Abortion Watch

Washington could soon join a handful of states that require public colleges and universities to offer abortion pills on campus.

Lawmakers in the state House listened to testimonies for and against Senate Bill 5826 during a hearing Thursday, The News Tribune reports.

The bill, sponsored by state Sen. T’wina Nobles, D-Fircrest, would require higher education institutions with a health center to offer abortion pills on campus. Institutions without a health center would be required to provide referrals to abortion facilities.

All public colleges and universities also would be required to create a webpage with information about abortion, prenatal care, and other “reproductive health” services.

Where were you when you first heard the lies about abortion? They go something like this. “Abortion is about freedom, health care, compassion, and hard cases.” Of course, it could never possibly be about convenience, never about preference, and certainly never about eliminating the “wrong” kind of child.

Nearly half of all abortions in Pennsylvania are repeat abortions, according to figures obtained from the Pennsylvania Department of Health.

The statistics from 2024, the latest year for which stats are available, indicate 49.2 percent of women obtaining abortions have already had one or more abortions.

Tragically, some 2,322 women had had four or more previous abortions.

Senate Democrats snubbed women all across the country on Wednesday when they downplayed the physical dangers and abuse risks associated with abortion pills in favor of promoting abortion for all via mail-order mifepristone.

Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy and his GOP colleagues utilized the hearing titled Protecting Women: Exposing the Dangers of Chemical Abortion Drugs as yet another opportunity to spur on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s professed mifepristone review.

Most observers of the abortion debate would likely agree that it is primarily a matter of ethics, a contest between the Hippocratic standard of respect for human life and various forms of humanistic pragmatism that allow abortion as a way to address personal and social problems. Resolving that debate has engaged philosophers of medicine, religious leaders, and the few political figures who seriously address it, for decades, with shifts in public policy and law back and forth. The debate also necessarily involves the matter of real-world consequences, making data collection and analysis a crucial part of the discussion, even if they are not ultimately the primary drivers of convictions on so profound a set of questions.

This fact has led to a range of skirmishes and debates all their own. One example is the decision of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) during the Obama administration to drop the requirement that abortion pill (mifepristone) manufacturers report non-fatal events to the FDA involving the drug. Only deaths were, and still are under the Trump administration, subject to mandatory reporting.

As fresh controversy swirls around the FDA’s promise to review the safety of mifepristone, the status of future injury reporting remains in doubt, although it would be a welcome restoration of a policy with virtually no downside, especially as other FDA policy changes have increased risks to women who are taking the abortion drug regimen later in pregnancy, without a doctor’s visit, and no tests to rule out ectopic pregnancy and other serious health concerns.

Next year, the Virginia legislature will promote a state amendment so radical that it should shock most people.

There is a constitutional amendment that is an extreme, radical, and deadly measure that would enshrine virtually unlimited abortions at any stage of pregnancy, including up to birth, stripping away longstanding protections for the unborn.

The amendment, dubbed the “Unlimited Abortion up to Birth Amendment” by opponents and formally known as the Reproductive Freedom Act, cleared both chambers of the Democrat-controlled General Assembly in the 2025 legislative session.

It establishes a “fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” that essentially allows abortions up to birth with only flimsy limits on late-term abortions.

The Supreme Court heard a case today involving First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, a pro-life Christian ministry in New Jersey that has spent four decades serving women facing unplanned pregnancies.

In First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin, the state’s attorney general tried to force First Choice to disclose how it applies its statement of faith to employees and volunteers, trains its staff to interact with expectant mothers consistent with its religious mission, collaborates with churches to support its ministry, relates to other pro-life organizations, and how it explains what God is doing in its ministry—without a single complaint or any evidence of wrongdoing.

What’s more, New Jersey insists that First Choice has no right to federal court review before being forced to expose its mission to state scrutiny. Becket filed a friend-of-the-court brief asking the Justices to protect religious ministries like First Choice from invasive government efforts to interrogate them because of their religiously inspired ministries. Read more about the cases Becket is watching at the Court this term here.