By Liliana Salgado

TULSA, Okla. – The sound of fingers on keyboards and an occasional moving office chair are all you will hear at Tulsa Women’s Clinic in Oklahoma these days.

The medical facility is silent and the two nurses that are left rarely stand up from their seats.

In May, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt signed into law the strictest abortion ban in the United States, one that prohibits abortions from fertilization and allows private citizens to sue those who help women terminate their pregnancies.

The rule change was one among a swathe in Republican states passed in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that established the constitutional right to abortion. That decision finally came on Friday.

Prior to the ban, Tulsa Women’s Clinic was receiving 30 to 40 patients a day and would carry out around 500 abortions a month.

“Our waiting room is empty, which is very different than how it looked just a couple of months ago where every room with every chair would be full. We’d have an overflow of chairs out here oftentimes,” said Andrea Gallegos, executive director of the clinic, this week.

“So, you know, to go from that many every day to nothing is quite significant,” Gallegos said.

Gallegos has been weighing her options, including moving the clinic to a Democratic state. She said she was not ready to give up.

“That’s important to me personally, professionally, as a woman, as a mother to daughters, I have to stay in it,” she said.

Tulsa Women’s Clinic is now only providing sonograms for women to see how far along they are in their pregnancy. Although no abortions are being performed, anti-abortion activists still stand outside the clinic. Pastor Brandon Allen is one of them.

“I still come to this place specifically because they are still open for business and their website still advertises that they will help parents murder their children. As long as that’s true, as long as parents are coming to this place I will be here to open my mouth to plead for mercy for those children,” Brandon said.

(Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)

(Reuters) -Russia on Friday said the decision by European Union leaders to accept Ukraine and Moldova as membership candidates would have negative consequences and amounted to the EU’s “enslaving” neighbouring countries.

Although it could take years for the countries to join the European bloc, the decision to accept them as candidates is a symbol of the EU’s intention to reach deep into the former Soviet Union.

Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry, called the move an attempt to encroach on Russia’s sphere of influence within the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) made up of ex-Soviet states.

“With the decision to grant Ukraine and Moldova the status of candidate countries, the European Union has confirmed that it continues to actively exploit the CIS on a geopolitical level, to use it to ‘contain’ Russia,” she said in a statement.

“They are not thinking of the negative consequences of such a step.”

By expanding to Ukraine and Moldova, two former Soviet republics, Zakharova said, the EU was sacrificing its democratic ideals at the expense of “unrestrained expansion and the political and economic enslavement of its neighbours.”

Moscow has said it needed to send troops into Ukraine, in part, to prevent its territory from being used to attack Russia. Western countries and Kyiv say Russia’s claims are a baseless pretext to justify a land grab.

(Reporting by ReutersEditing by Leslie Adler)

By Michelle Nichols

(Reuters) – Restricting abortion access does not stop people seeking the procedure “it only makes it more deadly,” a spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Friday after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a 1973 decision legalizing abortion.

“Sexual and reproductive health and rights are the foundation of a life of choice, empowerment and equality for the world’s women and girls,” spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters. “Restricting access to abortion does not prevent people from seeking abortion, it only makes it more deadly.”

The U.N Population Fund (UNFPA), the U.N. sexual and reproductive health agency, said “a staggering 45% of all abortions around the world are unsafe, making this a leading cause of maternal death.”

The U.S. court’s decision was “a major setback” and a “huge blow to women’s human rights and gender equality,” U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said in a statement.

Nearly half of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended and more than 60% of those may end in abortion, the UNFPA said.

It said that the United States – along with 178 other countries – backed a 1994 program that “recognized how deadly unsafe abortions are and urged all countries to provide post-abortion care to save lives, irrespective of the legal status of abortion.”

The U.S. Supreme Court, in Friday’s ruling powered by its conservative majority, ended constitutional protections for abortion contained in the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling of 1973. Roughly half of the U.S. states are poised to ban abortions.

Former President Donald Trump cemented the conservative majority in the Supreme Court by appointing three justices during his four-year term.

Trump’s administration also led a push at the United Nations against the promotion of women’s sexual and reproductive rights and health because it sees that as code for abortion. It opposed the long-agreed international language in U.N. resolutions.

Trump cut funding for UNFPA because it “supports, or participates in the management of, a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.” The U.N. said that was an inaccurate perception. Trump’s successor President Joe Biden has restored the funding.

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; editing by Grant McCool)