Abortion rates plummet with free birth control??? By Diane Duke Williams October 4, 2012
Providing birth control to women at no cost substantially reduced unplanned pregnancies and cut abortion rates by a range of 62-78 percent compared to the national rate, a new study shows. http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/24334.aspx
And of course there’s the Trump administration’s plan .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/us/politics/trump-abortion-limits.html .. to forbid medical professionals in clinics that receive federal money from providing their patients with pertinent and truthful information about abortion. This proposal, aimed at Planned Parenthood, is a clear suppression of free speech that flies in the face of the robust First Amendment that has evolved since the Supreme Court, by a 5 to 4 vote, upheld an earlier abortion gag rule .. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/500/173/ .. 27 years ago.
Some or all of these measures will reach the Supreme Court in due course. Indeed, part of the anti-abortion strategy is to serve up a diet of far-fetched cases: While there is no chance the Supreme Court will uphold the fetal heartbeat law, a defeat serves the greater purpose of keeping the base attentive to the court and motivated at the polls.
There is a case already at the court that presents the justices with a more immediate test. It is scheduled for consideration at Thursday’s private conference, where the justices decide which new cases to accept. At issue is whether the court will choose to respond to a bold act of judicial defiance: the refusal by a federal appeals court to apply the Supreme Court’s most recent abortion precedent to a situation that is all but indistinguishable.
---- Insert: Supreme Court Allows Arkansas Abortion Restrictions to Stand [...] By Adam Liptak May 29, 2018 WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to hear a challenge to an Arkansas law that could force two of the state’s three abortion clinics to close.
Two years ago, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt .. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/15-274_new_e18f.pdf , the Supreme Court overturned a Texas law that required doctors who provided abortions either by surgery or medication to have admitting privileges in a local hospital. The court concluded that there was no demonstrable need for the requirement and that any health-related benefit would be outweighed by the drastic limitation the law would have imposed on access to abortion in Texas. The law, which also imposed new physical requirements on abortion clinics, would have led two-thirds of the state’s clinics to close, leaving large areas of Texas without an abortion provider.
The Arkansas law, cynically entitled the Abortion-Inducing Drug Safety Act, would leave only one of the state’s three abortion clinics in business because the other two, operated by Planned Parenthood, offer only medication abortions. Planned Parenthood conducted a statewide canvass of obstetrician/gynecologists and found none willing to enter into the required contract. The remaining clinic, in Little Rock, which currently offers both surgical and medication abortions, would have to limit its practice to surgical abortions, leaving Arkansas women with no medication option.
Federal District Judge Kristine G. Baker blocked the law’s enforcement .. https://rewire.news/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/PP-Heartland-v.-Jegley-Act-577-TRO.pdf after concluding that any medical benefit from the contract arrangement would be “incrementally small” while the burden on women’s access to abortion would be substantial. The law was “a solution in search of a problem,” the judge said. In a ruling last July vacating the district court injunction, the Eighth Circuit said that Judge Baker had “failed to make factual findings estimating the number of women burdened by the statute” and who would either forgo or postpone an abortion because of the law.
Only willful blindness to the facts of the case could have led the appeals court to fault Judge Baker’s description of the burden the law would impose. She explained that closing Planned Parenthood’s clinic in Fayetteville, in the northwest corner of the state, would require women there to make a 380-mile round trip to the remaining clinic in Little Rock not once, but twice, because Arkansas requires an in-person meeting between doctors and their abortion patients, followed by a 48-hour waiting period.
“Inability to travel to the sole remaining clinic in the state will lead some women to take desperate measures, such as attempting to self-abort or seeking care from unsafe providers,” Judge Baker wrote.
How many women? How many angels on the head of a pin? “We are left with no concrete District Court findings,” the Eighth Circuit complained in sending the case back to Judge Baker for further factual development. We are left to guess by what magic the judge can satisfy the appeals court’s burning curiosity.
The Eighth Circuit agreed to suspend its order to permit Planned Parenthood to appeal to the Supreme Court. The appeal, Planned Parenthood of Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma v. Jegley, challenges the justices to stand by the ruling in the Texas case. The court’s “intervention is necessary to preserve the integrity” of that decision, the Planned Parenthood lawyers assert in their petition.
I see the case as presenting an additional challenge: the need for the justices to make clear to judges of the lower courts that, like it or not, the Constitution still protects access to abortion without the “undue burden” of state-created obstacles that serve no purpose other than to frustrate women in the exercise of their constitutional rights. And that need is urgent, given the Trump administration’s success in filling judicial vacancies with opponents of abortion, including one successful nominee to a federal appeals court who equated abortion and slavery as “the two greatest tragedies in our country,” and others who signal their opposition more discreetly.
