The New York Times posted a piece yesterday, “Access to abortion falling as states pass restrictions,” with these money quotes:

by Susie Allen, host of the blog, Pro-Life in TN, and Kelli

We welcome your suggestions for additions to our Top Blogs (see tab on right side of home page)! Email Susie@jillstanek.com.

• ProWomanProLife showcases an article about the death of a young woman who used the NuvaRing contraceptive. Her lawyer now fights for justice against the manufacturer, which touts its product as being easy — but buried in the fine print of thousands of pages sent to the FDA are the results of 500 studies which included blood clots and death.

by Kelli

From reading the New York Times, you might think that religious conservatives had started a culture war over whether company health-insurance plans should cover contraception. What’s at issue in two cases the Supreme Court has just agreed to hear, the Times editorializes, is “the assertion by private businesses and their owners of an unprecedented right to impose the owners’ religious views on workers who do not share them.”

That way of looking at the issue will be persuasive if your memory does not extend back two years. Up until 2012, no federal law or regulation required employers to cover contraception (or drugs that may cause abortion, which one of the cases involves)….

Backdrop from CNN, November 26:

The high-stakes fight over implementing parts of the troubled health care reform law will move to the US Supreme Court in coming months, in a dispute involving coverage for contraceptives and religious liberty.

The justices agreed on Tuesday to review provisions in the Affordable Care Act requiring employers of a certain size to offer insurance coverage for birth control and other reproductive health services [including sterilization] without a co-pay.

At issue is whether private companies can refuse to do so on the claim it violates their religious beliefs.

Within hours of each other, two federal appeals courts handed down separate decisions that affirmed sharp new limits on abortion and birth control. One on Oct. 31 forced abortion clinics across Texas to close. The other, on Nov. 1, compared contraception to “a grave moral wrong” and sided with businesses that refused to provide it in health care coverage.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide in the next week or so whether to take up the question of whether a for-profit company can deny its female employees contraception coverage in employer-provided health plans because the company owner has a religious objection. We’re not talking about religious institutions here. We’re talking about a secular […]

by Susie Allen, host of the blog, Pro-Life in TN, and Kelli

We welcome your suggestions for additions to our Top Blogs (see tab on right side of home page)! Email Susie@jillstanek.com.

• Can they stop the inevitable? Americans United for Life discusses how SCOTUS is trending  on abortion related cases:

  The Cline case “illustrates momentum for overturning the abuses of Roe. Multiple cases are advancing toward the Supreme Court as it has signaled its willingness to consider the impact of its unrestricted abortion policy on women and their unborn children,” said AUL’s Dr. Charmaine Yoest.

In a move that took both sides of the abortion divide by surprise, the 5th District Court of Appeals yesterday reversed most of a lower court’s decision to block an impactful portion of Texas’ new anti-abortion law. From  USA Today: