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#abortion #rights Republicans vote to advance Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination to the full Senate https://abortion-blog.com//republicans-vote-to-ad...vance-am/ KEY POINTS Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to advance the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court over a boycott from the committee’s Democrats. The vote paves the way for the full Senate to confirm Barrett to the high court on Monday, ahead of the Nov. 3 election between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. Trump has repeatedly pressed for Barrett to be placed on the high court in time to resolve any election-related litigation, a request that Democrats see as a plain call for the court’s conservative majority to declare him the winner. Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to advance the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court over a boycott from the committee’s Democrats. The vote paves the way for the full Senate to confirm Barrett to the high court on Monday, ahead of the Nov. 3 election between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. Trump has repeatedly pressed for Barrett to be placed on the high court in time to resolve any election-related litigation, a request that Democrats see as a plain call for the court’s conservative majority to declare him the winner if the outcome is contested. The swift action by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R, S-C., to meet Trump’s deadline will make Barrett the first justice in history to be confirmed so close to Election Day. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) arrives next to U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) for a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to be an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court on Capitol Hi Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) arrives next to U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) for a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to be an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., October 22, 2020.Hannah Mackay | Reuters Barrett, who was a professor at Notre Dame Law School until Trump nominated her to serve on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals approximately three years ago, will be the sixth Republican-appointee on the nine-judge Supreme Court, and Trump’s third nominee. Trump nominated her to the high court last month after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal icon who served on the bench for 27 years. Ginsburg expressed a dying wish not to be replaced until after the election. As Ginsburg’s replacement, Barrett is expected to shift the court’s center of gravity decisively to the right, potentially imperiling the Democratic agenda items on health care, abortion access and the Second Amendment. In focus is a Nov. 10 case the court will hear over the constitutionality of Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act. While the Democrats did not appear at Thursday’s committee hearing, they left supersized posters of individuals who rely on the law in their seats. Republicans denounced the gesture as theatrics. Democratic Senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee boycott the committee vote on Amy Coney Barrett to serve as an associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States during a Senate Judiciary Committee Executive Business meeting in Washington, Democratic Senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee boycott the committee vote on Amy Coney Barrett to serve as an associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States during a Senate Judiciary Committee Executive Business meeting in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 22, 2020.Caroline Brehman | CQ Roll Call | Reuters Barrett declined to provide specifics about her views on Obamacare during two days of questioning before the committee last week, but reaffirmed her originalist method of interpretation and her affinity for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the conservative hero for whom she clerked early in her career. Despite her previous writings that were critical of Obamacare, the conservative said she would approach the Nov. 10 case with an open mind if confirmed. She noted that the upcoming case raises questions about a legal doctrine upon which she had not previously expressed an opinion. Some progressives were outraged by Democrats’ handling of Barrett’s confirmation hearings, arguing they lent legitimacy to a process at odds with McConnell’s 2016 refusal to even hold hearings for President Barack Obama’s nominee Judge Merrick Garland. Organizations with power on the left, including Justice Democrats and Demand Justice, have since called for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the committee’s top Democrat, to step down. Democrats on Wednesday announced that they would boycott Thursday’s hearing. We will not grant this process any further legitimacy by participating in a committee markup of this nomination just twelve days before the culmination of an election that is already underway, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement that was joined by the committee’s Democrats. At the start of the hearing, Graham addressed Democrats’ boycott, saying we are not going to allow them to take over the committee. They made a choice not to participate, he said. Source: https://www.cnbc.com//gop-senators-vote-to-advance-amy-con

#abortion #rights Poland abortion: Top court backs almost all terminations https://abortion-blog.com//poland-abortion-top-court-back/ Poland’s top court has r...uled that abortions in cases of foetal defects are unconstitutional. Poland’s abortion laws were already among the strictest in Europe but the Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling will mean an almost total ban. Once the decision comes into effect, terminations will only be allowed in cases of rape or incest, or if the mother’s health is at risk. Rights groups had urged the government not to increase restrictions. The Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights said the day marked a sad day for women’s rights. Removing the basis for almost all legal abortions in Poland amounts to a ban and violates human rights, Dunja Mijatovic wrote on Twitter. A legal challenge against the 1993 law permitting abortion in cases of severe foetal disabilities which accounts for 98% of terminations carried out in Poland was launched by MPs from the ruling nationalist Law and Justice party last year. A majority of the court’s judges were nominated by the same party. Presentational grey line What court’s decision means for Poland Analysis box by Adam Easton, Warsaw correspondent Almost all legal abortions in Poland are performed on the grounds of foetal defects, so this ruling, which is final and binding, effectively bans pregnancy terminations. Poland is one of Europe’s most strongly Catholic countries, but there was no public clamour for this. For years opinion polls said a clear majority of Poles opposed a more restrictive law. Bishops and lay Catholic groups pressured the governing Law and Justice party to impose a stricter law. The party supports traditional Catholic values but changing it was problematic. There was opposition both in parliament and on the streets. In 2016 an estimated 100,000 people, mostly women, protested to block an attempt to tighten the law. A pro-abortion activist takes part in a demonstration in Krakow in April 2020 image captionActivists held socially distanced protests against the proposals earlier this year Late last year a group of governing party and far-right MPs decided to ask the court to decide the issue. This was convenient because a majority of the court’s judges were nominated by Law and Justice. It would also avoid a stormy and emotional parliamentary debate and accompanying anger on the streets in those pre-Covid days. Now, with public gatherings limited to a maximum of 10 people in most major cities, opponents of this change will have to find other ways to show their anger. There were just over 1,000 legal pregnancy terminations in Poland last year. Compare that with this statistic: women’s rights groups estimate between 80,000 and 120,000 Polish women a year seek an abortion abroad. Even women who qualify for a legal procedure often face challenges to having one: such is the stigma surrounding the issue. Presentational grey line Malgorzata Szulecka, a lawyer for the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, told the BBC: This is a totally unjustified decision that will lead to inhuman treatment of women. Ahead of the ruling, Polish sexual and reproductive health and rights activist Antonina Lewandowska told the BBC that the defence of the 1993 law was based on UN rules outlawing torture. It’s inhuman, it’s despicable honestly to make anyone carry a pregnancy to term, especially if the foetus is malformed, and 98% of legal abortions carried out in Poland are due to foetal malformations, she said. International human rights groups opposed the government’s stance, with Amnesty International, the Center for Reproductive Rights and Human Rights Watch saying they would send independent monitors to the court. The Constitutional Tribunal’s upcoming proceedings take place in the context of repeated government attacks on women’s rights and efforts to roll back reproductive rights, as well as legal and policy changes that have undermined the independence of the judiciary and rule of law in Poland, they said in a joint statement. Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54642108

#abortion #rights Roe v. Wade Might Be Overturned Soon This Is Worse Than You Think https://abortion-blog.com//roe-v-wade-might-be-overturned/ Angel Kai’s* ...heart sank when she found out she was pregnant again. The 20-year-old had delivered her second child only three months prior. She was on unpaid maternity leave from her job in Amarillo, TX, and she’d just received a $130 electricity bill in the mail that she didn’t know if she’d be able to pay. Everything that was happening financially was just bad, she remembers. I couldn’t have another kid. I knew getting an abortion would be the best thing, because I couldn’t walk up the street to get a soda if I wanted one at the time. We were that tight on money. It turned out, though, that Angel couldn’t even afford the abortion she knew she wanted. Her health plan was offered under state-funded Medicaid, which, in Texas, only covers abortion in cases of life endangerment, rape, and incest. So, Angel Googled abortion financial help. She came across a few different nonprofits called abortion funds, which provide financial assistance to people who can’t afford to go through the process themselves. One, Fund Texas Choice, said they would help Angel. They ended up footing the bill for the gas it would take to drive to the clinic, an overnight hotel stay, and her food for the trip. They also connected her with another fund that helped pay for the pill she was prescribed.The morning of her abortion, Angel dropped her baby off with a relative at 6 a.m. Then she put in a shift at the lawn company where she worked, her first since going on maternity leave. After clocking out, she started the four-and-a-half-hour drive to Albuquerque, NM. (The closest in-state clinic to her was in Dallas, an additional hour away.) Her then-partner was supposed to join her, but they got in a fight on the way, and she had to turn around and drop him off. She barely made it to the clinic on time, but she got there. And it changed her life for the better, she says. Before finding Fund Texas Choice, Angel had tried to get an ultrasound at a crisis pregnancy center, which is actually a coded name for an anti-abortion clinic. They told me abortion is murder, and that I would go to hell if I had one, Angel remembers now, a year later. But I knew the abortion was the best thing for me to do. Angel’s story could have looked very different. If she hadn’t learned about the fund, she may have not been able to get the abortion pill. Alternatively, if she lived in a different state, she may have been able to use her health insurance to pay for the abortion, at a clinic much closer to her house. In reality, the state of abortion access in America is woefully unequal. And soon, considering the tenuous status of Roe v. Wade, abortions may become even less attainable. If Abortion Is Legal, Why Is It So Hard To Access? In September 2020, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died at age 87. This opened up a spot on the Supreme Court, and President Donald Trump quickly nominated conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett to fill Ginsberg’s seat. Many fear that Barrett’s appointment could lead to Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the U.S., being overturned. While this possibility has led some to envision a future reminiscent of an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, the reality is that some people who already find it easy to get an abortion those with wealth, power, and connections may not notice such a big change in a post-Roe world. The ones who will be hit the hardest are those who already struggle to get abortion care. Namely, low-income people in states with already-restrictive abortion legislation. Over the last few decades, Roe has been an unfulfilled promise for many, says Jessica Arons, senior advocacy and policy counsel for reproductive freedom at the American Civil Liberties Union. States in the South and the Midwest tend to have the most restrictions around reproductive rights. The Bible Belt is known for legislation that typically makes abortions more expensive and time-consuming, and therefore less accessible. For