Readers of this column know that I’ve only reluctantly shed my reticence about naming the presidents who appointed the judges whose decisions I discuss. It may or may not be relevant that all three judges on the Eighth Circuit panel were named by President George W. Bush. They were Judges William Jay Riley, Raymond W. Gruender and James E. Gritzner, a senior federal district judge temporarily sitting on the Eighth Circuit. Judge Baker was named to the Federal District Court in Arkansas by President Barack Obama.
Arkansas passed its law in 2015, before the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Texas case. The law was part of an effort by a number of anti-abortion state legislatures to stop the practice of medication abortion. The laws serving this goal required doctors to prescribe the two drugs according to the instructions on the original label that the Food and Drug Administration approved when it authorized the procedure in 2000. That sounds sensible enough, but it actually was a highly cynical maneuver. Over the ensuing 15 years, during which 2.75 million medication abortions took place, doctors had determined that the better practice was to use only one-third the approved dose of one of the drugs, mifepristone. It came to be considered bad professional practice to follow the original label, and doctors testified that if put to the choice, they would stop offering medication abortions rather than violate what was now considered the standard of care.
In case anyone wonderswhy the anti-abortion forces would train their sights on medication abortion, which takes place only in the first 70 days of pregnancy, I think the reason is obvious: It empowers women because they take the second pill, misoprostol, at home. There is no need for medical apparatus nor, once the appropriate stage of pregnancy is confirmed, even for a doctor. The procedure is a perfect candidate for telemedicine, which some states are trying to bar while encouraging telemedicine for other simple procedures.
In March 2016, the Food and Drug Administration updated its label .. https://www.guttmacher.org/article/2016/06/public-health-implications-fda-update-medication-abortion-label .. to take account of the new consensus. So that part of the Arkansas law, which Judge Baker had also enjoined, fell away. What was left was the contract-physician requirement, which makes no sense. Not only is medication abortion extremely safe, with a hospitalization rate of 0.06 percent, but any complications occur after a woman has left the doctor’s office and traveled some distance, perhaps a substantial one, back to her home. The law requires a contract with a physician anywhere in the state, making it unlikely that the contract doctor would even be at hand or would have privileges in a hospital near the woman’s home.
Further, Arkansas has responded to Planned Parenthood’s complaint about the distance that women would have to travel from Fayetteville by arguing that those woman could get abortions 80 miles away in Tulsa, Okla., rather than 190 miles away in Little Rock. The fact that Oklahoma has neither a contract-physician requirement nor a face-to-face consultation requirement (the consultation can be by telephone) strips from Arkansas any facade of sincerity about the asserted health-protective rationale for its law. The law is phony. It’s unconstitutional. It’s the Supreme Court’s next test.
JimLur, Fetus sues mother's husband for invading his (the fetus's) home. Could it be one day? [...] What's Wrong with Fetal Rights [...] A pregnant woman and her fetus should never be regarded as separate, independent, and even adversarial, entities. Yet... https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=138740874
fuagf -- we'll know the 'originalists' are sincere, and not just lying buffoons using that ridiculous and idiotic ruse as an excuse to impose whatever views they like, when they hold that the Second Amendment guarantees only members of militias organized by state or local authorities to keep slaves in line only the right to own late eighteenth-century muskets https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140160465
Ok. Still, noted that you speak of trouble woman have had with abortions, yet nothing about all the women who have suffered no doubt. And nothing on others who have suffered doubt, yet are happy they had been able to have an abortion safely - and relatively easily. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=141466151
"How I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement .. bits .. Without Birth Control: 6 zygotes will “die” With Birth Control: 2 zygotes will “die”"
Pressure mounts on Biden to approve telemedicine for the use of abortion pills.
Abortion rights demonstrators rally outside the Supreme Court in Washington on March 4, 2020. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and DARIUS TAHIR
03/20/2021 07:00 AM EDT
The battle over abortion rights has a dramatic new front: the fight over whether the Biden administration will make pills available online.
Even as they keep a sharp eye on the increasingly conservative Supreme Court, activists, lawmakers and medical groups are pushing Biden’s FDA to lift restrictions on a 20-year-old drug for terminating early pregnancies. Such a decision would dramatically remake the abortion landscape by making the pills available online and by mail even if the Supreme Court overturns or cuts back Roe vs. Wade.
Pressure that had already been building for years over access to telemedicine abortions is reaching a peak, as patients fearful of Covid-19 are seeking to avoid in-person medical procedures whenever possible and demand for the drug has skyrocketed.
As the Biden administration deliberates on the federal rules on where, when and from whom patients can get the pills, with a federal court deadline looming in early April, conservatives are already erecting barriers. In court, in Congress and in statehouses across the country, they’re working to preemptively ban the pills or make them more difficult to obtain — with bills now pending in Indiana, Montana, Arizona, Arkansas, Alabama, Iowa this year alone.
