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contemplatingoutlander · 1 month

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This is a gift🎁link so anyone can read the entire NY Times article, even if they don' subscribe to the Times.

Jamelle Bouie does another excellent job of looking at current events through the perspective of American history. In this column, he compares the current Roberts Court with the infamous late 1850s/ early 1860s Taney Court--the Court that lost all credibility with its Dred Scott decision. Below are a few excerpts.

If the chief currency of the Supreme Court is its legitimacy as an institution, then you can say with confidence that its account is as close to empty as it has been for a very long time. Since the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization nearly two years ago, its general approval with the public has taken a plunge. [...] In the latest 538 average, just over 52 percent of Americans disapproved of the Supreme Court, and around 40 percent approved. [...] At the risk of sounding a little dramatic, you can draw a useful comparison between the Supreme Court’s current political position and the one it held on the eve of the 1860 presidential election. [color emphasis added]

[See more below the cut.]

NOTE: Remember that back in the 1850s/1860s the Democrats were the party that supported slavery. The Democrats and Republicans switched positions on civil rights in the late 20th century.

It was not just the ruling itself that drove the ferocious opposition to the [Taney] Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which overturned the Missouri Compromise and wrote Black Americans out of the national community; it was the political entanglement of the Taney court with the slaveholding interests of the antebellum Democratic Party. [...] Five of the justices were appointed by slave owners. At the time of the ruling, four of the justices were slave owners. And the chief justice, Roger Taney, was a strong Democratic partisan who was in close communication with James Buchanan, the incoming Democratic president, in the weeks before he issued the court’s ruling in 1857. Buchanan, in fact, had written to some of the justices urging them to issue a broad and comprehensive ruling that would settle the legal status of all Black Americans. The Supreme Court, critics of the ruling said, was not trying to faithfully interpret the Constitution as much as it was acting on behalf of the so-called Slave Power, an alleged conspiracy of interests determined to take slavery national. The court, wrote a committee of the New York State Assembly in its report on the Dred Scott decision, was determined to “bring slavery within our borders, against our will, with all its unhallowed, demoralizing and blighted influences.” The Supreme Court did not have the political legitimacy to issue a ruling as broad and potentially far-reaching as Dred Scott, and the result was to mobilize a large segment of the public against the court. Abraham Lincoln spoke for many in his first inaugural address when he took aim at the pretense of the Taney court to decide for the nation: “The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.” [color/ emphasis added]

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#scotus #roberts court #dobbs v. jackson women's health organization #taney court #dred scott #legitimacy of the supreme court #jamelle bouie #the new york times #gift link

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tomorrowusa · 20 days

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Donald Trump wants voters to forget that he killed Roe v. Wade. Don't let people forget what he did.

Trump’s fundamental disinterest in the truth value of his words is the only context that matters for his comments on abortion Monday morning. In a direct-to-camera statement on Truth Social, the former president told his audience that he does not support a national ban on abortion. “My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint,” Trump said. “The states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land. In this case, the law of the state.” [ ... ] Compared with the mounting push from anti-abortion activists to ban the procedure nationwide, however, Trump’s stance is designed to look almost moderate. And if you were born yesterday, you could even say that Trump was beginning his pivot to the center, to blur the difference on abortion between himself and other Republicans. [ ... ] The truth of the matter is that given a second term in office, Trump and his allies will do everything in their power to ban abortion nationwide, with or without a Republican majority in Congress. Recall that in his 2016 campaign, Trump said that there had to be “some form” of punishment for women who had abortions. Later, as president, he backed a House bill that would have banned abortion after 20 weeks. Anti-abortion strategists have not been shy about their plan to use the 1873 Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law, as legal authority for executive actions to limit abortions throughout the country, in blue states as well as red ones. [ ... ] We already know what he wants, what he’ll do and what he’ll sign. Trump landed a major blow against legal abortion during his first term. If given a second, he will land another.

