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Olivia Rodrigo’s Team Stops Distributing Morning After Pill At Her Concerts 

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Olivia Rodrigo was previously being praised for allowing Plan B emergency contraceptives to be distributed at her shows on her GUTS World Tour. Now, however, her team is stepping back on giving out the emergency contraceptive, citing that there are children present at many of the shows.

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France Becomes World’s First Country To Make Abortion A Constitutional Right 

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This week, France became the first country in the world to make getting an abortion a constitutional right. The effort to do so in the nation began as a direct response to the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade, which removed federal protections for abortion rights. 

According to reports from CNN, lawmakers from both houses of the French Parliament voted 780 to 72 in favor of the measure; in order to amend the French constitution they needed a three-fifths majority. 

Monday’s vote also marked the final step in the legislative process to approve the amendment. The French Senate and the National Assembly both “overwhelmingly approved the amendment earlier this year,” according to Joshua Berlinger and Xiaofei Xu of CNN. The gathering took place at the Palace of Versailles. 

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The amendment itself guarantees citizens the freedom to abortion in France, with some groups and lawmakers calling on stronger language to be used to call abortion a “right.” France is also hoping that this history-making decision will steer other nations towards a similar direction. 

Abortion rights are currently under threat in the US as well as other parts of Europe under far-right party power, like Hungary. 

Following the decision, the Eiffel Tower lit up in celebratory fashion with the words “my body my choice.” Prime Minister Gabriel Attal stated that lawmakers in general had a “moral debt” to all women who were forced to get an illegal abortions in the past. 

“Above all, we’re sending a message to all women: your body belongs to you.”

To celebrate the new amendment’s addition to the constitution, French President Emmanuel Macron said the government would be throwing a formal ceremony this Friday, which is International Women’s Rights Day. 

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In 1975, the Health Minister at the time, Simone Veil, who was an Auschwitz survivor, was able to get abortion legalized in France after a massive campaign. Veil has long been hailed as one of France’s most famous feminist icons. 

France has widely supported the right to an abortion. In fact, reports state that the lawmakers who voted against the amendment didn’t do so because they opposed abortion, but instead thought it was an unnecessary measure due to the nation’s overall support for reproductive rights.

With the US’s overturning of Roe v Wade and the overall debate over reproductive rights in America, France wanted to move quickly to guarantee abortion rights by putting it in the constitution. Before 2022, President Macron’s government held the same position as the lawmakers on the opposition of the recent amendment vote, they thought it was just unnecessary. 

When the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, France was pushed to do something official. 

French Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti had argued before 2022 that history is full of examples of “fundamental rights” being taken away when they were believed to be permanently protected. 

“As we were recently reminded by the decision of the US Supreme Court, we now have irrefutable proof that no democracy, not even the largest of them all, is immune,” he stated. 

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More Than 600 Google Employees Demand Abortion Care Protections

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More than 650 Google workers have signed a petition lobbying for the company to create policies that would protect and provide support for employees and consumers seeking abortion care.

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Roe Vs Wade Overturned, Experts Warn Maternal Mortality Rate Will Rise In US 

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The Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe vs Wade last week in a 6-3 decision, officially revoking the constitutional right to an abortion in the United States. Experts are now saying that pregnancy-related deaths will almost certainly increase, especially among people of color. 

Rachel Hardeman, a reproductive health equity professor and researcher at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, spoke on the issue: 

“There are going to be more people who are forced to carry a pregnancy to term, which means that there’s going to be a greater number of people who are at risk. More pregnancy means more likelihood of deaths.”

Current state bans could lead to an additional 75,000 births every year for those who won’t be able to access abortion, according to one experts estimate. The bans will also likely impact younger and poorer people of color at a much higher rate.

Currently in America, for every 10,000 births, 23.8 people have died from either pregnancy or childbirth-related causes, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

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More than half of the US states are likely to ban abortion following the fall of Roe.

“The truth of the matter is, it’s already hitting people [of color] harder than others – that’s been the reality,” said Monica McLemore, an associate professor of family healthcare nursing at University of California, San Francisco.

“Black people in the US were already 3.5 times more likely than white peers to die because of pregnancy and childbirth, according to one study looking at data from 2016-2017, and 2.9 times more likely,” according to a CDC analysis in 2020. 

“Because Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities are going to be disproportionately impacted by lack of access to abortion services, it’s going to exacerbate the maternal mortality racial gap that we’ve already seen in the United States,” Hardeman said.