“They’re trying as hard as they can to restrict access to the pills now because they know they won’t be able, later, to unring the bell,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor at the Florida State University College of Law who studies abortion. “This is just as important as what happens with Roe.”
Biden’s pledge to “follow the science” when it comes to public health is under scrutiny as medical experts argue — citing new data gained during the pandemic — that administering the abortion drugs remotely is safe and effective.
Should the federal rules get rewritten, someone in, say, Arkansas, could have a video consultation with a doctor in Massachusetts or even the UK and then receive the pills by mail. Even if red states moved to ban their importation, enforcement would be nearly impossible.
“It takes the fight out of the clinic setting into individual people’s homes,” explained Alina Salganicoff, the Director of Women’s Health Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “That becomes much more difficult to regulate and could potentially broaden access.”
Women’s health and advocacy groups stress, however, that the pills are not a panacea. For one, they can only be used safely in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy — a narrow time window during which many people are not yet aware that they are pregnant.
[INSERT: How Can You Be Pregnant (For Months) And Not Know It? [...] Here are some astonishing statistics: Among pregnant women, 1 in 450 doesn't know her status until week 20 or later (more than halfway through the pregnancy), and 1 in 2,500 is oblivious until she actually goes into labor. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=99687844]
Additionally, taking the pills in a state that has banned them could be legally perilous, discouraging people from seeking medical help if they have a complication. This fear is not theoretical — already, even with Roe still in place, women have faced prosecution for self-induced abortions.
Biden may soon be forced to make a decision.A federal appeals court is hearing a challenge to the Trump administration’s decision to keep the FDA’s in-person dispensing requirement for the pills in place during the pandemic, and Biden’s DOJ must tell them by April 7 whether or not it plans to keep enforcing those rules.
Even if the Biden administration were to choose to defend the Trump rule, there’s a burgeoning online underground market for the pills which, like its counterparts in the formal health care system, has seen surging popularity during the pandemic.
Abortion opponents are already sounding the alarm about this potential wild west.
Now that the administration is considering lifting the federal restrictions on the pill, conservatives are worried the state-level bans they’re rushing to enact won’t be enough.
“Chemical abortion really puts Roe vs. Wade on steroids,” said Kristi Hamrick with the anti-abortion group Students for Life of America. “Roe made abortion possible anywhere in the country during all nine months of pregnancy, but this is really a new frontier — doing it virtually and chemically.”
But for advocates like Silvia Henriquez, the co-president of the abortion rights group All* Above All, looser federal rules for the pills is part of a long-held goal.
“We are working towards a future where abortion care is there when we need it, where it’s affordable, accessible and on our own terms, without barriers,” she said. “Medication abortion gets us closer to that world — where it doesn’t matter who we are, how much we earn, or where we live.”
As conservative states have moved aggressively in recent years to restrict access to surgical abortions, passing hundreds of laws that have set limits on when, where and how people can have the procedure, demand for the cheaper and more convenient abortion pills has soared — including online, where patients have obtained the drug from underground marketplaces as well as approved vendors. In 2001, the drugs were used in just 5 percent of abortions in the U.S. By 2017, that jumped to 39 percent, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The increase came even as the total number of abortions dropped significantly .. https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/fact-sheet/the-availability-and-use-of-medication-abortion/ .
Scientists and doctors are increasingly supportive of medication abortions and have long called for scrapping the rules dictating that patients pick them up in person even if they don’t swallow them until they get home. They say it’s a particularly pressing concern during the pandemic, when the government has moved to limit in-person dispensing — and promote telemedicine — for nearly every other drug.
Jen Villavicencio, an abortion provider and health policy fellow with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told POLITICO that she started going from car to car seeing patients in her clinic’s parking lot and dispensing the pills after the Supreme Court intervened in January .. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/12/supreme-court-restrictions-abortion-pill-458436 .. to restore the Trump administration rules that for several months had been blocked by lower courts.
“We were trying to avoid interactions with other people to try to quell the rising numbers of Covid-19 cases,” she said. “Many medications that have much higher risk profiles were allowed to remove the in-person requirement because of the pandemic. But that courtesy and safety measure was not offered to people who were seeking abortion care or miscarriage management.”
Medication abortion relies on two pills — misoprostol, which is lightly regulated, and mifepristone, which has been more tightly regulated by FDA since its introduction in the market decades ago.
Yet mifepristone “has very few risks at all,” argues Villavicencio. “It is more safe than over-the-counter medications like ibuprofen and Tylenol. We know this medication can be safely administered via telemedicine because we’ve studied it.”