In his own words, Trump brags about killing Roe v. Wade to an adoring Fox News audience this year.

youtube

#donald trump #trump killed roe v. wade #maga #republicans #abortion #us supreme court #trump scotus appointments #reproductive freedom #a woman's right to choose #comstock act #dobbs v. jackson women's health organization #anti-abortion fanatics #jamelle bouie #election 2024 #vote blue no matter who #Youtube

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soberscientistlife · 3 months

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Women, If you're not angry, you are not paying attention

#women's rights #abortion rights #reproductive rights #roe rage #roe v wade #dobbs v. jackson women's health organization

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rapeculturerealities · 5 days

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Abortion bans and domestic violence: Homicide is a leading cause of death for pregnant people.

Are there any numbers that show how the Dobbs decision has impacted any of these things, either the homicide rate for pregnant women or reproductive coercion?

The National Domestic Violence Hotline said that there was a 98 percent increase in reports of reproductive coercion the year after Dobbs, compared to the year before—more than 2,400 callers, the year after, reporting experiencing some form of reproductive coercion, compared to about 1,200 callers the year before that decision.

Were people referencing the law?

Some of the callers were saying that their abusers were referencing the abortion ban in their state. And this is also, broadly, a tactic that experts expect to increase. Basically, when the state hands down these abortion restrictions, it can wind up enabling abusers because it suggests that the state has no interest in giving them access to abortion and supporting their reproductive autonomy. So, it’s something that an abuser can also restrict. And it does sound like, from the anecdotes that I heard, sometimes this is what people are reporting.

#Domestic violence #intimate partner violence #dobbs v. jackson women's health organization #reproductive rights #Reproductive coercion #Tw murder

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strawlessandbraless · 2 months

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With access to safe abortion and contraceptives being increasingly restricted, I just wanted to say a big ole happy international women’s day to the massive rise in vasectomies. You love to see it 💃🏻

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living400lbs · 1 month

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"The reality is that I’ve never had bodily autonomy in the US—not as a Black queer woman. And there are many people who have had even less. Trans people. Disabled people. Poor Black, brown, and Indigenous people. Incarcerated people.

The shocking assault on our rights that came with the numerous anti-abortion bills and then the devastating Supreme Court ruling echoed previous attacks on marginalized and vulnerable people throughout our country’s history. And only now—when cisgender, middle-class white women can feel the threat—is this considered an emergency.

But the same people right now deciding whether or not people will be forced to carry a pregnancy to term against their will are the same people deciding that Black, brown, and Indigenous people should be funneled into our prison systems, that the quality of life for disabled people doesn’t matter, that trans people shouldn’t have gender-affirming care or the ability to financially meet their basic needs or even use a bathroom safely.

The assault on our bodily autonomy didn’t start with the Supreme Court ruling, and it won’t end there either. And it is our racism, classism, ableism, and transphobia that have stopped us from coming together to fight this threat as hard as we should have."

-from Be A Revolution by Ijeoma Oluo

#be a revolution #Ijeoma Oluo #dobbs v. jackson women's health organization #us politics #us life

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 22 hours

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Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in what could end up being its most consequential abortion decision since Dobbs. In a case pitting Idaho’s extreme abortion ban against a federal law known as EMTALA—that since 1986 has required hospitals to provide emergency care—conservative justices seemed to embrace the idea that states can deny crisis medical treatment to pregnant patients, even if doing so means those patients suffer catastrophic, life-altering injuries. “My reaction can be summed up as ‘appalled,’” says Sara Rosenbaum, emerita professor at George Washington University who is one of the country’s foremost experts in health policy issues affecting women and families. “Will [the court] really say it is fine [to enforce] a law that costs women their organs as long as they don’t die?”

It’s hard to think of a piece of progressive American health care policy since the late 1970s in which Rosenbaum hasn’t played a pivotal role conceptualizing, enacting, or improving. That includes the federal statute that guarantees the right of every American to go to a hospital emergency room and receive medical treatment before being sent somewhere else. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requires hospitals to screen and stabilize anyone who arrives at the emergency room, including women in active labor. Narrow in scope yet vast in impact, the law has been a “force field around hospital emergency departments,” Rosenbaum says, protecting pregnant patients for four decades. Now, with the Dobbs decision, SCOTUS has “blown up medical care for childbearing people,” she says—and EMTALA could be the next major health care protection that the court decides to explode.

To more fully understand the implications of the case before the Supreme Court, we reached out to Rosenbaum to discuss the history of this unique statute and why it has become even more vital since the end of Roe v Wade.