“It’s translating into not getting the care they need, which can be a matter of life and death. And racism also takes an immense physical toll, so by the time that person becomes pregnant, they are at less optimal health than their white counterparts who haven’t experienced racism across the life course.”

The cumulative and chronic effects of living in America as a person of color increases stress, which can also affect reproductive health. “We know that the stress pathway is what leads to infant mortality, preterm birth, and other outcomes,” Hardeman said.

“We have to be thinking about the Scotus decision and abortion bans generally as a racist policy, because the burden will fall the hardest on Black pregnant people, it’s going to fall hard on Indigenous people and other people of color, people living in rural areas as well and people of lower socioeconomic status,” Hardeman continued.

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“The supreme court decision on Friday and bans on abortion instituted at the state level disproportionately harm people of color and reinforce a system of inequity and, frankly, of white supremacy.”

“If you think about why people get abortions, it’s often because it’s not safe for them to stay pregnant,” Stevenson said. “The people who are currently having abortions are very likely to actually have higher rates of pregnancy-related deaths and maternal mortality than the people who are currently giving birth.”

Having an abortion is “much, much, much safer than staying pregnant”, Stevenson said. 

Current research indicated that childbirth is 14 times more deadly than having an abortion. 

“We have to be thinking about the fact that because we live in a society where access to resources is based on racism and race, there are people who are not going to be able to access the services that are available.”

McLemore emphasized that direct action is what’s needed in order to protect the people in states that will be banning abortions. 

“Congress could act right now and render Scotus’s decision irrelevant by enshrining reproductive rights into national law. If this Congress doesn’t, she said, the six in 10 Americans who support abortion rights should vote for a new Congress that will,” she explained.

“We need an all-hands-on-deck approach here – with brilliance, not fear.”

 United Nations Health Expert Condemns US Over Threat To Abortion Rights 

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Special rapporteur for the United Nations, Dr. Tlaleng Mofokeng, is calling on the US Supreme Court to uphold the right to abortion in America. Dr. Mofokeng is arguing that the US is risking undermining international human rights laws and are indirectly threatening the right to a safe abortion for other countries around the world. 

Dr. Mofokeng is one of many global observers whose main job is to travel the world and defend human rights. She argues in a brief filed in a US court that by overturning abortion rights, the nation would be violating international human rights treates that were ratified by the US; including the convention against torture, and forcing a woman to carry their pregnancy to term, regardless of the personal risk for the mother and child. 

In an interview, Mofokeng told the media she could have “filed a brief on abortion rights, in any other court, in any other abortion case, globally. However, the US courts are dealing with the direct threat posed to abortion rights in the supreme court’s upcoming session.

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“We have this joke among us that when the US sneezes the rest of the world catches a cold. So we know that politically that what happens in the United States… does have an impact in precedents elsewhere in the world.”

Roe vs Wade is the famous 1973 court case that gave Americans the constitutional right to an abortion in privacy. At the time, the case invalidated numerous state abortion bans and restrictions, and allowed individuals to terminate a pregnancy up to the point where the fetus can survive outside the womb; around 24 weeks. 

“If that gets overturned, it has catastrophic implications, not just for the US. I fear overturning Roe would embolden global attacks on reproductive rights.”

Mofokeng’s  most recent UN report outlined “the challenges Covid-19 posed to reproductive rights, and how colonialism continues to impact global policies on reproduction, from sterilization to abortion bans.”

“It means that even those people who are conservative, who are anti-rights, in any country in the world, will actually now start referencing the US court as an example of jurisprudence that should be followed, and this is why this is so dangerous.”

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“If Roe … [were] overturned, many US states will implement bans or near-bans on abortion access that will make individual state laws irreconcilable with international human rights law. This would cause irreparable harm to women and girls in violation of the United States’ obligations under the human rights treaties it has signed and ratified,” Mofokeng’s brief argued.

“The denial of safe abortions and subjecting women and girls to humiliating and judgmental attitudes in such contexts of extreme vulnerability and where timely health care is essential amount to torture or ill treatment.”

In one recent analysis, the Guttmacher Institute found “26 states are certain or likely to outlaw abortion should Roe be overturned.”

“The rise in global anti-gender and anti-women’s rights is such that people will grasp at anything that seems to make their case solid, and  the case before the supreme court now relies on non-medical, non-scientific misinformation,” said Mofokeng.

“It means we have a risk of now having global jurisprudence – or at least influences in the global world – using jurisprudence that’s ill-informed. And that’s very dangerous, to undo the court’s decisions takes decades, sometimes a lifetime, – and that’s why it’s dangerous.”