ACOG, along with the American Medical Association and other leading medical groups, has been lobbying the Biden administration and arguing in court that the federal rules for dispensing the pills should be loosened. Their push has been echoed on Capitol Hill, where Democratic lawmakers have urged Biden to allow telemedicine abortions both during the pandemic and beyond.
But the decision still presents a political quandary for Biden, who until recently was relatively conservative on abortion for a Democratic politician.
The president has yet to take a position on the pills. When pressed by the New York Times in 2019 as part of a Democratic primary questionnaire on whether the medications should be over-the-counter, Biden gave a noncommittal answer, unlike several of his then-competitors, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who urged easier access to the pills.
Asked where it stands on the dispensing requirements on the drugs, the Department of Health and Human Services declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation. But Xavier Becerra,California’s Attorney General who is awaiting confirmation to leadHHS, last year led a coalition of 21 Democratic AGs in petitioning the FDA to allow telemedicine abortions at least for the duration of the pandemic.
“Forcing women to unnecessarily seek in-person reproductive healthcare during this public health crisis is foolish and irresponsible,” he wrote at the time.
As they await a decision, abortion rights opponents are fighting on two fronts: pushing Congress, state lawmakers and the FDA to enact restrictions on the pills or ban them entirely while also seeking to convince the public that the pills are dangerous.
For the last three years, groups including Students for Life of America have bought ads .. https://www.thisischemicalabortion.com/ads/ .. online and on TV, created mini documentaries, sponsored events on college campuses, and trained members to testify before their state legislatures about possible complications and side effects of the pills and the danger that women could be pressured or tricked into taking them without consent.
With easier telemedicine access to the pills, conservatives warn, even the fall of Roe vs. Wade wouldn’t curb their use in states that choose to ban abortion.
“There’s always been an issue of people crossing state lines, in order to do things that might be illegal,” said Roger Severino, a former top official in Trump’s HHS now working for a think tank. “It all depends on how the Biden administration reacts: if it fulfills its responsibility it’ll clamp down on the black market for it.”
Conservative fears around mifepristone are nothing new. When the drug was first introduced in the 1990s, politicians including George W. Bush worried the medication would popularize the practice.
Evidence since then — and especially during the pandemic — has borne those fears out. The popularity of so-called teleabortions has increased in the U.S. for years — long before the pandemic — both through the established health care system as well as more informal, underground groups. A January 2020 study in the American Journal of Public Health, for example, found increasing demand for one domestic teleabortion service operating underground in states where state restrictions on in-person abortion clinics increased. The federal government has also been seizing more pills shipped in from abroad, according to a POLITICO analysis of data on the FDA’s seizures of misoprostol and mifepristone obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
In 2008, FDA intercepted nine shipments of abortion drugs, according to the FDA data obtained by POLITICO; in 2018, just a decade later, there were 26. The agency’s annual totals have varied widely from year to year: a low of 5 in 2015, followed by rises during the Trump administration of 19 in 2017 and 26 in 2018. The number fell to 10 in 2019, the last year for which information is available.
The shifting landscape overseas for access to mifepristone is a potential indicator of how widespread the practice of teleabortion could become in the U.S., whether it gains new footing legally under the Biden administration or is kept underground.
In the United Kingdom, the not-for-profit group MSI Reproductive Choices performed some 16,750 abortions through telemedicine alone in 2020 after the government loosened restrictions on the practice. (The country typically has around 200,000 abortions per year.) A new study of the pandemic year in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology says the practice has been successful: patients wait on average 4 days fewer to get an abortion, with little difference from in-person abortions in safety or effectiveness.
Jonathan Lord, the chief medical officer of the group, says the increased ease in obtaining the medications has had the effect of expanding access to abortion generally. When women had to go in-person to pick up the pills, many vulnerable women — such as those being abused at home — were too fearful to make the trip, worrying that their partners would discover what they were doing.
Now, the health care system can coordinate with social workers and police for people in the group. “They’re also the group we would really, really, really like to engage with,” Lord said. “That’s where telemedicine has really helped.”
The change has also diminished the importance of some of the underground groups.
Women on Web, the most prominent international group providing abortion pills through the mail outside of formal health care channels, got contacts from 0 patients in the the U.K. during the first few months of the pandemic — down from 35 or 40 a month. In a study of eight European countries, the group generally found surging demand for its services during the pandemic year — unless the country allowed for more teleabortion.
No matter what decision Biden and other policymakers make in the coming months, these trends are likely to continue long after the threat of Covid-19 has passed. The medication is likely to be the future of the abortion wars, if only because it’s the future of abortion.