instance, 34 states and Washington, D.C. only provide healthcare funding for abortions in the most extreme circumstances, such as rape or life endangerment. This is in accordance with the Hyde Amendment, which was passed just three years after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion. This is, in part, why Angel couldn’t use her Medicaid insurance to pay for her abortion.Nearly half of abortion recipients live below the federal poverty line, according to the Guttmacher Institute’s 2014 Abortion Patient Survey, so the Hyde Amendment is particularly damaging. Those who are denied abortions are more likely to experience years-long economic hardship, according to a 2017 analysis from The American Journal of Public Health. The 16 states that let Medicaid be used for most medically necessary abortions, (a broad definition that includes physical, emotional, familial, and psychological factors) are largely liberal states. Another way state governments restrict access is through overly punitive regulations that are often called TRAP laws, short for Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers. They’re medically unnecessary, and make it harder and sometimes impossible for clinicians to offer abortion care, according to The Planned Parenthood Action Fund. That can limit the number of clinics in some areas. Five states have only one remaining abortion clinic: North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri, Mississippi, and West Virginia. People living in these states might have to travel up to 200 miles to reach a clinic, and could have to wait a few weeks for an available appointment. In 2019, the average woman of childbearing age lived 25 miles away from the nearest abortion clinic, according to data from the journal Contraception. But that number doesn’t tell the whole story. Large cities with clinics have high populations concentrated in one area. Although the mean travel distance for a person in New York was five miles, it was 136 for a woman in South Dakota.What’s more, some states have mandatory 24-hour waiting periods or require counseling before going through the process. That means patients may have to make two individual trips to the clinic, or get a hotel and stay overnight. The trips, plus the cost of the medical regimen or procedure which can be $1,000 or more can be untenable without financial aid. Across the country, we’ve already seen a systematic chipping away at the right to access abortion, even without overturning Roe, explains Rachel Sussman, The Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s vice president of state policy and advocacy. Since the 2010 elections, we’ve seen 480 state-level abortion restrictions passed. The legislation disproportionately affects Black women and people of color, says Marcela Howell, president and CEO of In Our Own Voice, the National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda. Some of the states with the most restrictions have higher POC populations. In Mississippi, for instance, which upholds the Hyde Amendment and requires patients to undergo counseling before having an abortion, 38% of the population is Black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Roe is the floor, not the ceiling, Howell says. What we’re concerned about is: How do we grant access to that right for everyone? And the future of abortion rights is looking bleaker and bleaker by the year, many abortion rights advocates say. In 2019, 58 new restrictions were enacted, including 25 abortion bans in 12 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute. They seek to place limitations on how, when, or why an abortion is performed. Some of the bans offer exceptions for pregnancies that occur due to rape or incest, but only if the patient has filed an official police report. Alabama has proposed a ban that would prohibit all abortions period. All this is to say, access to abortion is already compromised, and that’s with the Roe v. Wade decision intact. Yes, we all have a constitutional right to abortion, but the access has never been equally shared, Howell says. Women who are poor, those who have the kind of jobs that don’t have flexible hours to go to a clinic in states where they need to wait 24 to 48 hours between the initial appointment and procedure they don’t have access. What Will Happen If Roe v. Wade Is Overturned? At the first presidential debate in September Trump said, there is nothing happening with Roe v. Wade, and that he didn’t know [Barrett’s] view on the landmark ruling. But, during her confirmation hearings last week, Barrett noted Roe is not a super-precedent because calls for its overruling have never ceased. The prevailing belief is that the ruling is in grave danger of being overturned, Arons says. Perhaps unsurprisingly, at least some anti-abortion advocates are happy with Barrett’s appointment. Americans United for Life was the first pro-life group to urge the president to select Judge Barrett, Catherine Glenn Foster, president & CEO of the anti-abortion organization, told Refinery29 in a statement. She noted it’s likely the Supreme Court will have the opportunity to rule on questions of abortion rights. We are confident that if confirmed to the Supreme Court, Judge Barrett would prove herself a trusted caretaker of the constitutional protections extended to every human person in America, Glenn Foster said. The Supreme Court may get its chance to reconsider Roe v. Wade within the next year, according to multiple experts Refinery29 spoke to. Right now, there are 17 abortion-related cases that are one step away from the Supreme Court, Sussman says. There are several cases that could give the court the opportunity to completely gut Roe or perhaps overturn it. That’s more likely to happen if Barrett is confirmed. Barrett has not returned a message Refinery29 left with the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit requesting comment.If Roe v. Wade was overturned, abortion wouldn’t become illegal across the nation overnight. However, trigger laws that are on the books now would go into effect and ban the procedure almost immediately. And, more broadly, access would be even more dependent on state legislation than it is now, says Noel León, interim director of state abortion access at the National Women’s Law Center. Some states may pass bills or change their constitutions to protect access. Others, such as New York (where abortion was legal even before Roe was decided), have already passed laws to protect access in the event the landmark case is overturned. Meanwhile, other states could further curtail access or ban abortions completely. Without Roe, abortion would likely become illegal in 22 states, according to a recent analysis from Middlebury College. In that case, for 41% of women of childbearing age, the nearest abortion clinic would close. They’d then have to travel and average distance of 280 miles to the nearest one compared