Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States generally protected a right to have an abortion. The decision struck down many abortion laws, and caused an ongoing abortion debate in the United States about whether, or to what extent, abortion should be legal, who should decide the legality of abortion, and what the role of moral and religious views in the political sphere should be. The decision also shaped debate concerning which methods the Supreme Court should use in constitutional adjudication.
Norma Leah Nelson McCorvey, also known by the pseudonym "Jane Roe", was the plaintiff in the landmark American legal case Roe v. Wade in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that individual state laws banning abortion were unconstitutional.
Abortion is a divisive issue in the United States. The issue of abortion is prevalent in American politics and culture wars, though a majority of Americans support continued access to abortion. There are widely different abortion laws depending on state.
Sarah Catherine Ragle Weddington was an American attorney, law professor, advocate for women's rights and reproductive health, and member of the Texas House of Representatives. She was best known for representing "Jane Roe" in the landmark Roe v. Wade case before the United States Supreme Court. She also was the first female General Counsel for the US Department of Agriculture.
The Rockford Peaches were a women's professional baseball team who played from 1943 through 1954 in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. A founding member, the team represented Rockford, Illinois.
Linda Nellene Coffee is an American lawyer living in Dallas, Texas. Coffee is best known, along with Sarah Weddington, for arguing the precedent-setting United States Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade.
The Jane Collective or Jane, officially known as the Abortion Counseling Service of Women's Liberation, was an underground service in Chicago, Illinois affiliated with the Chicago Women's Liberation Union that operated from 1969 to 1973, a time when abortion was illegal in most of the United States. The foundation of the organization was laid when Heather Booth helped her friend's sister obtain a safe abortion in 1965. Other women with unwanted pregnancies began to contact Booth after learning via word-of-mouth that she could help them. When the workload became more than what she could manage, she reached out to other activists in the women's liberation movement. The collective sought to address the increasing number of unsafe abortions being performed by untrained providers. Since illegal abortions were not only dangerous but very expensive, the founding members of the collective believed that they could provide women with safer and more affordable access to abortions.
A trigger law is a law that is unenforceable but may achieve enforceability if a key change in circumstances occurs.
Judith Arcana is an American writer of poems, stories, essays and books. She was a teacher for forty years and her writing has appeared in journals and anthologies since the early 1980s. She has been an activist for reproductive justice since spending two years in the Jane Collective, Chicago's underground abortion service (1970–72). Arcana is notable for her insistence on the organically political nature of art and literature.
Both the Guttmacher Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regularly report abortion statistics in the United States. They use different methodologies, so they report somewhat different abortion rates, but they show similar trends. The Guttmacher Institute attempts to contact every abortion provider. The CDC relies on voluntary reporting of abortion data from the states and the District of Columbia. As of July 2022, the Guttmacher Institute had reported abortion data for the years 1973 through 2020 and the CDC had reported abortion data for the years 1970 through 2019.
Funny Women is an online and in-person workshop community dedicated to the support of female comedians. It was founded by Lynne Parker in 2002 as a reaction to misogynistic comments from a comedy promoter. Funny Women helps women find their voice, promote them, and assists charities.
She's Beautiful When She's Angry is a 2014 American documentary film about some of the women involved in the second wave feminism movement in the United States. It was directed by Mary Dore and co-produced by Nancy Kennedy. It was the first documentary film to cover feminism's second wave.
The women's health movementin the United States refers to the aspect of the American feminist movement that works to improve all aspects of women's health and healthcare. It began during the second wave of feminism as a sub-movement of the women's liberation movement. WHM activism involves increasing women's knowledge and control of their own bodies on a variety of subjects, such as fertility control and home remedies, as well as challenging traditional doctor-patient relationships, the medicalization of childbirth, misogyny in the health care system, and ensuring drug safety.
Abortion in Illinois is legal. Laws about abortion dated to the early 1800s in Illinois; the first criminal penalties related to abortion were imposed in 1827, and abortion itself became illegal in 1867. As hospitals set up barriers in the 1950s, the number of therapeutic abortions declined. Following Roe v. Wade in 1973, Illinois passed a number of restrictions on abortion, many of which have subsequently been repealed. Illinois updated its existing abortion laws in June 2019. The state has seen a decline in the number of abortion clinics over the years, going from 58 in 1982 to 47 in 1992 to 24 in 2014.
Call Jane is a 2022 American drama film starring Elizabeth Banks as a suburban housewife in the 1960s who deals with a life-threatening pregnancy and subsequently joins the Jane Collective, an underground network of abortion activists. The film also stars Sigourney Weaver, Chris Messina, Kate Mara, Wunmi Mosaku, Cory Michael Smith, Grace Edwards, and John Magaro. It is directed by Phyllis Nagy. The screenplay was written by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi.
Our Bodies Our Doctors is a 2019 American documentary film directed by Portland-based clinical psychologist and documentary filmmaker Jan Haaken. It concerns the work of abortion providers in the United States and controversy and backlash often faced by those providers. The film features the work of providers local to the Pacific Northwest, including based in the Seattle metropolitan area and the Oregon Health & Science University, as well as in Kansas and Oklahoma at the South Wind Women's Center.
The Janes is a 2022 American documentary film. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2022, and was released on HBO Max on June 8, the month after a leaked draft opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization was released, starting protests across the United States. The film was directed by Emma Pildes and Tia Lessin.
