade to prohibit abortion. With an administration publicly committed to outlawing abortion, antiabortion senators as chairmen of key committees, and many abortion opponents newly...

Antiprogestin drugs: Medical and legal issues. (Comment).
January 1, 2000... The Webster decision of the U.S. Supreme Court,(1) one aspect of which upheld state conditions limiting delivery of late abortion services, underscores the need for safe and reliable means to perform abortion early in pregnancy.(2) The Missouri...

Fetal research under fire: The influence of Abortion politics.
January 1, 2000... Summary Since 1973, fetal research has repeatedly been used as a weapon in the war against abortion, miring important research in seemingly endless controversy. Government funding of fetal research has been suspended several times: A 1974...

Late Abortion and Technological advances in fetal viability.
January 1, 2000... The most recent data indicate that only about 200 abortions a year, or one-tenth of one percent of the total, are performed after 24 weeks of gestation, the traditional line dividing the potentially viable fetus from one that has no chance of...

When does personhood begin? (Special Report).(when does life and personhood begin)
January 1, 2000... We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of...

Fetal research and antiabortion politics: Holding science hostage.
January 1, 2000... Revolutionary technical advances in probing, viewing and listening to the pregnant womb, and in culturing and evaluating the products and byproducts of conception, have brought us to the verge of understanding and treating disease processes...

The fetus as person: Possible legal consequences of the Hogan-helms amendment. (Comment and Controversy).
January 1, 2000... Neither the United States nor any state shall deprive any human being, from the moment of conception, of life without due process of law; nor deny to any human being, from the moment of conception, within its jurisdiction, the equal protections...

The 1988 abortion referenda: Lessons for the future. (Special Report).(effect of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services on proliferation of pro-life and pro-choice ballot referendum in the late 1980 and early 1990s)
January 1, 2000... In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, (1) which gave states greater authority to regulate abortion, both prochoice and right-to-life activists in several states are advocating...

The abortion issue in the 1984 Elections.
January 1, 2000... Summary In the 1984 election, Ronald Reagan, the Republican presidential incumbent and an opponent of legal abortion, defeated Walter Mondale, a prochoice Democrat, by a wide margin. Despite Reagan's sweep of 49 states, however,...

Letting the people decide: How the antiabortion referenda fared.(1985 referendums in three New England towns upheld the Supreme Court's decision on Roe vs. Wade)
January 1, 2000... On Election Day, 1985, voters in three New England towns--Bristol, Connecticut, and Dover and Derry, New Hampshire--were confronted by a question on the ballot that asked whether Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized...

The People vote on abortion funding: Colorado and Washington.
January 1, 2000... In 1967, Colorado became the first state in the country to liberalize its abortion law when the legislature voted to allow abortions if a pregnancy threatened the woman's life or her physical or mental health, if it resulted from rape or...

The abortion issue in the 1980 Elections.
January 1, 2000... Summary The political opponents of legal abortion achieved considerable gains in the 1980 American elections. A president who was committed to a strong antiabortion position was elected, and antiabortion candidates prevailed in six out of...

Abortion and the 1978 congressional Elections.
January 1, 2000... Public interest in political and social controversies seems to have diminished during the second half of the 1970s as Americans focused more on their individual lives and less on the broader and more divisive issues of the 1960s and early...

Is support of abortion political suicide?
January 1, 2000... The 93rd Congress had barely convened in January 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its sweeping decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton declaring unconstitutional almost all state laws on abortion. The Court ruled that states could...

Hospital mergers and reproductive health care. (SPECIAL REPORT).
January 1, 2000... Across the country, a growing trend of hospital mergers reflects an effort by health care facilities to consolidate in order to reduce costs, eliminate empty beds and compete successfully for managed care contracts. When hospitals merge or...

The restoration of abortion services at Cook County Hospital. (SPECIAL REPORT).
January 1, 2000... On the evening of September 16, 1992, Six women obtained abortions at Chicago's Cook County Hospital, a massive public institution that is the primary source of medical care for the city's large indigent population. The procedures went...

Is Medicaid pronatalist? The effect of eligibility expansions on abortions and births. (ARTICLES).(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2000... Context: Income thresholds for Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women were raised in two phases between 1987 and 1991. During roughly the same period, the U.S. fertility rate rose and the abortion rate declined; changes were particularly...

Women's reproductive choices: The impact of Medicaid funding restrictions.(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2000... As of January 1997,34 states were enforcing restrictions on Medicaid funding for abortions. Determining whether these restrictions affect women's reproductive decisions was the object of a fixed-effects log-linear analysis using 11 years of...

Courts sink new Title X regulations: (Special Report).
January 1, 2000... On February 2, 1988, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) issued the final version of new regulations governing how Title X funds could be disbursed to family planning projects. The new rules, scheduled to go into effect 30-60...

