Tag: abortion
A Tennessee Mom Fought Back On Abortion -- By Running For Legislature

A Tennessee Mom Fought Back On Abortion -- By Running For Legislature

A rallying cry has gone up across America over the past few months, with people gathering in cities large and small to protest the influence of Elon Musk, DOGE, and Project 2025 on the federal government. In Austin, Texas, a group of more than 200 people came together in late February for a similar reason — but this gathering had a very specific goal at its core. The first-of-its kind conference was designed to strategize ways to fight the extreme right-wing attack on women’s reproductive rights.

In what’s been described as a pivotal moment for the abortion rights movement, the conference — titled “Abortion in America” and co-founded by author Lauren Peterson, activist Kaitlyn Joshua, and former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards (who died in January) — included panelists like Amanda Zurawski and Samantha Casiano, two of the 20 women who sued the state of Texas after being denied abortions, and Texas radio DJ Ryan Hamilton, who found his wife unconscious after being denied treatment for a miscarriage.

And it invited people from out of state to talk about their experiences, both the dangerous situations they and their loved ones have faced due to abortion bans, and the ways they’re fighting back.

“The aha moment that made me finally decide to go ahead was when I learned about the 10-year-old girl in Ohio, who was raped and had to travel to Indiana to obtain an abortion,” said Allie Phillips, a panelist at the event from Tennessee. “That was the last straw. I had a six-year-old daughter and I was like, ‘That’s it. Nobody is going to protect my daughter like I would, so I’m going to do it.’”

That was the moment, Phillips said, that made her decide to run for office.

The now 30-year-old announced her campaign at the end of 2023, but it took a year of heartache — and a very disturbing conversation with her state representative — to get her to that point.

Phillips and her husband, Bryan, found out they were expecting a daughter at their 15-week sonogram appointment in 2022. Allie said the pregnancy was a celebration for their whole family.

“I remember that I handed Bryan the positive pregnancy test and he was really excited,” she said. “He picked me up and twirled me around, he was so happy.”

Adalie, Phillips’ 6-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, was excited, too. “She told everyone who asked her that she was going to be a big sister,” Phillips said.

The family joyfully named the baby Miley Rose.

‘She only had half a heart working’

But then, a few weeks later, Phillips’ pregnancy took a turn.

“During my 20-week sonogram, Bryan and I were crushed by devastating news,” Phillips said. “Miley’s brain hadn’t developed properly and neither had her kidneys, her stomach, and her bladder. Even though her little heart was beating, she only had half a heart working.”

The fetus had a brain malformation called semilobar holoprosencephaly — a condition that was so severe that it was incompatible with life.

“Not only that, the doctor warned that she could die inside me at any time, and the longer I remained pregnant, the greater the risk would be to my own future fertility and even to my life,” Phillips said.

In Tennessee, abortions are banned after fertilization with very limited exceptions. And while those exceptions allow for saving the life of the mother, Phillips would have to get to the point where her life or a major bodily function required immediate saving before she’d be able to have an abortion.

In states with such extreme abortion bans, like Texas, doctors have left in droves due to the uncertainty around when they can step in to help their patients. There are also countless stories of women dying while waiting for an abortion.

“It was the thought of Adalie motherless that cemented my decision to find a medical facility somewhere that would perform an abortion on me at 20 weeks,” Phillips said. “My mom and I eventually were able to make an appointment at a clinic in New York City that could take me in the next week. But since my husband and I live paycheck to paycheck, I had to appeal to strangers on TikTok to help me raise the $5,000 I needed for the procedure and travel to New York.”

Phillips said that after she had her abortion, she knew she wanted to do something to help people in situations like hers, “regardless of their political views.”

“Shortly after I was back home, I was contacted by the Center for Reproductive Rights, asking if I would join a lawsuit against the Tennessee abortion law. I thought, ‘That’s how I could be of help.’”

Phillips joined the lawsuit, but said she also wanted to work on more immediate change.

A disturbing meeting with her elected official

“I decided to meet with my district representative in the state legislature,” she said. Her idea was a bill she’d called “Miley’s Law,” which would create an exception in Tennessee’s abortion ban allowing for the termination of pregnancies when the fetus has a fatal diagnosis.

She said the meeting with her lawmaker — state Rep. Jeff Burkhart, a Clarksville Republican — was disturbing.

“I quickly learned that these (Republican) lawmakers don’t know anything about reproductive care,” she said. “He was confused because I had had a healthy first pregnancy, and then lost my second one. He told me, ‘I thought only first pregnancies could go bad.’”

Burkhart, a 63-year-old father, told Phillips he’d set up a meeting for her with the state’s attorney general — but never followed through, Phillips said.

“After that, my mom said, ‘Maybe you should run against him,’” Phillips said. “And then my TikTok followers started to say the same thing.”