to 36 miles, the current average for counties where a Roe reversal is likely to occur, explains Caitlin Knowles Myers, a professor of economics at Middlebury College. And even if Roe is not overturned in one fell swoop, states could continue passing legislation that chips away at access bit by bit, and the Supreme Court could uphold those state laws, explains Laurence H. Tribe, university professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard. If Roe is dismantled, Sussman says that 25 million women of reproductive age live in a state where abortion would be banned. This is perhaps the most likely scenario: That a more conservative Supreme Court will first hollow out Roe until there’s almost nothing left. That could look like banning common procedures for abortion, such as Dilation and Evacuation, or even forbidding abortions after brain waves are detected, Tribe says. Right now, with the 17 abortion-related cases held up in federal appeals courts, the Supreme Court has what Tribe describes as a menu of cases, and they’ll get to pick and choose which to take. They’re going to be looking for cases that will give them the maximum opportunity to do the most damage to Roe v. Wade, Tribe says. You’ve heard of death by a thousand cuts? That’s what may happen to Roe, after about a dozen decisions over the next three to four years. If that occurs, or in the case of overturning Roe entirely, Congress could try to enact a national law protecting the right to abortion. But the Supreme Court with three Trump-appointed Justices, plus Justices [Samuel] Alito and [Clarence] Thomas might hold that it’s beyond Congress’s power under the interstate commerce clause to pass such a law, Tribe adds. Then, determining access would be in the hands of the states. But it won’t necessarily stay with them. If Roe is eventually overturned, a more liberal state, say California, could write in their constitution that it’s still legal to have an abortion in the first two trimesters. But eventually, anti-abortion advocates could take a case to the Supreme Court saying that’s depriving the fetus of its right to life. That kind of argument, which would have gone nowhere five or 10 years ago, might well have five justices behind it if Barrett is confirmed, Tribe says. Congress could also pass a federal abortion ban that the president signs. The worst possible outcome is a sweeping constitutional amendment banning abortion federally, according to Talcott Camp, the chief legal and strategy officer at the National Abortion Federation though she doesn’t see it happening in the near future. However, it’s been part of the Republican platform for years. We are confronting a world in which women can be controlled by people in power, Tribe says. But no matter which scenario actually becomes reality, abortion access will continue to affect people unequally. You’ve got to hold two things at once, Camp says. It would be a terrible, tragic loss if Roe was overturned, and that would have a huge impact on low-income, Black, brown, and rural women. But it is also true that those folks are already suffering from lack of abortion access today. And that they would suffer disproportionately were the courts to hollow out Roe so much that states could effectively ban abortion. Organizations that help fund abortions, like the one Angel used, are already struggling to meet the needs of their communities. Here’s the reality a lot of people aren’t talking about, says Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive director of both the Mississippi Freedom Fund and the Yellowhammer Fund in Alabama. Roberts, who uses she/her and they/them pronouns, has been helping low income folks pay for abortions in the South since 2013. People are saying, ‘Well, we’ll just get money together and drive all these people to states where abortion is legal like we did before Roe,' Roberts says. As I always say when something is ridiculous, ‘That’s cute.’ Capacity-wise, clinics could not afford to take all of those patients. Even if we all had private jets to fly people out of state, it still would not solve the problem. As Roberts says, You’re gonna see folks who, with Roe, could swing it not be able to swing it any more. The same person who could drive from Texas to New Mexico for an abortion may not be able to make it all the way to Chicago. And definitely not to Europe.This may prompt more women to try terminating their pregnancies at home, says Jen Villavicencio, MD, MPP, a physician providing abortions in Michigan and a fellow of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. There’s evidence to suggest that self-managed abortion whether done with guidance from others, or done by a woman herself can be done safely, Dr. Villavicencio says. I worry about the stigma associated with this We’re in a scary place where people will potentially not be willing to seek care if they have one of the few rare complications because they’re afraid of the consequences. There are laws that exist right now that criminalize this, and people have been put in jail for it, taken away from their families. Even though abortion is legal, there have been numerous attempts to charge and convict women for self-inducing abortion. Arons says that Black and brown women are at heightened risk for being targeted by overzealous prosecutors misusing statutes to criminalize behavior during pregnancy. States with abortion bans held up in courts right now, such as Alabama, claim they’d only prosecute doctors, not pregnant people seeking abortions. But how would you enforce that? asks Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University and author of Abortion and the Law in America: A Legal History of the Abortion Debate. People are going to fly out of state or order abortion pills online. If you’re Alabama, you’re faced with this choice: Do you not enforce your law, or do you punish your patients? That’s going to be a zero-sum decision. All this may seem dismal, but not all is lost, advocates say. There are certainly states looking to protect abortion rights right now, says Elizabeth Nash, the interim associate director of states issues at The Guttmacher Institute. Virginia just rolled back restrictions such as counseling and waiting period requirements this year, and expanded access to abortion. In that state, 10 years ago you wouldn’t have thought that was possible, but it shows that progress can be made. But those advancements won’t happen if people don’t make their voices heard and vote, says Rachel Fey, the senior director of public policy at Power to Decide. She urges people to learn where their national and local candidates stand on the right to choose before casting a ballot. She notes that folks can call their Congresspeople to voice support for bills that aim to protect reproductive rights. Two are currently in the House of Representatives: the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would stop