Taking family planning out of Title X: The impact of the proposed new regulations. (Comment).
January 1, 2000... On September 1, 1987, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) published in the Federal Register its proposed new Title X regulations. These proposed amendments reflect changes in the Title X program that had been called for by...

Title X and its critics.
January 1, 2000... Introduction On April 5, 1984, Senator Jesse Helms (R.N.C.) was the lead witness at a hearing before the Senate Labor and Human Resources Subcommittee on Family and Human Services. The subcommittee was considering the renewal of Title X of...

After the Hyde Amendment: Public funding for abortion in FY 1978.
January 1, 2000... What effect did the passage of the Hyde Amendment and its successors have on federal and state funding of abortion services for poor women? In 1976, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, the first of a series of amendments to annual...

The impact of restricting Medicaid financing for abortion.
January 1, 2000... On February 19, 1980, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services) again began paying for medically necessary abortions for women eligible for Medicaid, the program under which the federal...

Abortion and government policy.
January 1, 2000... There are at least three important questions to consider in any attempt to propose a government policy on the availability of abortion services. The first is whether it is theoretically possible to devise a policy that is coherent and...

The court, the congress and the president: Turning back the clock on the pregnant poor.(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2000... "Well, as you know, there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people can't." President Jimmy Garter, press conference, July 12, 1977. Safe, legal abortions are apparently to be added to the...

Pregnancy counseling and abortion referral for patients in federally funded family planning programs.
January 1, 2000... Family planning programs often see patients who have medical or social problems that are unrelated to fertility regulation or that require interventions beyond the program's capabilities. Both professional standards and the regulations...

The impact of requirements for parental consent on minors' abortions in Mississippi. (RESEARCH NOTE).
January 1, 2000... Mississippi data for 1993 indicate that the state's new parental consent requirement had little effect on the abortion rate among minors. In a comparison of Mississippi residents who had abortions during the five months before and the six...

Parental involvement in minors' Abortion decisions. (ARTICLES).(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2000... In a 1991 study based on a nationally representative sample of more than 1,500 unmarried minors having an abortion, 61% of the respondents said that one or both of their parents (usually the mother) knew about the abortion. Only 26% of the...

Parental notice and consent for abortion: Out of step with family law principles and policies. (Comment).
January 1, 2000... In 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court in Hodgson v. Minnesota (1) allowed a state to require, with limited exceptions, notification of both parents before a young woman under 18 has an abortion, as long as the law provides a judicial bypass...

Factors associated with the use of court bypass by minors to obtain abortions.
January 1, 2000... Summary Interviews with minors at four Minnesota abortion clinics revealed that 43 percent used the court bypass option that is part of that state's parental notification statute. The proportion who did so increased with age and was most...

Judging teenagers: How minors fare when they seek court-authorized abortions.
January 1, 2000... The U.S. Supreme Court has held that a state may require an unmarried minor who seeks an abortion to notify or obtain the consent of her parents, provided that if she does not wish to do so, she must be able to obtain permission from a judge....

Parental notification: Is it settled? (Law and Policy Analysis).
January 1, 2000... Does the Supreme Court's recent decision in the widely publicized Utah parental notification case permit states to require that all minors notify their parents before obtaining an abortion? Despite numerous reports to the contrary, the Court...

Your parents or the judge: Massachusetts' new abortion consent law.
January 1, 2000... "As a practical matter, I would suppose that the need to commence judicial proceedings in order to obtain a legal abortion would impose a burden at least as great as, and probably greater than, that imposed on the minor child by the need to...

Telling parents: Clinic policies and adolescents' use of family planning and abortion services.
January 1, 2000... U.S. courts have consistently upheld the right of mature minors to consent for contraceptive and abortion services. (1) In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled in Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth (2) and in Bellotti v. Baird,s {3)...

Teenagers and pregnancy: The law in 1979.
January 1, 2000... Since January 1976, when we last reviewed state laws and policies affecting the right of teenagers to consent for their own birth control and other reproductive health care, (1) the U.S. Supreme Court has in effect issued at least a partial...

Pregnancy, teenagers and the law, 1976.
January 1, 2000... A number of significant developments have occurred since June 1974, when the authors last reviewed state laws and policies affecting the right of teenagers to obtain sex-related medical care on their own consent. (1) At that time,...

Pregnancy, teenagers and the law, 1974.
January 1, 2000... This analysis of laws is based in large part on statutes, court decisions and attorneys general opinions which have been reported in Family Planning/Population Reporter, a bimonthly publication of the Center for Family Planning Program...

The Institute of Medicine reports on legalized abortion and the public health. (Comment and Controversy).
January 1, 2000... Two major conclusions emerge from the year-long study by the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine about how legalized abortion affects the public health: * "Fewer deaths and a lower rate of medical complications" may be...

