Posts Tagged ‘ Abortion rights ’

An undue burden

Jun 27th, 2016 9:32 am | By

The Supreme Court has struck down Texas’s horrific anti-abortion law.

In a dramatic ruling, the Supreme Court on Monday threw out a Texas abortion access law in a victory to supporters of abortion rights who argued it would have shuttered all but a handful of clinics in the state.

The 5-3 ruling is the most significant decision from the Supreme Court on abortion in two decades and could serve to deter other states from passing so-called “clinic shutdown” laws.

And (I assume) it will also make it possible for clinics forced to close by the law to re-open.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the majority opinion, which was joined in full by Kennedy. Breyer wrote that despite arguments that the

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A step toward getting rid of abortion altogether

May 19th, 2016 1:19 pm | By

That was Oklahoma, today. Tuesday, it was South Carolina.

The South Carolina legislature passed a bill yesterday that bans abortions after 19 weeks, and is now on its way to Gov. Nikki Haley’s desk, where she will likely sign it. That would make South Carolina the 17th state to pass the ban.

Rep. Wendy Nanney, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act’s sponsor, said the bill is a step toward getting “rid of abortion altogether.” The bill does allow for exceptions if the mother’s life is in danger, or if a doctor determines the fetus cannot survive outside the womb. There are no exceptions for rape or incest, and it would be illegal to abort a fetus with a severe

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An assault on women

May 19th, 2016 12:51 pm | By

The Oklahoma legislature has passed a bill making abortion a felony. That seems pretty blatantly unconstitutional, but I’m not a lawyer.

The bill passed the Oklahoma House of Representatives with a vote of 59-to-9 last month. On Thursday, the state’s senate passed it with a vote of 33-to-12.

That’s a horribly large majority of legislators who believe women have no rights.

“This is a ban on abortion, plain and simple,” Dawn Laguens, Executive Vice President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement about the legislation after the state’s house passed it. “Punishing doctors for performing a legal, medical procedure is an assault on women.”

Women apparently don’t deserve rights.

Since taking office in 2011, [Republican Governor

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Out of concerns for security

May 3rd, 2016 3:56 pm | By

The New York Times:

A doctor who performs abortions at a hospital in Washington [DC] filed a federal civil rights complaint on Monday, charging that the hospital had violated the law by forbidding her, out of concerns for security, to speak publicly in defense of abortion and its role in health care.

The doctor, Diane J. Horvath-Cosper, 37, an obstetrician and gynecologist, has in recent years emerged as a public advocate, urging abortion providers not to shrink before threats. Last December, her complaint says, officials of the MedStar Washington Hospital Center imposed what she described as a “gag order,” but what the officials termed a sensible precaution against anti-abortion violence.

You can see why they would want to do … Read the rest



To help impoverished pregnant people travel hundreds of miles

May 1st, 2016 10:53 am | By

Lindy West is confused. She has a piece at Comment is Free about what a mess the US election is. She starts with a friend who works hard for abortion rights.

“You’re a hero,” I said.

“No, I am not,” she snapped, vehement. “Somebody’s got to do it. It’s a fucking embarrassment that I have to.”

She was right. “Our country is a septic tank,” I sighed. “On fire.”

“Full-on fail.”

I still think that choosing to take on the exhausting, sisyphean, largely thankless work of abortion advocacy (we are not taught to say “thank you” for abortion; we are taught to never speak of it at all) is heroic. She could choose to leave that work to others,

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Oklahoma to women: you have no rights, bitches

Apr 24th, 2016 3:00 pm | By

Oklahoma throws the very idea of women’s rights out the window. Don’t be stupid: incubators are machines, and machines don’t have rights.

An Oklahoma bill that could revoke the license of any doctor who performs an abortion has headed to the governor, with opponents saying the measure in unconstitutional and promising a legal battle against the cash-strapped state if it is approved.

In the Republican-dominated legislature, the state’s House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a Senate bill late on Thursday. Governor Mary Fallin, a Republican, has not yet indicated whether she will sign it.

Under the bill, doctors who perform abortions would risk losing their medical licenses. Exemptions would be given for those who perform the procedure for reasons including

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No shirking

Mar 25th, 2016 11:13 am | By

Always remember, children, women are not people, they are machines for the making of babies. Because they are baby-making machines, they have to be subject to many laws regulating their behavior and making sure they don’t shirk their baby-manufacturing duties.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R) signed a controversial abortion bill Thursday that, among other things, would ban the procedure if it is sought because the fetus was diagnosed with a disability or defect such as Down syndrome.