restrictions that block access to abortion care; and The EACH Woman Act, which would eliminate restrictions on abortion coverage in public and private insurance plans. Tribe adds that it’s not too late to continue to push your senators to hold off on the confirmation of Barrett before the vote on Oct. 22. If there was a massive uprising and people realized what was at stake for them, and marched on Washington on reproductive rights, who knows? Tribe says. She will likely be confirmed very narrowly, and, at this point, only political pressure will matter. There’s no procedure or silver bullet available to stop this nomination. Rising up is the only way. What To Do If You Need An Abortion (Or Know Someone Who Does) These days, most people who need an abortion start in the same place as Angel: Google. But it can be hard to decipher your state’s laws, and sometimes doing so takes time that you may not have. Luckily, there are organizations that make it easier. To find the abortion clinic nearest to you, visit the National Abortion Federation’s website or call them at 1-877-257-0012, Roberts suggests. They have a list of certified clinics on their website, which demonstrate that they comply with NAF’s high standards for safety and patient-centered care. Additionally, the nonprofit Power To Decide launched a digital abortion finder tool just last month that can help you safely find a verified physician or nurse practitioner in your area. This can be accessed at abortionfinder.org. If you know you won’t be able to pay for your abortion, NAF has a confidential hotline you can call to request help with funding: 1-800-772-9100. If they can’t cover you, try the National Network of Abortion Funds website, which lists organizations that help folks pay for their abortions, broken down by state. If your state doesn’t have a fund, call the one in the neighboring state, and they’ll likely know what to do. If someone goes through the trouble to find us, we’ll rarely turn them away, Roberts adds. Besides money for abortions, these funds may offer assistance with travel, hotels, and emotional support, too.Worth noting: Many abortion funds need financial support. If you’re able, consider donating to a fund using the resources above. Any way people want to give money or resources, we’ll make it happen and find a way to take the donation, just reach out, Roberts says. Even if that means giving us a gift card you got for your birthday that you know you won’t use, everything helps. Angel, now 21, is pregnant again and this time, she’s thrilled. Her abortion allowed her to get back on her feet financially, and she says she has no regrets. She’ll forever be grateful for the emotional and physical support that Fund Texas Choice gave her as she traveled across state lines to take the abortion pill at five weeks. She remembers sipping a Sprite on her long drive home a soda the fund’s program coordinator had bought her knowing she’d made the right decision. And she feels even more confident in her choice today. I’m much happier now, she says. Right now, if I wanted to have an abortion, I could actually afford to make that choice. My abortion helped open up doors to get me where I’m at now. It was something that needed to happen. *Angel’s name has been changed to protect her identity. Source: https://www.refinery29.com//what-happens-if-roe-v-wade-ove

#abortion #rights Chief Justice John Roberts’ Abortion Time Bomb Goes Off in Kentucky Less than four months after helping keep Louisiana abortion clinics open, ...John Roberts could be the reason clinics in Kentucky are forced to close. https://abortion-blog.com//chief-justice-john-roberts-abo/ The time for celebrating the Supreme Court’s ruling in June Medical Services v. Russo is over, and you have embattled Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron to thank for it. In late June, when the Supreme Court struck down Act 620, Louisiana’s law forcing abortion providers to get admitting privileges at a local hospital, abortion rights advocates celebrated the win. It was a victory for abortion rights in Louisiana, since access wouldn’t be further decimated. And it was a victory for the providers who had triedand failedto get admitting privileges at hospitals that were either outright hostile to abortion or saw no point in granting privileges to doctors who rarely admit patients with complications. (That’s because abortion is wildly safe!) But advocates knew that the celebration would be short-lived. Yes, John Roberts had voted with the liberals on the Court and, in doing so, had saved Louisiana’s remaining abortion clinics. But he did so with a wink and a nod to anti-choice advocates. Well, the other shoe has dropped. It’s barely four months later and Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, along with a couple of Trump judges from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, wants you to know that laws almost identical to the ones the Supreme Court just struck down in Louisiana are still on the table. Let me explain how. June Medical Services was a case about a Louisiana TRAP law. Generally, TRAP lawsthat stands for targeted regulation of abortion providersare designed to shut down clinics. In June Medical Services, the TRAP law required abortion providers in Louisiana to maintain admitting privileges at a local hospital. That TRAP law was modeled on an identical law in Texas, and lawmakers in both states gleefullyand publiclyadmitted that their clinic shutdown laws were meant to do just thatshut down clinics. But what if there was a TRAP law that wasn’t a clinic shutdown law? What if instead of shutting down clinics, the law kept them in a perpetual state of licensing limbo? Enter Kentucky, which was able to sneak its clinic shutdown law past a three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, thanks to an argument that Cameron crafted after he intervened (legalese for pushed his way into) the case. The two judges who sided with Cameron are, unsurprisingly, Trump judges. Cameronwho has somehow managed to avoid a national scandal after reportedly lying about the investigation into Breonna Taylor’s murderasked the court if he could intervene because, although the state legislature is controlled by Republicans, Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, is a Democrat and has demonstrated he’s not going to waste Kentucky taxpayer money defending bullshit abortion restrictions. Cameron has no such reservations.Kentucky’s law requiring abortion clinics to have a transfer agreement in order to maintain their license has a loophole that allows officials in the state to slowly lower the sword of Damocles over clinics’ heads without ever truly dropping it. In documents filed with the Sixth Circuit, Cameron argued that Kentucky’s transfer agreement law was different than the laws in Louisiana and Texas. It’s a cynical, and quite frankly, ridiculous, interpretation of a law that