You’ve called EMTALA “revolutionary” and “the most important American health care law that we have.” Why? What makes this law so special?

It’s the only American law we have that guarantees access to care. For everybody. It doesn’t matter who you are—whether you have insurance or don’t have insurance, what color you are, how much money you have, whether or not you’re disabled. If you come to a hospital emergency department and you believe you have an emergency, they have to screen you. If it is an emergency, they have to stabilize you. The definition of an emergency isn’t that you’re in danger of dying; it includes situations that could lead to severe, long-lasting physical harm. And the decision about what is required to stabilize you—it’s up to the doctor’s medical judgment.

I would say EMTALA is really our only universal health care law.

This law is from 1986. What was happening in the ’70s and ’80s that made EMTALA seem so necessary?

A few things were going on. Back in the early ’80s, a decision was made that the United States was spending too much on hospital care. So Congress changed the payment structure for Medicare [the single largest payer for health care services in the US] to incentivize shorter stays. Pretty soon there were stories emanating from the press about a phenomenon they called “sicker and quicker,” where patients who actually had been admitted to the hospital were getting discharged too soon, when they were still unstable.

Another major problem was that indigent people were not able to get emergency care at all. There were a lot of stories of women being sent away in labor—not just pregnant patients, although that was the story that got the most play. In those days, many fewer women were eligible for Medicaid than are today and it wasn’t as generous. Only very, very indigent women could get Medicaid coverage.

Later in the 1980s, you also helped persuade Congress to vastly expand Medicaid for pregnant women, making it a federal requirement.

There’s no question that poor people bore the brunt, but they were not the only ones. For example, one of the most famous EMTALA cases from that period involved a patient with HIV—nobody would touch him. There have been many cases of fully insured people who, for whatever reason, hospitals just chose not to treat. People who were in a drunk driving accident and were out of control, for example, or mental health patients who were disruptive. Even if the patient was well insured, if they were a handful they would get sent over to the public hospital.

Hospitals are very good at getting rid of people they don’t want. And so, while indigent people were the immediate focus, there’s nothing in EMTALA that limits it to uninsured people. That’s the important thing.

Tell me about one of your pregnancy cases from this era.

One of the cases I worked on in the mid-’70s involved a Black woman named Hattie Mae Campbell who went into premature labor at her home near Holly Springs, Mississippi. She had Medicaid, but the local hospital refused to treat Medicaid patients. The baby was coming out. And the nurse stood at the door of the hospital with her arms spread wide, blocking the entrance, refusing to let her set one foot inside, because once a patient crossed over the line, there were legal arguments to be made that the hospital had begun the admission process. So she gave birth in the parking lot.

And we know that after the birth, the staff still refused admission. They provided a sheet to wrap the baby, then they transferred Campbell and her newborn to another hospital 30 miles away. How much of a factor was racism in these situations?

Race is always a factor—a combination of racism and the fact that people of color were even more poorly insured than white people.

Were there regional differences in how patients were being treated?

There were hospitals all along the Texas-Mexico border that would dress up [security] guards as immigration officials. They would station personnel at the door so you couldn’t come in. But this was going on everywhere. Rich states, poor states, affluent communities, not-so-affluent communities, racist communities, not-such-racist communities. It was happening everywhere because [private] hospitals felt that public hospitals or community hospitals should take care of patients they didn’t want.

You should understand that hospitals were set up to accept only the patients they want. That has been tempered a bit. In the case of emergency care, they can’t do that anymore. But it hasn’t changed that much. A hospital might want me for elective surgery but not my neighbor down the street who’s a Latina who has Medicaid coverage. I mean, they have all kinds of ways to avoid patients they don’t want, right? The type of insurance they take, the doctors they give admitting privileges to, deciding what networks to be part of.

That’s why EMTALA was enacted using Medicare, which is a national program, as the stick. If you as a hospital want to participate in Medicare, and you run an emergency department, then you must do these things as a condition of participation.

Even despite all these horror stories, I still have a hard time imagining how you and other public health advocates managed to get EMTALA passed.

There was no resistance in Congress. None. A Republican Senate, a Democratic House, virtually identical language in both bills. Signed by Ronald Reagan. It really was a different era in the life of the United States.