“There are so many direct and indirect ways that states have moved to limit access to surgical abortion — from waiting periods to parental notification and requirements for special licenses — and I anticipate they would be equally creative with medication abortions,” Salganicoff said. “Whether they can stop every pill from coming across the border is another story.”
dropdeadfred, How many millions would you have suffer desease and/or die to satisfy your sadly anti-social, anti-abortion stance. The cells used were "electively aborted" decades ago. As DragonBear said, better used for good than dumped in the waste bin. Abortion opponents protest COVID-19 vaccines’ use of fetal cells https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=162476441
"Spiritual Warfare" - Demons of the deep state: how evangelicals and conspiracy theories combine in Trump’s America "The apocalyptic myth that helps explain evangelical support for Trump "Is this fascism? No. Could it become fascism? Yes"" .. and others .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=161519587
Briboy - Evangelicals perfected cancel culture. Now it’s coming for them. [...] Following the cultural upheaval that began in the 1960s, conservative Christians bathed in a sense of loss. By the mid-1970s, traditional American Christian values were on the decline in favor of a new kind of pluralism. To protect themselves, leaders of the newly formed religious right argued a kind of Christian cultural separatism in which all that was deemed evil would be cut off from all that was deemed holy. P - Among their enemies were liberal politicians, social justice activists, feminist professors, abortion rights advocates, secularists, pornographers, humanists, atheists, Hollywood moguls, civil rights leaders, working moms and stay-at-home dads. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=157609535
Cotswals, What Drives Success? [...] Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others — as measured by income, test scores and so on — is enough to provoke a firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism. The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes. P - There are some black and Hispanic groups in America that far outperform some white and Asian groups. Immigrants from many West Indian and African countries, such as Jamaica, Ghana, and Haiti, are climbing America’s higher education ladder, but perhaps the most prominent are Nigerians. Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=157008032
arizona1, Here’s what happened when one woman emailed the White House about birth control [...] A woman who sent the White House an email as part of a campaign to counter measures by the administration to curb access to birth control was surprised to receive a reply within hours — but even more surprised that the response had nothing to do with birth control, and instead touted President Trump’s anti-abortion stances. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=143745943
Non-coding DNA changes the genitals you're born with [...] Mammals will develop ovaries and become females unless the early sex organs have enough of a protein called SOX9 at a key stage in their development. SOX9 causes these organs to become testes, which then direct the rest of the embryo to become male. P - The amount of SOX9 produced is controlled initially by the SRY protein encoded by the Sry gene, which is located on the Y chromosome. This is why males, who have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome, usually develop testes while females, who have two X chromosomes, do not. P - Only 2% of human DNA contains the 'code' to produce proteins, key building blocks of life. The remaining 98% is 'non-coding' and was once thought to be unnecessary 'junk' DNA, but there is increasing evidence that it can play important roles. P - The latest study adds to this evidence, showing that a small piece of DNA called enhancer 13 (Enh13), located over half a million bases away from the Sox9 gene, boosts SOX9 protein production at the right moment to trigger testes development. When the team genetically removed Enh13 from male (XY) mice, they developed ovaries and female genitalia. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=141575949
Sex redefined [...] The idea of two sexes is simplistic. Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that. [...] But beyond this, there could be even more variation. Since the 1990s, researchers have identified more than 25 genes involved in DSDs, and next-generation DNA sequencing in the past few years has uncovered a wide range of variations in these genes that have mild effects on individuals, rather than causing DSDs. “Biologically, it's a spectrum,” says Vilain. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=162607356
"How I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement .. bits .. Without Birth Control: 6 zygotes will “die” With Birth Control: 2 zygotes will “die”"
Overturning Roe is the first step. But the anti-abortion movement has its sights set far beyond.
By Kaia Hubbard May 6, 2022, at 4:27 p.m. U.S. News & World Report
A demonstrator holds up a model of a fetus as she and other anti-abortion demonstrators protest in front of the Supreme Court. (Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
A series of troubling incidents directly involving legal questions about the unborn drew headlines in recent weeks, even before an unprecedented leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion made abortion rights’ future appear more grim: Five aborted fetuses were found in the D.C. home of an anti-abortion activist who reportedly planned to give them proper burials, Kentucky lawmakers introduced a provision that requires the burial or cremation of fetal remains, and a Texas woman was charged with murder over a self-induced abortion.
On their faces, the incidents may be viewed as isolated. But taken together, they perhaps reveal an undercurrent of an anti-abortion movement with its sights set beyond Roe – beyond merely giving abortion back to the states – and toward recognizing the rights of the fetus and making abortion murder.
That reality inched one step closer on Wednesday, when Republican lawmakers in the Louisiana House of Representatives – emboldened by the Supreme Court draft opinion that shook the nation – advanced a bill out of committee that would classify abortion as homicide, allowing patients to be criminally charged by prosecutors.
“We cannot wait on the Supreme Court to confirm that innocent babies have the right to life in Louisiana,” state Rep. Danny McCormick said during a committee hearing on Wednesday. “The act of abortion ends the life of a human being.”
