Abortion Services Restored at South Austin Planned Parenthood

[LadyHawkAZ]

A tiny bit of good news for Texas. I recommend not reading the comment section.

http://www.austinchronicle.com/blogs/news/2013-11-22/abortion-services-restored-at-south-austin-planned-parenthood/

The post-House Bill 2 world is decidedly bleak for women in need of legal abortion care, but today there's a bit of good news for those women: Planned Parenthood's South Austin surgical center is back in business.

That's the word from Sarah Wheat, vice president of community affairs for Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas, which operates abortion and family-planning clinics from Dallas to Austin.

The South Austin clinic, one of the state's handful of surgical centers able to perform abortions up to 20 weeks, had to cease providing legal abortion care on Oct. 31, the day two provisions of the controversial HB 2 took effect, after an appeals court lifted a court order that had blocked their implementation.

...

But today, the bright spot of news: As of today, the doctor at the South Austin Planned Parenthood facility has secured privileges and the clinic is ready and able to provide safe and legal care, Wheat said.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Good news!

I hope Planned Parenthood can do this all over Texas.

[PeaceNikki]

2. The TRAP laws need to be stopped. We need to support the Women's Health Protection Act of 2013.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/13/pro-choice-bill-womens-health-protection-act_n_4266599.html

[LadyHawkAZ]

13. +1

[idwiyo]

3. k&r

[herding cats]

4. United we stand.

Or divided we fall.

I'm happy for women in Austin, Texas today, and equally concerned for women in other parts of Texas who have basically had this, and several other medical procedures made inaccessible to them. We're all in this fight together. Each and everyone of us are having to either revisit the old battle of our mother's, or are reliving the fight we thought we'd already won decades ago. This goes for all of us, even those of us in states where our rights are safe. If any of us are being dragged back into a fight thought won 40 years ago, then we all are. Personally, I have no intention of being sequestered back into the metaphorical stone-age by a bunch of fundamentalist cretins. Not without one hell of a fight.

[PeaceNikki]

5. Welcome to DU!!

Here's a long, but good speech by R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School and an outspoken voice in the pro-choice community that concludes with:

"The bottom line is that the effort to impede access to accurate information, or to safe and legal services, has not only had the effect of preventing us from having access to abortion services but the ancillary effect of preventing access to a whole variety of medical services that affect people of every age and every type across the country. So from my perspective and in my work, abortion is not only a woman's issue and it's not only a reproductive health issue: it's a human rights issue."

http://www.blogforchoice.com/

[herding cats]

6. Thank you!

For both your kind welcome and the video link. I'm only at the halfway point (starting 2/2 on the videos), but I'm impressed with Ms Charo's no nonsense way of pointing out the basic facts in a linear way. She has a skill for bypassing all the sensational fog favored by the anti-choice crowd. I wanted to take a moment to thank you before I finish watching the second half. I'd never seen her speak before, she's a force to be reckoned with. Hopefully I'll be able to channel some of her wisdom in the future when the need arises. I'm still stunned with how easily she pointed out how we've forfeited our dignity as a people (as she states, even in our rights to chose when/if we as an adult are to be able to choose a dignified end to our life) by letting the extremist control the dialog in abortion rights.

Again, thank you. She's an inspiration and a wealth of wisdom both!

[PeaceNikki]

7. My pleasure. She and Joyce Arthur are 2 of my biggest heros of choice.

She also wrote an excellent piece called A proposal for moms-to-be (like abortion rules, for their own good) that's rather powerful.

Honestly great to have more DUers passionate about reproductive choice!

[herding cats]

11. That's a DOMA I can get behind.

Which is something I never thought I'd be saying.

That is an excellent piece also filled with her common sense approach to an issue which has been hijacked by activist who use shock imagery, and false emotionally charged jargon to guilt people into thinking they're somehow bad if they don't agree with them. I plan on quoting it often and sharing it wherever I can.

[eggplant]

8. And now that they are available again, here's how to really help...

Donate to http://www.fundabortionnow.org/

Donate to Planned Parenthood too (for the long haul), but NNAF helps TODAY.

[Rozlee]

9. And in the meantime, Mexican and "flea market" abortions are going to be abounding.

Texas legislatures have forced this on women. They'll be flocking to McAllen and across the border to buy Cytotec and Mifepristone and visit the mobile surgical units (i.e., a guy with a backpack) that set up shop at a different location every day. I'm glad they restored services to the South Austin location, but it still doesn't meet the needs of so many Texas women. This state keeps regressing with every day that teabaggers have it in a stranglehold. Women's rights, education, civil rights, worker safety, inequality, refusal to expand Medicaid...they are literally killing us.

[PeaceNikki]

10. Mississippi is down to one provider in the entire state. One. And they fight to stay open every day.

http://news.msn.com/us/abortion-clinic-owner-committed-despite-pressure

Abortion clinic owner Diane Derzis has stared down protesters, laughed off those who call her "baby killer" and smiled through clenched teeth while bantering with people who want to close her centers in the South.

She has been an abortion rights advocate for decades and owned clinics since 1996, but Derzis is facing some of the biggest political and legal pressure she has ever seen. She spars with pastors and politicians alike, and her latest fight is to keep open her Mississippi clinic, the last one remaining in the state.

"If they think they're going to make me feel badly about what I do — not gonna happen," said Derzis, a 59-year-old Virginia native who has lived in Alabama for decades.

...

Sunsara Taylor, of New York, is spokeswoman for Stop Patriarchy, a group that supports "abortion on demand and without apology." She said Derzis is doing important work.

"It really matters tremendously — the courage, the bravery, the self-sacrifice to keep women's right to abortion available, especially in places where the whole state apparatus is so dead set against women's reproductive rights," Taylor said this month in Jackson.

[Rozlee]

14. Those people are despicable.

Mississippi has the highest rate of teen births, which will now go only higher. But, those people will pray and coo over a bunch of fetal cells until they're expelled from their young mothers' bodies as live children, doomed to live in poverty and hunger as conservatives clamor to cut child nutrition and other safety net programs. Then, let's see how much cooing and praying they do over them.

[PeaceNikki]

15. I know. And while we should cheer PP for helping one clinic, we need to address the root problem.

We need to write to, call and get in our representatives faces urging that they support Federal initiatives to stop states from trampling on women's reproductive freedom.

These TRAP laws restrict access to all types of family planning including contraception and prenatal care as well as abortion services.

[Politicub]

12. +1 for freedom of choice