Because what right does any woman have to decide she can’t or doesn’t want to have a disabled child? What right does any woman have to decide, before there is a baby, that she would prefer to terminate the process of … Read the rest



Lies about abortion and the women who have them

Mar 6th, 2016 10:57 am | By

RH Reality Check on the lies behind the many new laws restricting abortion:

Seventy percent of the 353 state-level abortion restrictions introduced so far this year are based on political pretext, false information, or stereotypes, according to an analysis released Thursday.

The advocacy group National Partnership for Women & Families released the analysis as part of its “Turning Lies into Laws” campaign focused on lies about abortion in 2016. The analysis follows on the heels of its report, Bad Medicine: How a Political Agenda is Undermining Women’s Health Care, which lays out the ideological motivations and inaccuracies that the report’s authors say underpin the majority of legislative impediments to abortion care.

Two hundred fifty-one cases of

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Truth and consequences

Jan 15th, 2016 10:31 am | By

Michelle Goldberg reports at Slate:

Thanks to the Center for Medical Progress, Planned Parenthood spent the latter part of 2015 getting kicked in the teeth. The CMP’s highly edited undercover videos, which purported to show Planned Parenthood officials selling fetal organs, created a hurricane of terrible publicity and spurred political attacks across the country. Anti-clinic harassment shot up exponentially. Protestors targeted Planned Parenthood doctors at their homes. Five congressional committees and eighteen states launched investigations. (Ten of those state investigations cleared Planned Parenthood of wrongdoing.) A madman ranting about “baby parts” murdered three people at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs.

All for the sake of trying to keep women from having the right and the ability to … Read the rest



Hand over the ultrasound

Jan 12th, 2016 4:13 pm | By

More war on women sadism, this time from North Carolina.

A state law requiring that doctors who perform an abortion after the 16th week of pregnancy supply an ultrasound to state officials has sparked a new and bitter front in the war over abortion here, with stakes that are both personal and political.

Supporters say the purpose of the law is to verify that doctors and clinics are complying with state law, which outlaws abortions after 20 weeks but with an exception made for medical emergencies. Critics say the purpose is to intimidate and provide hurdles to women and doctors.

Oh come now, why wouldn’t women seeking abortions want state officials looking at their ultrasounds? They’re not as fragile … Read the rest



Clarification as obfuscation

Jan 10th, 2016 5:19 pm | By

Nope nope nope nope.

Twitter.

A Conceited Empress ‏@TheAngryFangirl Jan 7
Let’s clarify a few things about reproductive health and abortion specifically.

Abortion IS NOT a cis woman only issue. Cis women ARE NOT the only people on hearth who get, want, or need abortions.

When you center cis women in your speech and activism around abortion, you’re excluding the other people who need access to it.

Who are these other people? Trans men, non binary people, agender individuals, etc. In short, a whole lot of folks.

Changing your language to say “pregnant people” or “people with uterti” is easy and super inclusive.

NO ONE is saying “women” is a dirty word. NO ONE is saying you should erase

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Can someone please inform the protesters?

Jan 4th, 2016 12:02 pm | By

RH Reality Check on Facebook:

Can someone please inform the protesters outside Preterm Cleveland that they can protest the actual murder of an actual child all they want downtown today?

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The year in forced pregnancy

Jan 4th, 2016 11:47 am | By

Last month the NY Times did an unsigned editorial on the nonstop erosion of reproductive rights over the past year.

How many laws making it harder to get an abortion will pass before the Supreme Court sees them for what they are — part of a tireless, coordinated nationwide assault on the right of women to control what happens with their own bodies without the interference of politicians?

One answer is, no fewer than 288. That’s how many abortion restrictions states have enacted since the beginning of 2011, when aggressively anti-choice lawmakers swept into statehouses around the country.

The trend accelerated in 2015, as state legislators passed 57 new constraints on a woman’s right to choose. Hundreds more were

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Where many millions of babies die

Nov 29th, 2015 11:12 am | By

Planned Parenthood thinks the shootup at its Colorado clinic was motivated by something as opposed to being random. Planned Parenthood thinks the shooter didn’t select its clinic just as he might have selected a Burger King or Applebee’s, but rather, on purpose, because of what it is – a place where women can end pregnancies they don’t want to or aren’t able to continue.