And then what happened?

Oh, then there was huge hospital resistance. Even though hospitals were very involved in designing EMTALA, it’s a pretty heavy-duty regulation. Over the years, there’s been a lot of resistance both to the requirement that hospitals have to do an initial screening and to the requirement that they have to stabilize the patient before discharging or transferring. There have been thousands of EMTALA cases. The federal government has brought them, private individuals have brought them.

There was a lot of resistance from attending doctors as well. The very first enforcement action was a birth case out of Texas. An OB-GYN who was supposed to be on-call went duck hunting, and when the hospital got a call that a woman had presented in labor, he said, basically, “I’m not coming in for her.”

In 1989, the language of the statute was tweaked to clarify that EMTALA didn’t just apply to the pregnant person, but also to the “unborn child.” Nowadays that goes right to the “personhood” argument of abortion opponents—indeed Justice Alito invoked it during oral arguments. Why was that language necessary then and how is it different from how it is being deployed today?

Because women were still giving birth in parking lots. Women in labor were still being spurned. That language is in there because women who literally had babies coming out of them were being sent away. Everybody understood that you had two medical crises going on here, the crisis of the mother and the crisis of the baby. Everyone, apparently, except the noncompliant hospitals. The concern was not just the pregnant woman, the way it is with some of the emergencies we’re hearing about post-Dobbs, where the fetus is utterly non-viable and the focus is rightly on the pregnant woman.

So the language was clarified: The baby was also a patient. Here on Planet Earth, there are two concerns in labor and delivery, the mother and the baby.

Was there any worry that at some point in the future, anti-abortion people might point to that language and say, as Idaho and Texas are arguing now, “See, EMTALA actually means we can’t do abortions because we have to care for the unborn child”?

That really was not ever the intent. No, no, no, no. We didn’t put that language in there because we were suddenly creating embryonic fetal rights. It’s just a complete misunderstanding of EMTALA.

The pro-choice world crabbed about the language but didn’t fight it tooth and nail because everyone understood the context was labor and delivery. And they were going to lose that [battle]—no member of Congress was willing to listen to nonsense at that point about “clean up your language.” I’ve litigated abortion cases since the Hyde Amendment [the 1976 law banning the use of federal funds for abortion under most circumstances], and I was completely not troubled by that language.

Was it always understood that in some situations, EMTALA might require doctors to do emergency abortions?

This issue of abortion as an emergency procedure has been grounded in EMTALA for a long, long time. There were already cases in the early ’90s of women coming to the hospital with a terrible pregnancy emergency where an abortion had to happen. Or they’d had an abortion that failed, or an incomplete miscarriage that needed an abortion procedure. So this issue [of whether EMTALA requires hospitals to perform emergency abortions] is not new. What’s new is Dobbs. What’s new is what the Supreme Court unleashed when it overturned Roe v Wade.

Pregnancy-related complications that might lead to emergency abortions—for example, when the embryo implants in the fallopian tube instead of the uterus, or when a woman’s water breaks too early for the fetus to survive—are a lot more common than many people realize. But pregnant people end up in the emergency room for all kinds of other reasons, too.

Pregnant people are frequent users of emergency departments. About one in 500 pregnancies goes to an emergency department at some point. Most of the attention has rightly been placed on emergencies where something terrible has happened to the pregnancy itself. But there’s a whole other group of emergencies that aren’t pregnancy-related—it could be appendicitis, it could be a car accident, it could be domestic abuse, it could be COVID.

The tendency when somebody is pregnant is to send them to the emergency department right away because you don’t want to take any chances. And sometimes in these situations, you need anesthesia, you need surgery. Sometimes, unfortunately, as a consequence of treatment you may have a demise. What Idaho has done is to make every pregnant person coming to an emergency department radioactive.

As someone who has spent your whole career steeped in health policy and health law, did you see this moment coming? When hospitals turn away pregnant patients with life-threatening emergencies? When a law as important as EMTALA seems on the verge of being gutted?

It was very evident, from the moment that the Dobbs decision was leaked, that there was just a total, fundamental clash between what states like Idaho with these terrible abortion bans thought they had the license to do and what EMTALA required.