The effect of legalization of abortion on population growth and public health.(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2000... In what ways has increased access to legal induced abortion changed behavior; and what has been the impact, if any, of such changes on population growth and public health? We will attempt in this article to evaluate these phenomena, focusing on...

The measurement of public opinion on abortion: The effects of survey design.
January 1, 2000... A factorial experiment examined the effects of the wording and sequence of survey questions on the measurement of attitudes toward abortion. When a first-trimester pregnancy is specified, 55% of respondents agree that a woman should be able to...

Measuring public attitudes on abortion: Methodological and substantive considerations.
January 1, 2000... Data from a 1989 CBS News/New York Times survey are used to examine the effect that the framing of questions on abortion has on estimates of what proportions of the population support various legal positions. The nationwide data and results...

Abortion in context: Historical trends and future changes.(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2000... Summary Reform of abortion laws in the United States stemmed from concern over the health consequences of illegal abortion. Feminists were relative latecomers to the movement, and abortion did not become a major political issue until after...

Morality and legality.(Abortion and the Public Opinion Polls, part 1)
January 1, 2000... Two recent surveys of representative national samples of American women aged 18 and older provide new insights into the attitudes of women concerning the legality and morality of abortion, and the characteristics of women who have had...

Abortion attitudes, 1965-1980: Trends and determinants.(Polling Data)(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2000... Summary Approval of legal abortion increased dramatically among Americans between 1965 and 1973 (from an average of 41 percent for six different reasons in 1965 to 68 percent in 1973). Levels remained stable through 1977, then showed a...

Women who have had abortions.(Abortion and the Public Opinion Polls, part 2)
January 1, 2000... National information on the characteristics of U.S. women who have obtained abortions has come in the past from reports issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The characteristics for which data were available, aside from those...

Trends in attitudes toward abortion, 1972-1975.
January 1, 2000... Two-thirds of a nationwide random sample of Americans polled in February 1976 said they agree with the statement that "the right of a woman to have an abortion should be left entirely up to the woman and her doctor." For the first time in the...

Attitudes of American teenagers toward abortion.
January 1, 2000... Numerous public opinion surveys commissioned by academicians, a presidential commission and private organizations in the 1960s and early 1970s document the growing acceptability of abortion among adult Americans. (1) None of these surveys,...

Catholic clergy on abortion: Preliminary findings of a New York state survey.
January 1, 2000... The Catholic Church's official condemnation of direct abortion and its opposition to laws permitting such abortions under any circumstances are well known. Numerous surveys, however, have indicated that the attitudes of individual Catholics are...

State abortion policy, geographic access to abortion providers and changing family formation.
January 1, 2000... Context: One of the goals in cutting welfare payments and setting time limits on welfare receipt is the reduction of out-of-wedlock childbearing among poor women. Yet such changes may increase the demand for abortion at the same time that...

The effects of economic conditions and access to reproductive health services on state abortion rates and birthrates. (ARTICLES).(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2000... The effects that such factors as wages, welfare policies and access to physicians, family planning clinics and abortion providers have on abortion rates and birthrates are examined in analyses based on 1978-1988 state-level data and...

State actions on reproductive health issues in 1996.
January 1, 2000... In 1996, state actions in such diverse areas as health care, welfare reform, education and the environment attracted national attention as they increased the states' involvement in setting the country's social agenda. Many of these initiatives...

The effects of mandatory delay laws on abortion patients and providers. (SPECIAL REPORT).
January 1, 2000... Since the Supreme Court ruled in 1973 in Roe v. Wade that a woman has the right, based on her constitutional right to privacy, to have an abortion, activists and legislators opposed to abortion have sought other means of restricting access to...

Correction.(impact of mandatory waiting periods on abortion statistics)(Correction Notice)(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2000... In "The Effects of Mandatory Delay Laws on Abortion Patients and Providers" by Frances A. Althaus and Stanley K. Henshaw [26: 228-231 & 233], an incorrect number was given in the second full paragraph of the left-hand column on page 231. The...

How patients view mandatory waiting periods for abortion.(Polling Data)(Statistical Data Included)
January 1, 2000... Summary In recent years, various legislatures have enacted laws and ordinances mandating a waiting period for women seeking to obtain abortions. Legal challenges to such statutes have been successful, except in one instance (Akron, Ohio),...

State legislation on reproductive health in 1990: What was proposed and enacted. (Special Report).
January 1, 2000... Introduction In 1990, state legislatures across the United States considered more than 1,500 measures related to abortion, family planning, sterilization, teenage pregnancy, infertility, new reproductive technologies, maternal and child...

State laws and the provision of family planning and abortion services in 1985.
January 1, 2000... Sixty-five laws related to fertility were enacted by the 49 state legislatures that held sessions in 1985. (*) This was the largest number enacted since 1973, and the second largest total since The Alan Guttmacher Institute began tracking state...