Tag: Abortion rights

Of course they did.

Opponents of abortion rights have a long history of supporting abortion bans with three major exceptions: when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, or when a woman’s life is at risk.

But, fueled by momentum from the passage of a restrictive abortion law in Alabama, a coalition of anti-abortion-rights groups released a letter Wednesday asking Republican officials to “reconsider decades-old talking points” on exceptions to such laws.

“We understand that issues like rape and incest are difficult topics to tackle; nevertheless, it is our view that the value of human life is not determined by the circumstances of one’s conception or birth,” said a draft of the letter provided to NPR by Students for Life of America, which led the effort.

But it’s not just about “one’s” conception or birth. It’s also about the female human being in which “one” has to gestate for nine months in order to be able to have an actual human life. That female human being is already a human being with a life; she’s not a process, she’s completed. If she’s not completed she can’t possibly gestate or conceive an infant, so we know she’s completed.

If we think about it from the angle of valuing her human life first, then we grasp that the circumstances of conception do indeed determine the value of the process inside her body that depends on her before it can be a human life. If the conception is a result of rape then it is violently against her will: it is something she did not want and did not seek, and it’s something that was imposed on her forcibly by the kind of human being that is free from ever being forced to gestate an infant she never asked for.

The forced-birthers of course want us to put the life of the fetus first, with the life of the host a distant second if at all. But there’s no reason to do that. An embryo has no reason to cling to life, to want to stay inside the female body long enough to have a human life; an embryo has no plans, no ongoing life it wants to continue, no dreams, no memories, no favorite landscapes. The imagined life of the embryo should not trump the real life of the woman or girl.

The letter to McDaniel comes as Charlotte Pence, the daughter of Vice President Pence, penned an op-ed in The Washington Times expressing support for Alabama’s law. “Personally, I would not encourage a friend to get an abortion if she suffered the horrendous evil of rape or incest because I care about her child — and her. I do not believe abortion provides healing,” she writes.

But it’s not about what Charlotte Pence believes. It’s about what the woman or girl wants.

Oh really, that’s interesting.

The Koch brothers describe themselves as "libertarian" but @KochIndustries donated thousands to the politicians behind Alabama's abortion ban https://t.co/I82mUhRbPr

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) May 16, 2019

Maybe by “libertarian” they mean liberty for men? Or, more specifically still, for white men? I don’t think I’ve ever seen any Koch brothers advocacy for reform of our slavery-like prison regime. Or just rich white men perhaps? Liberty for Koch brothers and men like Koch brothers?

From Popular Information:

Other companies supporting the Republicans behind Alabama’s abortion ban

Koch Industries, run by the supposedly libertarian Koch brothers, donated $2,500 to Ainsworth, $1,500 to Chambliss, $1,500 to Ledbetter, and $2,000 to Reed.

Liberty is an awesome thing, but only rich white men really know how to use it. Everyone else has to be kept on a very tight leash.

In Alabama women are officially not people, they are just incubators owned by men.

Alabama lawmakers voted Tuesday to ban virtually all abortions in the state — including for victims of rape and incest — sending the strictest law in the nation to the state’s Republican governor, who is expected to sign it.

The measure permits abortion only when necessary to save a mother’s life, an unyielding standard that runs afoul of federal court rulings. Those who backed the new law said they don’t expect it to take effect, instead intending its passage to be part of a broader strategy by antiabortion activists to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which legalized abortion nationwide.

And by the way to send a strong message to women that we are not people.

The Alabama bill, which passed 25-6, is even more restrictive than prior state-level abortion laws, and it includes a penalty of up to 99 years in prison for doctors who perform abortions. Six of the Senate’s Democrats voted against the bill — one abstained — and they staged a filibuster into Tuesday night after debating the bill for more than four hours, with senators discussing the role government should play in legislating what a woman can do with her body and the definition of life.

…

Republican Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth said in an interview before the vote that the debate was about the idea of “personhood” and whether a fetus has rights from the outset.