When the Dobbs decision finally came down, my daughter called, incredibly upset. All of her friends were incredibly upset. I said, “Here’s my one piece of advice. You have friends all over the country. The ones who live in any one of the states that are going to impose a complete ban, tell them that they must not get pregnant. And if they do want to be pregnant, they must move away. Because a lot of things can go wrong in a pregnancy, and if anything goes wrong, they’re not going to be able to get emergency care.”

The other thing that I realized right away is that it would be impossible for doctors to practice in these places, and there would be a huge exodus of providers. And in Idaho that has happened. So people like me, who are steeped in health policy, understood immediately what was coming. But where we are now is worse than I could have even imagined it was going to be.

#us politics #news #interview #2024 #mother jones #Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act #dobbs v. jackson women's health organization #us supreme court #Sara Rosenbaum #reproductive justice #reproductive health #reproductive rights #roe v wade #abortions

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crybabyddl · 10 months

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God forbid, I wanna suck whatever the fuck I wanna

God forbid, I wanna fuck whoever the fuck I want

And if he cums, I guess I gotta be a mother

Fuck what I think, I don't know a thing

The government knows my body

No, it's okay, it's better this way, I'm only a carbon copy

Even if I'm dying, they'll still try to stop me

Do we even hear ourselves?

My life, my voice

My rights, my choice

It's mine, or I'm just swine

My blood, my loins

My lungs, my noise

It's mine, or I'm just swine (Hey, hey, hey, hey)

Picture your faith, imagine your God and even your Holy Bible

Is suddenly bannеd, do you understand?

Now doesn't that sound entitlеd?

It's your book, but it's my survival

We gotta grow 'em, we gotta raise 'em, we gotta feed and bathe 'em

And if you won't, they call you a witch to burn at the stake in Salem

Thought by now they'd change, but we're still waiting

Give these motherfuckers hell

My life, my voice

My rights, my choice

It's mine, or I'm just swine

My blood, my loins

My lungs, my noise

It's mine, or I'm just swine (Hey, hey, hey, hey)

Under-compensated, too domesticated (The fuck?)

Underestimated, overregulated (The fuck?)

Under-celebrated, hate-dominated (The fuck?)

We're infuriated, got us activated (Get up)

Ever-dedicated, newly-motivated (Get up)

And if you're awake, then I'm so glad you made it

(Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah)

My life, my voice

My rights, my choice

It's mine (It's mine)

Or I'm just swine (Or I'm just swine)

My blood, my loins

My lungs, my noise

It's mine, or I'm just swine

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lenbryant · 2 months

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O Alabama!

(LATimes) Column: Alabama’s highest court declared frozen embryos people. The U.S. Supreme Court is to blame

Tom Parker, now Alabama’s chief justice, announcing his campaign for the position.

(Jamie Martin / Associated Press)

The Alabama Supreme Court’s breathtakingly arrogant, slapdash and pernicious opinion conferring personhood on newly formed embryos vividly illustrates the consequences of another reckless decision: the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe vs. Wade.

The Alabama court held last week that fertilized ova cryogenically preserved for couples having difficulty conceiving are legally and morally equivalent to newborn babies and, for that matter, 20-year-old adults. According to the court, all are human beings protected under Alabama law to precisely the same extent.

The decision clears the way for wrongful death lawsuits brought by couples whose embryos were destroyed by a patient who wandered into an in vitro fertilization clinic through an unsecured entrance, picked up several frozen fertilized eggs and, shocked by their cryogenic temperature, immediately dropped them on the floor. Reversing the trial court, the Alabama Supreme Court held that this conduct could be subject to a wrongful death claim, rendering it indistinguishable from, say, the death of a 2-year-old negligently left in a sweltering car.

Astonishingly, the sole focus of the court’s analysis was whether Alabama’s wrongful death law encompasses “extrauterine children — that is, unborn children who are located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed.” The court did not even attempt to wrestle with the distinction between a just-fertilized egg — what biologists call a blastocyst, a ball of up to a few hundred cells measuring a fraction of a millimeter in diameter — and a fully formed child born at term.

It’s customary to note the parade of horribles that could be occasioned by such an extreme decision. But here the parade has already begun.