Burkhart did not respond to a request for comment from Courier Texas.

Fighting back by running for office

Phillips announced her campaign for District 75 in the Tennessee House of Representatives in late 2023. She was 28 years old.

“When I was door-knocking, a lot of people just wanted somebody to listen to them,” she said. “There were times I would stand at someone’s door for an hour, and they would talk about the struggles they had and they would thank me.”

Phillips said she learned that she and the people of her district had more in common than not. Her husband Bryan, a forklift mechanic, and she, a daycare provider, knew what it was like to live paycheck to paycheck, like many of the folks she talked to. And like them, she and her husband cared about their public schools and preventing vouchers from sending tax dollars to private schools.

“There were people who told me, ‘I’ll vote for you for the simple fact that you came and knocked on my door, and that had never happened before,’” Phillips said. “One gentleman told me that he had voted for Republicans for his entire life, and he said he didn’t agree with a lot of things that I was running on.”

But “he said that what was going on in our state and across the country is not okay.”

He cast his ballot for Phillips.

In the summer before the November 2024 election, Phillips and her husband found out they were expecting again. They’d been trying, knowing that it might take some time for her body to fully heal after losing Miley, but not without some hesitation.

“It’s scary to be pregnant in Tennessee,” Phillips said. “It’s scary to be pregnant in this country in general. But I took the risk because I’m not going to let some lawmakers take away the dream that I’ve had since I was a little girl.”

“I got tired of letting them control my brain and my fear. I made the decision to get pregnant again because I want to be — not because JD Vance wants more babies in America, but because it was my dream,” she said.

Phillips announced her pregnancy during her concession speech on Election Night. With just over 11,000 votes, Burkhart won reelection.

Phillips had earned 45 percent of the vote in her district, though — the closest margin of any Democrat in Tennessee trying to flip a seat in the state legislature in 2024.

Moving on

Phillips and her husband learned that the baby they’re expecting is a boy, and they’ve named him Archie. But they’ve worried throughout the whole pregnancy.

“All along I’ve known that if something were to happen to my baby, I wouldn’t be able to get care in Tennessee,” Phillips said.

She had to close her daycare business to campaign, and said if she runs for office again, it’ll be for something more local — like the county commission, city council, or school board. A place “where I could make more of an impact on my local community,” she said.

Phillips said no matter what comes next, she’ll keep sharing her abortion story.

“A lot of the Republican voters I talked to while campaigning didn’t even know we had an abortion ban,” she said. “I will share my story for 20 years if I have to, because it does make a difference.”

Like Phillips, women across the country are increasingly turning their experiences with abortion bans and their passion for reproductive justice into action by running for office. Women like Gina Ortiz Jones, whose lead in the May 3 race for mayor of San Antonio is currently growing.

“As a candidate, I found that what was most effective in connecting with voters was to remain authentic,” Phillips said. “I didn’t change who I was or lie about who I was. I was very open and honest about what I was going through.”

It’s that strategy — along with the determination to stand up and do something — that Phillips shared with the audience in Austin. And as the horror stories about what’s happening to women’s health across the country continue to be shared, it’s becoming more and more likely that women will go into the 2026 election cycle looking for leaders like them.

Reprinted with permission from Courier Texas.

Liz Cheney

Liz Cheney Says GOP's Extremist Abortion Policies Are 'Untenable'

Former Rep. Liz Cheney said the restrictive abortion policies put in place by her fellow Republicans have created an “untenable” situation for millions.

Cheney made the comments during a Monday town hall session in Wisconsin alongside Vice President Kamala Harris. Cheney has endorsed the Democratic nominee’s presidential bid, citing the need to cross party lines to defend democracy against Republican nominee Donald Trump and events like the January 6 attack on the Capitol that he instigated.

“I’m pro-life and I have been very troubled, deeply troubled, by what I have watched happen in so many states since Dobbs,” Cheney said, citing “women who, in some cases, have died, who can’t get medical treatment that they need because providers are worried about criminal liability.”

Her conclusion: “We’re facing a situation today where—I think that it’s an untenable one.”

The 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization by a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling and allowed Republican-led states to implement and enforce anti-choice laws and regulations. Trump appointed three of the six justices who voted with the court majority.

Cheney warned that there are “fundamentally dangerous” things that have happened in the years following the court’s unpopular decision.

Among the issues Cheney singled out: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s pending lawsuit that seeks to obtain the medical records of women who have crossed state lines to get an abortion. Abortion is illegal in Texas except “when a doctor, in their ‘reasonable medical judgment,’ believes it is necessary to save the life or protect the health of the pregnant patient,” according to the Texas Tribune.

”Even if you are pro-life, as I am, I do not believe … that the state of Texas ought to have the right, as they’re currently suing to do, to get access to a woman’s medical records,” Cheney said.