[INSERT: At this point i disconnected my VPN to see if i could then see the photos mentioned. Couldn't and then was denied access back into the article. Reconnecting the VPN didn't help, still failed to regain access. So from here i'm only able to edit the article blind.]
Photos: Abortion Protests Erupt A crowd of people gather outside the Supreme Court, early Tuesday, May 3, 2022 in Washington. A draft opinion circulated among Supreme Court justices suggests that earlier this year a majority of them had thrown support behind overturning the 1973 case Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion nationwide, according to a report published Monday night in Politico. It's unclear if the draft represents the court's final word on the matter. The Associated Press could not immediately confirm the authenticity of the draft Politico posted, which if verified marks a shocking revelation of the high court's secretive deliberation process, particularly before a case is formally decided. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
It’s the latest example in a wave of Republican-dominated statehouses in recent months that have introduced and passed legislation at near-record rates restricting access to abortion ahead of the Supreme Court decision expected out of Mississippi this summer that will likely unravel the almost 50-year-old precedent established in Roe v. Wade. The draft opinion showed the high court doing just that, but a statement from the justices later urged that the votes have not been finalized.
Nevertheless, appearing emboldened by a 6-3 conservative majority on the high court, lawmakers along the way to Roe’s final days have sought harsher and more novel restrictions, like deputizing private citizens as the enforcers of a recent high-profile Texas abortion law or revoking commonly used exceptions to abortion bans like incest or rape. But perhaps more quietly, they’re also reframing the conversation from one that centers the woman’s health to another advocating for the fetus – no matter the cost. And in doing so, they’re elevating a decades-long push to have fetuses seen as human beings.
[ Read: Could Overturning Roe v. Wade Backfire for Republicans? .. inside ]
Making the Fetus a Person
Whether fetuses are people is a question at the very heart of the abortion debate and can be plainly seen in the differing depictions of early stage pregnancies by some as “babies” versus “clumps of cells” and everything in between. But the idea of “fetal personhood” is a concept with larger legal implications.
Those in opposition to abortion have been seeking to recognize fetuses as people at the legal level since Roe v. Wade, according to Rachel Rebouché, the interim dean of Temple University’s law school and an expert in reproductive health law. She notes that the political will to recognize a fetus as a human being did not exist in the past.
“But now I think what's interesting is you see kind of a renewed enthusiasm because no one really knows what the Supreme Court is going to say,” Rebouché said before the draft opinion surfaced. “Most people think that it will be some kind of overturning or evisceration of Roe. And if that turns on erasing the line of viability as when states can legislate or when they cannot, then why not push the envelope and try to afford fetuses some level of personhood.”
In Roe, the justices decided that up until fetal viability, when a fetus may survive outside of the womb on its own, states do not have a legal interest in the fetus. Rather than insert itself into a complex philosophical question of when life begins, the court decided to base the ability to get an abortion on whether the fetus could survive independently of the mother, creating the viability standard.
“Roe is very clear that the court was not defining the question of when life began and instead just decided the issue of when is there constitutional liberty to end the pregnancy as a choice,” Rebouché says. “And so that's really why the viability line exists. Because it's at that point that the court said there's an interest of the state once a fetus can live outside the womb. And so personhood is really interconnected to this idea of when life begins – the question that the courts said courts shouldn't answer.”
The viability standard, generally understood by experts at present to mean 24 weeks of pregnancy, has stood for nearly half a century. But Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is revisiting that question, raising whether Mississippi has the legal right to pass a law moving that line to 15 weeks, or more broadly, whether states have the right to set earlier gestational limits on abortion.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh during oral arguments over the Mississippi case, in December appeared to again raise that question of choosing between life and liberty, seeming to agree that it’s one that the high court perhaps should not answer.
“Why should this court be the arbiter rather than Congress, the state legislatures, state supreme courts, the people being able to resolve this?” Kavanaugh said. “And there will be different answers in Mississippi and New York, different answers in Alabama than California, because they're two different interests at stake and the people in those states might value those interests somewhat differently.”
Kavanaugh highlighted that, for some in this debate, two interests may be at stake: an interest in the woman and an interest in fetal life, often described as the maternal-fetal conflict.
“The other side would say, and the reason this issue is hard, is that you can't accommodate both interests,” Kavanaugh said. “You have to pick. That's the fundamental problem. And one interest has to prevail over the other at any given point in time. And that's why this is so challenging, I think.”
According to Grace Howard, a professor of Justice Studies at San José State University, when two opposing interests are at stake, “Typically in that dynamic, they will invoke the innocence of the unborn,” adding that the current makeup of the Supreme Court is favorable to the idea of fetal personhood.