Alabama’s largest hospital announced Wednesday that it would no longer offer would-be parents in vitro fertilization procedures due to the substantial threat of criminal liability for mishandling fertilized eggs. Other providers followed suitThursday. Medical personnel who try to help couples conceive have been suddenly recast by the courts as potential murderers.

The immediate consequences don’t end there. Women who use intrauterine devices or morning-after pills, which can affect fertilized eggs, are in the eyes of Alabama law rank baby killers.

The court’s supposed legal opinion in fact rests on the tenet that life begins at conception, a matter of religious faith to which only a small minority of the country subscribes.

Chief Justice Tom Parker’s concurring opinion employs quotations and teachings from Scripture as if they had the legal force of the Bill of Rights. Passages from Genesis and Exodus, various theological tracts, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards take their place alongside the writings of U.S. Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Neil M. Gorsuch. All are marshaled in support of the view that “God made every person in his image… and human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.”

But apart from the wrath of God, there is no attempt to rationalize the legal equation of a frozen, formless collection of cells with a living person. The court simply assumes it away with the syllogistic reasoning that Alabama’s statutory law specifies that human life includes “unborn” life.

Such ham-handedness undermines the entire opinion. The critical question for the state is not whether an embryo of any particular age can be said to be, in some sense, alive; it’s whether it is a human being deserving of the rights and protections accorded to all of us, which is a far broader and more complicated designation.

A stadium full of theologians, philosophers, ethicists and politicians couldn’t come up with an authoritative answer to that question. And in the absence of such an answer, how can the state impinge so deeply on the liberty of women and aspiring parents?

It’s in that sense that the Alabama Supreme Court’s opinion can be traced directly to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The idea of shoving this tendentious religious tract down Americans’ throats would have been a nonstarter under Roe vs. Wade, which asserted the constitutional liberty interests of women against an overreaching, moralistic state.

Post-Dobbs, those rights are featherweight. The outrage belongs with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ill reasoning and grotesque overreach.

Nor is Alabama the only state purporting to enshrine the fundamentally religious position that human life begins at conception in law. Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri and Oklahoma issued similar proclamations in the wake of Dobbs.

The Alabama Supreme Court takes this malign presumption to its logical end, stripping every American in its jurisdiction of the right to make their own decisions on a matter of the highest moral and practical import. That’s the antithesis of liberty.

Harry Litman is the host of the “Talking Feds” podcast. @harrylitman

#refrigerator magnet #ivf #personhood #embryo #alabama #supreme court #supreme corruption #roe v wade #dobbs v. jackson women's health organization

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eve-is-a-terf · 3 months

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in honor of the 51st anniversary of roe v wade, take your anger to the polls

#eve's posts #terf safe #terfs do touch #radfem safe #radfems do interact #radblr #abortion #roe v wade #reproductive rights #dobbs v. jackson women's health organization #dobbs v jackson #abortion access #get out the vote #vote goddamn it istg if i hear one person say it doesn't matter

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beelzzzebub · 7 months

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all the girlies (gn) hate clarence thomas

#really despise that man #dobbs v. jackson women's health organization

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contemplatingoutlander · 2 years

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Alexandra Petri is back just when we need a little humor to manage the stress of the wrecking ball that SCOTUS has recently taken to our society regarding abortion and guns. Enjoy! 😉😂

I can see how you might be confused! At least, I think that horrid screaming, silent sobbing and rending of garments indicates confusion.

You are looking at the rulings the Supreme Court has been putting out lately and wondering how they are consistent with one another. “This ruling seems like it will result in many more births. Tons of births. More births than a majority of Americans think we ought to be compelled to have, in fact!” you say. “Whereas this ruling seems like it will result in people being killed with guns. Are we excited to protect life, or aren’t we?”

This is simple. Let me draw you a chart: Here is conception, when we have decided life begins. Sacred, exquisite, beautiful life. Life, than which nothing is more precious. Life, a concept popular enough to sell as both a board game and a cereal. Life! Which everyone ought to have!