Cheney also cited cases where women have died because they could not receive abortion care.

As she noted, Cheney has a legislative record of opposing abortion access and even received an “A” rating from the anti-choice group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. But she said that several states’ extremist actions following the Supreme Court’s decision cause her concern.

Cheney pointed out that Trump has praised himself for appointing the justices who overturned the precedent.

“You just cannot count on him, you can’t trust him,” she said.

Trump has claimed he isn’t affiliated with anti-choice extremists and tried to distance himself from Republican efforts to pass a federal abortion ban. But recent opinion polling has shown that most voters are skeptical, with 51 percent surveyed by Navigator Research saying they believe he would sign such a law.

Harris has argued that those with strong religious objections to abortion should still back efforts to curtail the fallout from Trump’s effort to pack the Supreme Court with justices who eventually nullified the constitutional right to an abortion.

“One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree: The government, and Donald Trump certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” she said during her September debate against him.

Harris backs federal legislation that would enshrine the protections of Roe in federal law and has said she backs killing the Senate filibuster if it would enable the passage of such legislation. Current Senate rules require that if legislation is filibustered by a single senator, 60 votes are required before an issue can be voted on, even if a majority supports a proposal.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

When Trump Rants About Abortion, Women Voters Must Listen

When Trump Rants About Abortion, Women Voters Must Listen

It was one of those rants that would disqualify a normal candidate. Speaking to Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, Donald Trump took off on abortion, saying things that are flat-out untrue and mouthing opinions entirely out of the mainstream. Most of the media ignored it, Trump being Trump.

"It's a beautiful thing to watch," Trump said of states passing extreme and near total bans on access to abortion. The consequences of those bans — horrific consequences — have been documented. A 13-year-old rape victim in Mississippi forced to carry a pregnancy to term because she was denied access to a safe and legal abortion — what is beautiful about that? A young woman in Texas who almost died because doctors were afraid to treat her — does Donald Trump find that beautiful? A Florida woman who was turned away from the emergency room and lost roughly half her blood in a single day after experiencing a miscarriage — beautiful to watch?

Twenty states now have near or total bans on abortion, forcing women to travel out of state to secure needed and necessary medical care. The most vulnerable are the most seriously affected — teenagers who don't even know that they are pregnant, poor women who lack the resources and connections to find or afford help in distant states. It is dangerous and downright cruel. Trump claims he supports exceptions for rape and incest and the life of the mother, but he finds it a "beautiful thing to watch" states pass laws that include no such exceptions.

And he spouts lies and spreads misinformation about abortion. Trump claimed, as he has repeatedly, that "everyone" has been in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade since the case was first decided in 1973. It is simply not so that legal scholars on all sides were united in criticizing the decision. Indeed, what is noteworthy is that as the years have passed, Roe became more firmly entrenched in the nation's jurisprudence, leading some early critics, such as the late conservative Solicitor General Charles Fried, to reverse his critical position on Roe and support it as firmly established precedent.

Trump is right that he is responsible for overturning Roe, because he appointed the three justices who cast the deciding votes to do so. But they turned themselves into pretzels to avoid telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that they planned to do so, mouthing words that they did not believe and did not abide by about respecting precedent. They didn't do that because "everyone" wanted to see Roe overturned — just the opposite.

Trump lied about Democrats approving abortion in the eighth and ninth months and "even after birth."

"Everybody knows that in the eighth month and the ninth month and beyond that — hard to believe, they have some states passing legislation where you can execute the baby after birth," Trump said. "It's crazy." Another lie. Executing newborn babies is homicide, and no state and no Democrats support legislation to allow it. More than 90 percent of abortions take place in the first trimester, and the one percent that take place after 21 weeks legally involve women whose lives are in danger or who are carrying much-wanted pregnancies where they receive a fatal fetal diagnosis late in their terms. To suggest otherwise is simply irresponsible.

Trump has been trying to "defang" the abortion issue by his stance that it should be left to the states, and then applauding what the states do, even at the expense of women's lives. It is a purely political move, reflecting no principles at all. The anti-abortion movement, which has lost at the ballot box in Ohio and Kansas, has almost as much reason to turn on Trump, who was pro-choice before he bargained away his soul to the right to win their support in 2016, as the pro-choice movement does. When it comes to abortion, he has no principles at all. And that is so typical that he gets away with it, sloppy rants and all.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Reproductive Health Care Rights

Conservative State Courts Stir Trouble For GOP Legislators On Abortion

Abortion opponents have maneuvered in courthouses for years to end access to reproductive health care. In Arizona last week, a win for the anti-abortion camp caused political blowback for Republican candidates in the state and beyond.

The reaction echoed the response to an Alabama Supreme Court decision over in vitro fertilization just two months before.