amounts to little more than harassment of Kentucky abortion providers. Under Kentucky law, abortion providers must have a transfer agreement with a local hospital in the same county or within a 20-minute drive of the clinic. (A transfer agreement is for all intents and purposes the same as an admitting privileges agreement. It means a clinic has an arrangement with a hospital to transfer patients suffering complications from abortion to a specific hospitaleven though very few patients suffer abortion complications, and paramedics will take the ones who do to whatever hospital is closest.) But wait! I thought the Supreme Court has already decided that admitting privileges laws serve no medical benefit? you may be asking. You’re right. In 2016’s Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, Stephen Breyer, writing for the majority of the Court, said that admitting privileges laws are nonsense. (The technical term for nonsense in this context is an undue burden on the right to an abortion under Planned Parenthood v. Casey, but nonsense is what it is.) Breyer took a look at the benefits that Texas claimed the law would have for pregnant people and weighted them against the burdens the law would impose. (That’s what the undue burden test in Planned Parenthood v. Casey requires.) After that calculus, Breyer determined that the law was an undue burden. After all, it would have closed most clinics in the state. In June Medical Services, Breyer deployed that same logic. The law in Louisiana, like in Texas, would have shut down nearly every clinic in Louisiana. But in his concurring opinion in June Medical Services, Roberts donned his monocle and top hat and huffed But what did the Casey Court really say? before explaining that the undue burden analysis in Casey doesn’t require the weighing of benefits and burdens that the majority in Whole Woman’s Health said was necessary. In Roberts’ view, Casey asks one question: Is this law a substantial obstacle? He was content to answer in the affirmative when it came to Louisiana’s law because it was a clinic shutdown law. But what if a state passed an admitting privileges law that didn’t shut down clinics? That just made it an absurd pain in the ass for abortion clinics to stay in business? That is what’s happening in Kentucky. Kentucky’s law requiring abortion clinics to have a transfer agreement in order to maintain their license has a loophole that allows officials in the state to slowly lower the sword of Damocles over clinics’ heads without ever truly dropping it; officials can extend a waiver to a clinic having difficulty securing a transfer agreement if the officials feel like it. It’s at their discretion. The waiver permits the clinic to continue operating for 90 days. And considering that the clinics in Kentucky haven’t had much success in obtaining these agreements, the law essentially forces these clinics to apply for a waiver of the transfer agreement requirement every 90 days while unceasingly trying to convince a hospital to enter into a transfer agreement. Because if officials in Kentucky get the sense that clinics just aren’t trying hard enough, then they can refuse to extend the waiver. It’s a bonkers system. But that’s the abortion landscape for the foreseeable future, thanks to the giant Casey time bomb John Roberts left ticking in June Medical Services v. Russo. If, as Roberts believes, the only relevant question is whether a law is a substantial obstacle to abortion, then as long as a law leaves the possibility of a clinic remaining openby offering discretionary waivers from it’s requirementthen it may not be an undue burden. It doesn’t matter if that clinic has the Sisyphean task of spending countless hours trying to comply with laws that it will likely never be able to comply with. Roberts has signaled loud and clear that he is OK with this system. He has also signaled that he is eager to take another long hard look at Planned Parenthood v. Casey, if only someoneanyonewould tee up the right case. Source: https://rewirenewsgroup.com//chief-justice-john-roberts-/

#abortion #rights Whose Story Gets Told In The Abortion Debates? https://abortion-blog.com//whose-story-gets-told-in-the-a/ As the Supreme Court confirmation ...hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett approach, abortion issues have been thrown into the spotlight once again. President Donald Trump nominated Judge Barrett after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last month. Justice Ginsburg was a vocal advocate for women’s rights and endorsed abortion rights when questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee at her confirmation hearing in 1993. While Judge Barrett has not signed onto an official opinion cutting back on the rights guaranteed in the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, she has disagreed with appeals courts who struck down laws that restrict abortion in her home state of Indiana.ListenListening45:22Host Anita Rao talks with four guests about misconceptions and under-represented narratives in the abortion debate and in popular culture. But while advocates on both sides contemplate the future of abortion laws, misconceptions and stigma around who gets abortions and why make it difficult to understand who might be affected by changes in legislation. Individual stories of patients and providers get lost in the broad-sweeping debates and laws, such as stories of those who seek abortions in the second trimester or those who terminate wanted pregnancies. Host Anita Rao talks with Gretchen Sisson, a research sociologist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, about how television and real life diverge when it comes to abortion and how that may influence our understanding of the issue. Dr. Rathika Nimalendran also joins the conversation to break down North Carolina’s abortion laws and misconceptions. And Rao talks with Margaret and Ruth, two women who terminated wanted pregnancies in their second trimesters for medical reasons. Interview Highlights Rathika Nimalendran on a common barrier many patients face in getting information about abortion: I provide primary care to patients in a rural community health center that receives federal funding. And because of federal laws, I’m actually one, not able to provide abortions to my patients, to the patients that I see who come to me. And additionally, I’m also not even allowed to tell them where they can access an abortion or even access information about what clinics provide abortions. Gretchen Sisson on how popular media may shape audience understanding of abortion: Because abortion is so stigmatized in real life, there’s a deficit of real abortion stories to contextualize what we think we know about abortion. So everybody knows someone who’s had an abortion, they just don’t necessarily know that they know someone who’s had an abortion because it’s so secretive. And in that way, fictional stories