[ Read: Overturning Abortion Rights, the Pandemic Turn the Clock Back for Women .. inside ]
The Shift Toward Criminalization
Historically, the anti-abortion movement has been hesitant to punish women who choose to terminate a pregnancy, instead painting them as victims to the abortion practice. But recent developments may suggest a future where states pursue criminal charges not only against abortion providers but also against the people seeking them out.
A recent move in Texas garnered national attention after a woman was charged with murder for what authorities claimed was a self-induced abortion. Experts say it was a misreading of the state law, and the charge was ultimately overturned – but not before the incident could raise eyebrows nationwide to the potential for states to criminalize women getting abortions in the not-so-distant future.
The new bill in Louisiana, known as the “Abolition of Abortion” act, is an even more concrete step toward criminalizing the woman rather than the provider by way of making a fetus a human being. The bill says it would “ensure the right to life and equal protection of the laws to all unborn children from the moment of fertilization by protecting them by the same laws protecting other human beings,” going on to dictate that the the consequences associated with the homicide of any person would be extended to an unborn child.
The occurrence is also happening more subtly, in legal moves unrelated to abortion that sought to criminalize pregnant women for harming an “unborn child,” like in South Carolina and Alabama, where the state supreme courts have upheld convictions ruling that substance use in pregnancy constitutes criminal child abuse.
In reality, the occurrence – of someone being charged with a crime for harming a fetus – is not unusual.As of 2018, at least 38 states had fetal homicide laws conferring rights or protections upon the fetus, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. While some of those laws explicitly set parameters around abortion, excluding it from homicide charges, others make no mention of the procedure. And the charges even appear to have become so prolific that a recent proposal in California would attempt to combat the prosecution of pregnant women for crimes related to pregnancy loss by allowing those who are pregnant to sue prosecutors for incorrectly charging them.
The idea behind moves to criminalize harm to the fetus, experts say, is that by creating legal protections for fetuses in other contexts outside of abortion, advocates could over time chip away at abortion rights as well. But as Roe enters what experts believe is likely its final days, the playing field has likely shifted from taking down Roe and subsequently revoking the limit on when states may restrict abortion – and toward eking out protections for fetuses, presumably on the road toward making abortion illegal everywhere.
In some more recent legislation, the anti-abortion movement also appears to have turned its back on messaging that promoted the “health and safety of the mother” by stripping bills of exemptions to the procedure that have been somewhat common, at least in recent memory: namely, exceptions for incest, rape and the health or wellbeing of the mother.
Mississippi’s ban beyond 15 weeks of pregnancy, along with Texas’ heartbeat abortion ban and more recently bans that have been signed into law in Florida, Arizona and Oklahoma make no exception for rape or incest, despite pleas from those in opposition decrying the “decency” of those exceptions.
“It does certainly make the law seem even more draconian when you're not even willing to protect people who have gone through something terrible. But I guess this is what we get when we extend personhood to the fetus,” Howard says. “If we've really decided the fetus is a person, it wouldn't make sense to have exceptions for rape or incest. If the fetus is a person, then the only answer is no abortion ever – make it as hard as possible to get an abortion. And they finally have kind of a political and legal means to enact that now in a way where you know, maybe 10, 20 years ago it just wouldn't have been possible.”
In recent weeks, Utah’s Republican Party threatened to take things a step further, announcing that it was considering changing its official stance on abortion to eliminate language that supported exceptions not only for rape or incest but also another commonly held exception to abortion bans: to “preserve the life of the mother.”
[ MORE: Poll: Voters Want SCOTUS to Support Abortion .. inside]
The Next Moves
As the Supreme Court deliberates Roe’s future, with a decision expected come summer over the Mississippi case that Americans received a preview of this week, the future of access to abortion in the U.S. remains unclear, and inconsistent, nationwide.
But the overturning of Roe, if that is indeed the high court’s final decision, would mark a massive moment for the country – not only by nullifying what has for decades been the law of the land but also by marking the first step toward making abortion illegal nationwide.
The next step, experts say, is fetal personhood – a glimpse of which was foreshadowed in Louisiana this week.
“It's worth noting that if Roe is overturned and fetuses are people, theoretically someone could be charged with murder if they have an abortion,” Donley says. “Because a fetus is a person that was killed.”
According to Donley, whether the anti-abortion movement takes things that far remains to be seen, but criminalization in some form, she says, is certainly coming. And it’s not necessarily dependent on the fetus becoming a legal person.