The election-year ruling by the Arizona Supreme Court allowing enforcement of a law from 1864 banning nearly all abortions startled Republican politicians, some of whom quickly turned to social media to denounce it.

The court decision was yet another development forcing many Republicans legislators and candidates to thread the needle: Maintain support among anti-abortion voters while not damaging their electoral prospects this fall. This shifting power dynamic between state judges and state lawmakers has turned into a high-stakes political gamble, at times causing daunting problems, on a range of reproductive health issues, for Republican candidates up and down the ballot.

“When the U.S. Supreme Court said give it back to the states, OK, well now the microscope is on the states,” said Jennifer Piatt, co-director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. “We saw this in Alabama with the IVF decision,” she said, “and now we’re seeing it in Arizona.”

Multiple Republicans have criticized the Arizona high court’s decision on the 1864 law, which allows abortion only to save a pregnant woman’s life. “This decision cannot stand. I categorically reject rolling back the clock to a time when slavery was still legal and where we could lock up women and doctors because of an abortion,” state Rep. Matt Gress said in a video April 9. All four Arizona Supreme Court justices who said the long-dormant Arizona abortion ban could be enforced were appointed by former Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who in 2016 expanded the number of state Supreme Court justices from five to seven and cemented the bench’s conservative majority.

Yet in a post the day of the ruling on the social platform X, Ducey said the decision “is not the outcome I would have preferred.”

The irony is that the decision came after years of efforts by Arizona Republicans “to lock in a conservative majority on the court at the same time that the state’s politics were shifting more towards the middle,” said Douglas Keith, senior counsel at the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice.

All the while, anti-abortion groups have been pressuring Republicans to clearly define where they stand.

“Whether running for office at the state or federal level, Arizona Republicans cannot adopt the losing ostrich strategy of burying their heads in the sand on the issue of abortion and allowing Democrats to define them,” Kelsey Pritchard, a spokesperson for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in an emailed statement. “To win, Republicans must be clear on the pro-life protections they support, express compassion for women and unborn children, and contrast their position with the Democrat agenda.”

Two months before the Arizona decision, the Alabama Supreme Court said frozen embryos from in vitro fertilization can be considered children under state law. The decision prompted clinics across the state to halt fertility treatments and caused a nationwide uproar over reproductive health rights. With Republicans feeling the heat, Alabama lawmakers scrambled to pass a law to shield IVF providers from prosecution and civil lawsuits “for the damage to or death of an embryo” during treatment.

But when it comes to courts, Arizona lawmakers are doubling down: state Supreme Court justices are appointed by the governor but generally face voters every six years in retention elections. That could soon change. A constitutional amendment referred by the Arizona Legislature that could appear on the November ballot would eliminate those regular elections—triggering them only under limited circumstances—and allow the justices to serve as long as they exhibit “good behavior.” Effectively it would grant justices lifetime appointments until age 70, when they must retire.

Even with the backlash against the Arizona court’s abortion decision, Keith said, “I suspect there aren’t Republicans in the state right now who are lamenting all these changes to entrench a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.”

Meanwhile, abortion rights groups are trying to get a voter-led state constitutional amendment on the ballot that would protect abortion access until fetal viability and allow abortions afterward to protect the life or health of the pregnant person.

State court decisions are causing headaches even at the very top of the Republican ticket. In an announcement in which he declined to endorse a national abortion ban, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on April 8 said he was “proudly the person responsible” for ending Roe v. Wade, which recognized a federal constitutional right to abortion before being overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022, and said the issue should be left to states. “The states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land,” he said. But just two days later he sought to distance himself from the Arizona decision. Trump also praised the Alabama Legislature for enacting the law aiming to preserve access to fertility treatments. “The Republican Party should always be on the side of the miracle of life,” he said.

Recent court decisions on reproductive health issues in Alabama, Arizona, and Florida will hardly be the last. The Iowa Supreme Court, which underwent a conservative overhaul in recent years, on April 11, heard arguments on the state’s near-total abortion ban. Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed it into law in 2023 but it has been blocked in court.

In Florida, there was disappointment all around after dueling state Supreme Court decisions this month that simultaneously paved the way for a near-total abortion ban and also allowed a ballot measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution to proceed.

The Florida high court’s decisions were “simply unacceptable when five of the current seven sitting justices on the court were appointed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis,” Andrew Shirvell, executive director of the anti-abortion group Florida Voice for the Unborn, said in a statement. “Clearly, grassroots pro-life advocates have been misled by elements within the ‘pro-life, pro-family establishment’ because Florida’s highest court has now revealed itself to be a paper tiger when it comes to standing-up to the murderous abortion industry.”

Tension between state judicial systems and conservative legislators seems destined to continue, given judges’ growing power over reproductive health access, Piatt said, with people on both sides of the political aisle asking: “Is this a court that is potentially going to give me politically what I’m looking for?”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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