can be really powerful examples. Margaret on having the right to make her own decision about her termination: If someone else in my shoes were to make a different decision, then I’m great with that. I’m fine with that. I support them. But I don’t think that these other people should get to choose for me. I don’t think that they should get to make this decision for me and my family. Ruth on her termination being deemed elective by her insurance: We were told that our child was incompatible with life. That’s a diagnosis that no parent or soon-to-be parent ever wants to hear. But to complicate things further, to then go through a termination and receive a bill from your insurer for what I received was a $42,000 bill for a procedure that they deemed quote unquote, elective. After a doctor told me that this was a baby that was incompatible with life. How can I be billed for this as though I were having plastic surgery? As if it were something that I walked in and planned and wanted? Source: https://www.wunc.org//whose-story-gets-told-abortion-debat

#abortion #rights Notre Dame calendars show more events not listed on Amy Coney Barrett’s Senate paperwork https://abortion-blog.com//notre-dame-calendars-show...-more/ Public calendars from the University of Notre Dame’s law school show at least seven additional talks not listed on Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Senate paperwork, including one with the law school’s anti-abortion group, according to a CNN KFile review. Barrett, whose Supreme Court confirmation hearing to succeed the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is underway, is listed as participating in the newly discovered talks from 2004 to 2013. The calendars list her as participating in a panel on religion in the public square, a speech to a student religious society, a talk with the law school’s anti-abortion group, a roundtable on the Constitution, a faculty colloquium, a student scholarship symposium and an event sponsored by Notre Dame’s Women’s Legal Forum. All of Barrett’s events were listed on public calendars from Notre Dame, which CNN’s KFile accessed on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and on Notre Dame’s website. Barrett is required to disclose to the Senate Judiciary Committee all public talks she has given in her professional career, according to a committee staffer. Similar types of events were disclosed on the paperwork she submitted. Barrett has already faced questions over initially failing to disclose some talks she gave while a law professor at Notre Dame. CNN’s KFile reported last week that Barrett initially did not disclose two talks she gave in 2013 hosted by two anti-abortion student groups on paperwork provided to the Senate. Barrett’s initial failure to disclose those two events, and subsequent talks found by CNN’s KFile, raise questions about whether the questionnaire is a complete overview of her talks as a law professor and whether she could face any consequences from the committee. CNN’s KFile could not independently confirm Barrett’s participation in the events, only that they were listed on Notre Dame’s public calendars. In several of the instances, only listings for the events, but not descriptions of them, were archived.Following CNN’s reporting last week, and an inquiry to the White House on a 2013 right to life ad she signed in a Notre Dame newspaper, Barrett sent a letter detailing the talks and the ad to the Senate Judiciary Committee. At her hearing on Tuesday, Barrett said those initial omissions had been an oversight due to the large volume of material she had to find and remember over 30 years.White House spokesperson Judd Deere told CNN in an email on Wednesday that Barrett had been nothing but transparent with the committee, noting that she had provided 1,800 pages of materials, met with the vast majority of senators on the committee and after today will have gone through nearly 20 hours of questioning by members with zero notes in front of her. A spokesperson for the Senate Judiciary Committee referred CNN to a press release from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office that noted that Supreme Court nominees have routinely supplemented their questionnaires. CNN reached out to Barrett’s chambers for comment, but they did not respond.Of the newly discovered undisclosed talks from Barrett, several of them focused on the intersection between religion and the law, a not uncommon subject for a Catholic university. In April 2004, Barrett was scheduled to give a two-hour talk called Law and The description, according to the calendar, was Liberally Clothing the Naked Public Square, a reference to religion in the public square.In February 2005, Barrett was scheduled to speak to the religious student organization the St. Thomas More Society on her experience as a Catholic mother in the legal profession.In March 2013, the calendar shows she was going to participate in a roundtable with the Notre Dame Program on Constitutional Structure to discuss the year’s theme, The Constitution and Unwritten Law, which was to focus on ways in which the law is shaped by forces outside the Constitution’s text.In four instances, it is not clear what Barrett may have said at the talks nor what the talks were about. According to a 2005 calendar, she was scheduled to speak to the Women’s Legal Forum on April 5, 2005. Likewise, she was scheduled to give a presentation in February 2013 to faculty based on a paper. In January 2007, according to a calendar, she was to speak to the law school’s anti-abortion club, Jus Vitae, but it is unclear what the topic of discussion was. And in April 2007, she was set to participate in a student scholarship symposium where she responded to a presentation on an unknown topic from a student from the school’s law review. Source: https://edition.cnn.com//kfile-amy-coney-barre/index.html

#abortion #rights Amy Coney Barrett Wants to Decide If You’re Virtuous Enough to Vote https://abortion-blog.com//amy-coney-barrett-wants-to-dec/ In Amy Coney ...Barrett’s world, people deemed virtuous are white, Christian, able-bodied men. Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s regressive views on abortion rights are well known. She has called abortion always immoral, and if confirmed, would be a reliable vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Less well known, however, is her belief that a person’s virtue should determine their eligibility for basic civil rights like the right to vote. Barrett, who is President Donald Trump’s nominee to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat, doesn’t just want to go back to the pre-Roe 1970s; she also wants to drag voting and political rights back to the Jim Crow era. In a dissent she wrote last year in Kanter v. Barr, Barrett argued for limiting participation in political rights for people not deemed virtuous. What Barrett conveniently left out of her argument is that all of her historical legal examples were used to disenfranchise women, people with disabilities, and people of color. In Kanter, a two-judge majority of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled it was reasonable for Rickey Kanter to lose his Second Amendment right to own a gun after his conviction for felony mail fraud. Barrett dissented. The majority found that the writers of the Constitution meant for Second Amendment protections to belong only to virtuous citizens, arguably excluding anyone convicted of a felony, whether violent or nonviolent. Unfortunately, the two-judge majority’s use of virtue as a qualification for accessing Second Amendment rights left the door open for Barrett to argue for the application of virtue to other constitutional rights. Rather than limit her dissent to the case in front of her, Barrett wrote an overreaching opinion that argued for limiting citizens’ rights to vote and serve on juries. Barrett noted that historically, states deprived people of voting rights and jury service if they had certain infamous crime felony convictions, but she failed to mention that this was a particular tool used to disenfranchise Black people in the Jim Crow South after the Civil War. Although many states had criminal disenfranchisement laws in place before the war, felon disenfranchisement was expanded after the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to include more crimes and therefore disenfranchise more people. This application of virtue restrictions on voting persists today: In many states, people convicted of certain felonies are still stripped of their right to vote, even as many states expand programs to re-enfranchise people convicted of felonies. Barrett further argued that historically, voting and jury service could be limited based on a mental fitness requirement, essentially supporting ableist restrictions on people’s voting rights based on mental disabilities. But women, people of color, non-Christians, and people with disabilities didn’t need a felony conviction to be denied voting rights, entry to the United States, the right to serve on a jury, or even the right to testify in court on the basis of insufficient virtue or morality. Women weren’t legally allowed to vote until the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, and it wasn’t until 1975 that the Supreme Court ruled that women could be drafted into jury service just as men. White, Christian, able-bodied men were assumed to have sufficient moral virtue for political life, while people of color, women, non-Christians, and people with disabilities, were required to prove their morality and mental fitness to access their political rights.Barrett’s argument in favor of virtue requirements for participating in the political process in antithetical to an inclusive democracy. For many crimes, women had to be virtuous in order for a man to be held accountable. The crime of rape or seduction could only be committed against a pure woman whose virtue was intact. If the woman wasn’t considered virtuous, 19th- and early 20th-century laws didn’t see her as a rape victim. Black women in particular rarely got justice for crimes of sexual violence because courts didn’t view them as having Christian virtue to lose. The stereotype of the oversexualized Black woman meant courtrooms didn’t take their testimony or pain seriously. Sexual moral virtue was also used to keep Chinese American women from entering this country as a result of the Page Act of 1875, which barred admittance for any Chinese woman suspected of being a sex worker. Virtue and believability in court were linked to white, Christian values. In the 19th century, Jews were asked extra questions to prove their trustworthiness before being allowed to testify under oath. New York courts required a non-Christian witness to be sworn according to the peculiar ceremonies of his religion after 1829, but even with this accommodation courts asked separately whether such oaths were binding on a Jewish person’s conscience. Jewish people didn’t get the same benefit of the doubt as Christian witnesses. Some courts even questioned if believing in Jesus Christ was necessary for a witness to be believed under oath. Many courts had to rule separately that Jews were competent witnesses after they were challenged for their lack of Christian faith. In the first half of the 19th century, many courts didn’t even allow nonwhite people to testify against white men accused of a crime. A number of states had laws barring Black or mixed-race people from testifying against white men. The California Supreme Court ruled in 1854’s People v. Hall that Chinese immigrants couldn’t testify against white citizens and threw out the conviction of a white man found guilty of murdering a Chinese man based upon the testimony of Chinese witnesses. By prohibiting Chinese immigrants from testifying against white people, the court suggested that Chinese immigrants couldn’t be trusted based on bigoted assumptions that their moral values were different from those held by white, Christian Americans. This is the ugly history of the sort of virtue jurisprudence that Barrett advocates. Her focus on stripping rights from people who aren’t virtuous enough for her liking ignores one of the critical questions noted by the majority in Kanter: whether the state has a reasonable interest in denying people access to their Second Amendment rights. When the state strips someone of that right, it is doing so out of concern for public safetyto keep guns away from possibly violent people. But what is the state’s interest in keeping non-virtuous people from voting or from serving on juries? Except for discriminatory purposes, the state has no such interest. Rather than determine whether a state has a reasonable interest in barring entire classes of people from exercising a right, Barrett justified her argument by placing voting and jury service on a lower rung of citizenship guarantees. According to Barrett, people serve on a jury and vote not because they have the right to do so but because it is for the collective good. This argument might have worked in the 19th century, but it is now 2020, and we have decades of legislation and jurisprudence that shows such limitations result in discrimination, biased jury verdicts, and nondemocratic elections. Barrett’s argument in favor of virtue requirements for participating in the political process is antithetical to an inclusive democracy. A U.S. citizen shouldn’t be required to prove virtue in order to access their rights. Her reasoning is also an insult to the legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose seat Barrett has been nominated to fill. Ginsburg, who wrote a scathing dissent in Shelby v. Holderthe 2013 case that gutted the Voting Rights Actwas a champion for voting rights. Amy Coney Barrett is not. Source: https://rewirenewsgroup.com//amy-coney-barrett-wants-to-/