The Personhood Movement "Those state laws do not imply what you would like them to imply." Where it came from and where it stands today. 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decides Roe v. Wade .. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=410&invol=113 , making abortion legal in all 50 states. But in his majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun notes, “If this suggestion of personhood is established, [Roe’s] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment.” A week later, a Maryland congressman proposes .. https://www.congress.gov/bill/93rd-congress/house-joint-resolution/261 .. a Human Life Amendment — the first of more than 330 versions proposed or introduced over the next four decades. 1980 The election of Ronald Reagan and a GOP Senate with many new pro-life members raises hopes among abortion opponents for passage of a constitutional amendment. 2020 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=153100819
Abortion Isn’t a Necessary Evil. It’s Great [...] The end of the line, Pollitt says, is the sort of ridiculous decision made by Planned Parenthood .. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/us/politics/advocates-shun-pro-choice-to-expand-message.html .. in 2013 to move away from the term “pro-choice,” which “was itself a bit of a euphemism: Choose what?” We can hardly be expected to defend abortion effectively if we can't even call the procedure by name. P - Pollitt convincingly outlines the many reasons that abortion is not only necessary but good for society: “always a choice,” as she writes, “and often a deeply moral decision.” P - First, and most obviously, if you have a uterus, your life depends on being able to control what goes on inside of it; giving birth necessarily represents a drastic lifestyle change and heavy financial responsibility, which lasts anywhere from nine months to the rest of your natural-born life. Therefore, in order to effectively plan a life and career, you must have some guarantee that you will never be forced to take on the risk or cost of childbirth unless you choose to do so. Birth control and abortion are the only ways to provide such a guarantee. If we are to have leaders and geniuses with uteruses, we must provide them with the reproductive freedom necessary to go to school and build careers. P - Pregnancy is also a health risk:... 2019 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=148818063
Republicans Push Deeply Unpopular ‘Personhood’ Bill in Congress Jan 23, 2017, 3:51pm Christine Grimaldi "Personhood" laws would criminalize abortion with no exception and ban many forms of contraception, in vitro fertilization, and health care for pregnant people. 2018 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=145202210 Shame: "the Republican party platform calls for a ban without exceptions" Your first link .. http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/gop-candidates-ban-abortion-no-exceptions Shame on the GOP. Whatever happened to your Bible belief. What the Bible says about Abortion ..each linked inside .. Abortion is not murder. A fetus is not considered a human life. If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life. -- Exodus 21:22-23 The Bible places no value on fetuses or infants less than one month old. And if it be from a month old even unto five years old, then thy estimation shall be of the male five shekels of silver, and for the female thy estimation shall be three shekels of silver. -- Leviticus 27:6 Fetuses and infants less than one month old are not considered persons. Number the children of Levi after the house of their fathers, by their families: every male from a month old and upward shalt thou number them. And Moses numbered them according to the word of the LORD. -- Numbers 3:15-16 God sometimes approves of killing fetuses. 2015 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=116106171
Move over, Sarah Palin; Joni Ernst is the GOP's new star [...] Ernst wants to overturn Obamacare and is open to the idea of impeaching the president. And, like the Confederates of old, she thinks states can and should nullify federal laws they do not like and resist federal authorities who try to enforce those laws. P - The freshman senator from Iowa thinks food stamps and the minimum wage are bad ideas. She hates handouts from the government, at least for other people. Her own extended family is reported to have received close to half a million dollars in farm subsidies over the years. P - Counter to the conclusions of arms control experts, Ernst continues to think that Saddam Hussein really had weapons of mass destruction that justified the invasion of Iraq. She also disagrees with 97% of the world’s scientists who say that climate change is real and caused by human activity. Oh, and she buys into the story making the rounds among paranoid right-wing conspiracy theorists that the United Nations is scheming to drive American farmers off their land and into the cities. 2015 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=110163747
6 Ways Religion Does More Bad Than Good 1. Religion promotes tribalism. Infidel, heathen, heretic. Religion divides insiders from outsiders. 2. Religion anchors believers to the Iron Age. Concubines, magical incantations, chosen people, stonings.... 3. Religion makes a virtue out of faith. Trust and obey for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus. 4.Religion diverts generous impulses and good intentions. 5. Religion teaches helplessness. 6. Religions seek power. Think corporate personhood. Religions are man-made institutions, just like for-profit corporations are. And like any corporation, to survive and grow a religion must find a way to build power and wealth and compete for market share. Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity—any large enduring religious institution is as expert at this as Coca-Cola or Chevron. And just like for-profit behemoths, they are willing to wield their power and wealth in the service of self-perpetuation, even it harms society at large. 2014 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=108257800
If a woman cannot get contraceptives because of the "religious" company she works for, she will get pregnant and have an abortion. In other words these "religious" companies will be responsible for abortions that should not have had to happen. Very Christian like. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=104028058 .. and in reply .. and even more 'personhood' murders since evidence is the ones they refuse to pay for come into play before the sperm invades the egg, so the woman's body rejects more zygotes than they would if they used the Hobby Lobby rejected birth control methods . https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=104028790
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