The year’s biggest battles over abortion rights

Abortion has been contested in the United States for at least a half-century, but 2015 took it to the next level.

It was a year of 57 new restrictions on the procedure in the states, according to the Guttmacher Institute’s Elizabeth Nash, and in which we learned the Supreme Court will finally take on one of the hundreds of recent restrictions. This was the year of the release of hundreds of hours of secretly-recorded tapes, used to accuse Planned Parenthood of trafficking in fetal parts, and of over a dozen official investigations that so far have yielded not a single criminal charge. 2015 saw Robert Lewis Dear storm a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, killing three people and saying it was becauseordered on the internet. In December, Tennessee prosecutors charged 31-year-old Anna Yocca with attempted first-degree murder for allegedly using a coat-hanger to self-abort. Meanwhile, public health researchers at the University of Texas found that as many as 100,000 women in Texas have tried to end their pregnancies themselves. That’s a lot of women to prosecute.

Republicans took it to the next level. If Todd Akin were to repeat his soliloquy on “legitimate rape” during the current Republican primary, he would probably have to fight for airtime. Anti-abortion rhetoric and positions among Republicans appear to be at an all-time high. Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina claimed she saw a video with “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says, ‘We have to