Here, we have the halcyon period during which nothing is too good for you and you must be saved and protected at all costs. Anything you want, you must have. Someone else’s body, even at risk to her life? You got it! We owe you that much. We have no way of knowing you won’t be Shakespeare, or invent foaming hand soap. Up until the moment of birth, you are a glistening orb of magical potential. You might become a president, or better yet, the man who picks the president by deciding which electoral votes get counted.

And then here is birth, after which you are on your own.

Once you have been born, you are a nuisance, and, possibly, a woman — two categories the Supreme Court generally frowns upon. The born are always asking for things. You want baby formula? Uncontaminated formula? You want people not to be able to bring guns to your school? You want to be mirandized? Can’t we go back to that lovely place when you were just an exciting concept who might grow up to be a Supreme Court justice? [...] Some complain that this will be the first generation born with fewer rights than the one preceding it. But can you blame us for limiting the rights of the born? They are just so irritating! [...] The born demand food and clothes and a roof over their heads. They object to laws passed about their bodies by people who have only the remotest, foggiest notion of what their bodies actually contain. They feel, somehow, that they should be able to make their own decisions, medical and otherwise — even the ones who are capable of conceiving! They, themselves, want to choose, not a bunch of people in robes who have been laboring under a misconception for years and now would like everyone else to, as well. And these born keep insisting they have a right to life, to liberty, to full autonomy. So needy!

Now you understand, surely. There is life — pleasant, luminous, sacred, to be honored and protected at all costs. And then comes the moment of birth, after which all you have is the unpleasant, sticky process of actually living. That hardly seems worth protecting at all.

[emphasis added]

_________________________

I took the liberty of drawing the “charts” that Alexandra Petri alluded to. The human figures in the second chart (before edits) are from Shutterstock. Sources for the stages of fetal development: 01, 02. Source for the stages of the human lifespan: 01.

#scotus #women's reproductive rights #roe v. wade #concealed gun carry #dobbs v. jackson women's health organization #new york state rifle & pistol association v. bruen #which lives are valued #alexandra petri #the washington post #humor #my charts #my edits #satire

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tomorrowusa · 6 months

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Ohio voters handed anti-abortion Republicans a stinging defeat. Those voters approved Issue 1 which puts reproductive freedom into the Ohio Constitution. The just passed amendment also protects the right to contraception and fertility treatment.

Results are still coming in. But with 85% of the votes counted, about 55.5% of Ohioans voted to protect reproductive freedom. And most of the remaining uncounted votes come from large urban counties which approved Issue 1 with over 65% of the vote.

Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment on Tuesday that ensures access to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care, the latest victory for abortion rights supporters since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. Ohio became the seventh state where voters decided to protect abortion access after the landmark ruling and was the only state to consider a statewide abortion rights question this year. The outcome of the intense, off-year election could be a bellwether for 2024, when Democrats hope the issue will energize their voters and help President Joe Biden keep the White House. Voters in Arizona, Missouri and elsewhere are expected to vote on similar protections next year. Ohio’s constitutional amendment, on the ballot as Issue 1, included some of the most protective language for abortion access of any statewide ballot initiative since the Supreme Court’s ruling. Opponents had argued that the amendment would threaten parental rights, allow unrestricted gender surgeries for minors and revive “partial birth” abortions, which are federally banned. Before the Ohio vote, statewide initiatives in California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana and Vermont had either affirmed abortion access or turned back attempts to undermine the right. Issue 1 specifically declared an individual’s right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions,” including birth control, fertility treatments, miscarriage and abortion.

It's a great victory for women and freedom in general. And it's a bad omen for GOP prospects in 2024.

Donald Trump carried Ohio both in 2016 and 2020. But the Republican insistence on controlling women's bodies will probably hurt the party there and elsewhere. And any attempt by the GOP to moderate its stand on abortion will result in major pushback by radical fundamentalist Christians who would like to return to the societal standards of the 17th century.