Planned Parenthood said on Sunday that news reports that the gunman who attacked its Colorado health clinic had uttered “no more baby parts” during his arrest showed that the suspect was motivated by an anti-abortion agenda.

The remark attributed to the 57-year-old suspect, identified by police as Robert Lewis Dear, was an apparent reference to Planned

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Erased from the dialogue

Oct 16th, 2015 12:00 pm | By

At Feminist Current, Susan Cox interviews Mary Lou Singleton.

Who gives birth? The answer used to be: females. Today, it’s considered politically incorrect to say that it is women, specifically, who get pregnant and become mothers. Thus, in the name of inclusivity, a number of women’s reproductive health groups are changing their terminology in order to degender the language of birth. Several organizations now refer to “pregnant people,” “pregnant individuals,” and “birthing parents” instead. Feministing writer Jos Truitt recently demanded we “Stop saying and stop thinking that abortion is a women’s issue.”

Well, okay then! Degendering women’s issues — I mean, “people’s issues” — is way progressive. But what are the costs of doing that? What are we

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“Pro-life” death threats

Oct 1st, 2015 4:19 pm | By

Of course. The #ShoutYourAbortion campaign has provided yet another pretext for threateners to threaten.

The goal, according to Amelia Bonow, 30, who posted on Facebook on Sept. 19 that she had had an abortion at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Seattle last year, was to encourage women who have kept their abortions secret to speak up — in an effort to reframe the debate on the subject.

“A shout is not a celebration or a value judgment, it’s the opposite of a whisper, of silence,” Ms. Bonow said in an interview. “Even women who support abortion rights have been silent, and told they were supposed to feel bad about having an abortion.”

But less than two weeks after she and

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Four years of unrelenting assaults on reproductive rights

Sep 18th, 2015 3:19 pm | By

Abortion rights? What are they?

[Renee] Chelian is now 64 and has two grown daughters. She’s the founder and CEO of Northland Family Planning Center, a group of three clinics that perform abortions in the Detroit suburbs. A petite woman with a blunt haircut and a round face, Chelian is matter-of-fact and seemingly unflappable. But when we talk about her clinics, her tone intensifies. Her business is under constant threat of closure from the conservative Michigan Legislature, which has spent the past four years churning out a string of arbitrary new abortion restrictions designed to shut clinics like Northland down. One proposal required Northland to have one bathroom for every six patients.

“Sometimes, I feel like I’ve gone back

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They just flat out pay for them

Jun 6th, 2015 4:59 pm | By

Quoting a public post by Josh Spokes on Facebook:

Give the gift of a life determined by the person who lives it—fund an abortion today. The National Network of Abortion Funds pays for women to have abortions they couldn’t otherwise afford. That’s right. They don’t “raise awareness,” or “help women with the very difficult life choices that these issues raise,” or any of that happy-pappy bullshit designed to avoid saying “having an abortion is a very good thing if you want one.”

They just flat out pay for them. Please help.

Fund Abortion Now.

You can donate to honor Dr George Tiller if you like.

Donate to honor Dr. George Tiller, killed for helping women

The day that

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



Always look on the baby side of rape

Feb 7th, 2015 4:00 pm | By

A West Virginia Republican wants to make sure everyone is aware of the upside to rape. Yes, of course, it’s unpleasant and horrid, but on the other hand, you can get a child out of it. What a payoff! Imagine if you could get a child that easily any other way – say, by getting your teeth cleaned, or waiting for a bus for an extra long time on a cold day. But you can’t. With most unpleasant things you can’t get a child out of it at all. But with rape, you can! How cool is that?

West Virginia Del. Brian Kurcaba (R) made the comments — which were first reported by Charleston Gazette staffer David Gutman —

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)



This is not that

May 20th, 2014 10:05 am | By

Dear oh dear – if you’re going to disagree, disagree with the actual claim, not a different one. That applies to sub-claims as well as the chief claim.

Someone called Rand Paul Fanbase (not a promising start, I know) on Twitter:

Rand Paul Fanbase @LibertyNerd

@OpheliaBenson not only supports abortion “rights” but says there’s nothing bad about abortion. Humanism=hedonism.

What I actually wrote in the piece:

We don’t have to be helpless before a failure of contraception, because there is a fix. That’s not tragic.

Of course, that’s not to say that abortion is never sorrowful. It’s to say that it’s not inherently and always sorrowful and that it shouldn’t be made so by

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(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)