#ohio #issue 1 #reproductive freedom #abortion #a woman's right to choose #roe v. wade #dobbs v. jackson women's health organization #republicans #anti-abortion extremists fail again #radical fundamentalist christians lose #defeat for republicans #election 2023 #election 2024

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uboat53 · 2 years

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“We recognize that, as advocates, men’s desire to support women can sometimes feel paternalistic, disempowering, or condescending. It is certainly true that its manifestation in our society has often been all of those things. Yet we would not want to live in a world in which people did not want to support and care for one another. In our communications moving forward, we need to explore ways to effectively harness men’s desire to support women within a broader message framework that supports a woman’s agency, rather than in opposition to it.” -- Report from NARAL

I think this is a good analysis. Fellow men, we do need to step up and protect women, but we need to do it in a way that is supportive, the kind of protection and support we would offer to any person in need, rather than possessive. That's not too crazy, right?

Source

#pro abortion #abortion #abortion rights #roe vs. wade #roe v wade #roe versus wade #dobbs v. jackson women's health organization #politics #us politics #men supporting women

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tomfooleryprime · 2 years

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I’ve seen a lot of op-eds talking about how the overturn of Roe v. Wade will have a chilling effect on reproductive healthcare. There’s this fear that providers will be hesitant to treat women suffering from miscarriages for fear of prosecution, since miscarriage and abortion are medically indistinguishable. If that’s your biggest fear, you're suffering from failure of imagination and an inability to pay attention, considering there are plenty of recent examples of prosecutors trying to pin charges on women for failing to carry a pregnancy to term.

Most recent cases involve women being prosecuted after taking illegal drugs like methamphetamine or opioids and maybe it’s easy to think, “Well, illegal drugs are bad.” But all kinds of things have been linked to bad pregnancy outcomes that aren’t alcohol or hard drugs: soft cheese, undercooked meat, rollercoasters, hot tubs, deli meats, caffeine, litter boxes, hair dye...

If SCOTUS really thinks the decision to place “reasonable” restrictions on pregnant people’s rights for the sake of their fetuses truly belongs to the states, just wait and see what states consider reasonable in the inevitable wave of resulting lawsuits.

Many state courts have sided with pharmacists who refuse to fill kind of family planning prescriptions if they violate their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” What’s going to happen when a pregnant woman tries to buy an energy drink and the devout Walgreen’s cashier is worried for the life of her unborn fetus?

And what about women who aren’t visibly pregnant? Can businesses refuse service on the off chance that they might be? What happens when amusement parks start insisting women of childbearing age take a pregnancy test prior to riding a rollercoaster because they’re afraid of felony murder charges for playing a role in potentially harming a fetus thanks to poorly-written and vague state laws? How will you feel when the manager at La Quinta asks you to get out of the hot tub until you can provide some kind of evidence you’re not cooking your fetus on their property?

What about literally any healthcare for any pregnant person that isn’t actually related to their pregnancy? There's a lot of overlap between the people cheering this decision and the people who reject Covid vaccines. What happens when those same people start whispering in the ears of state lawmakers and all of a sudden, pregnant women aren’t allowed to receive recommended vaccines anymore because there “may be concern” it will harm the baby?

Nevermind the CDC recommends flu shots during pregnancy to protect mom and baby. Why would CDC recommendations matter to the same people who wrote laws requiring abortion providers to lie to patients and say abortion is more dangerous than childbirth and may lead to everything from breast cancer to future infertility? Will SCOTUS say that because flu shots aren’t explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, a pregnant woman’s right to make an informed decision about vaccines and avoid dying of the flu can be superseded by the state’s interest in “protecting” the fetus, even when that interest is based on junk science and a religious agenda?

Break a leg? Why would a doctor risk prison time by offering you x-rays and pain meds that could harm the fetus when you could just bite down on a strap and let the doctor do their best to set a bone they’re not even certain is broken? Suffer from migraines but someone found an inconclusive study that shows the medication you rely on might cause birth defects? Maybe you should just drink more water and pray about it. Need a root canal because pregnancy can play havoc on your oral flora? What happens when your dentist recommends pliers and a little bit of courage because there’s not enough research on how local anesthetic might affect a pregnancy and they’ll be damned if they’re gonna do time just because your teeth are rotting?

Your concern shouldn’t stop at the line of what might happen to women suffering a miscarriage: it should stop at the erosion of rights for all people capable of bearing a child to the point where they’re basically viewed as nothing but a uterus and a source of criminal liability.

#roe v wade #dobbs v. jackson women's health organization #abortion #abortion is healthcare #healthcare is a human right

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