“Is it a life?” Ainsworth said. “I believe it is, and if it’s a life, you can’t have any exceptions.”

Is that so? I wonder what Ainsworth’s position on the death penalty is. I wonder what his view of war is. I wonder what approach he takes to police shootings.

A federal judge in Mississippi struck down the state’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks.

U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, in Jackson, wrote a sharply worded rebuke of the law, calling it a deliberate attempt by the state to ask the newly conservative-majority Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established a woman’s legal right to abortion.

At one point, he said the Mississippi legislature’s “professed interest in ‘women’s health’ is pure gaslighting.”

“The State chose to pass a law it knew was unconstitutional to endorse a decades-long campaign, fueled by national interest groups, to ask the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade,” Reeves wrote in his ruling. “With the recent changes in the membership of the Supreme Court, it may be that the State believes divine providence covered the Capitol when it passed this legislation. Time will tell.”

We know what the Supreme Court is going to do.

In his conclusion, Reeves wrote about how he, as a man, could not imagine “the anxiety and turmoil” a woman might endure when deciding whether to get an abortion.

“The fact that men, myself included, are determining how women may choose to manage their reproductive health is a sad irony not lost on the Court,” Reeves wrote.

Women? Are we allowed to say that?

This is a tremendous victory for the rights of pregnant people to make their own personal medical decisions. https://t.co/6gc9ky1dWA

— Cecile Richards (@CecileRichards) November 21, 2018

Hadley Freeman:

https://twitter.com/HadleyFreeman/status/1002806356355829761

https://twitter.com/HadleyFreeman/status/1002887977461219328

The column she wrote:

During the Irish abortion referendum there was a lot of talk about the extreme cases in which legal abortion is not just a right but a necessity: rape victims, foetuses with fatal abnormalities. But it would be dishonest not to mention the more banal stories like mine. Back then, I was with my first boyfriend, whom I loved very much. I was starting to recover from anorexia – which is why I hadn’t been more careful: I assumed I couldn’t conceive – and my boyfriend was then no more emotionally equipped than I was to look after a baby.

But the truth is, we – I – absolutely could have had that baby. I would have had to give up my job and move back in with my parents. My relationship would have eventually ended, and it would have taken years for me to be able to support myself and the baby. But, sure, I could have done it.

But she didn’t want to, and that should be all there is to it. It’s her body and her life so she should get to decide.

Since I had twins at 37, I’ve become even more pro-choice, because I now know the realities of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. Making anyone go through that when they don’t want to is so obviously self-defeating, it verges on the surreal.

My story is not every story, any more than an anti-choice campaigner’s love for their children is an argument against abortion. Women’s needs are different. That’s why they need a choice. Even some pro-choicers talk about abortion with distaste. But I love my abortion. It gave me the freedom to work, to choose when I wanted children and who I wanted them with. My now-long-ago-ex-boyfriend and I are not yoked together by a baby we weren’t ready for. And my abortion was so free of shame and fear that it has never affected me emotionally. The miscarriage that I had at 38, I think about every day, because I wanted that baby; my abortion at 23, I never think about at all. While I couldn’t control the outcome of the former, I am lucky to live in a place that let me control the latter.

Being able to put a stop to a pregnancy you don’t want is a thing to rejoice in.

I wrote about it in Free Inquiry back in 2014:

The more we buy into the meme that abortion is always a tragic lesser-of-two-evils situation, the more we lose sight of the reality, which is that for a woman or girl who does not want to be pregnant, abortion is a glorious human invention, a life-salvaging bit of technology.

Of course it is! It’s not the case that everyone everywhere would welcome any pregnancy, no matter what. Imagine if pregnancy were random, an abrupt unrequested gift of the gods that could happen to either sex at any time. Would it be a joy to the recipient every single time, in all possible circumstances? Obviously not. The same applies when only one sex is affected—traditionally the inferior, expendable, subordinate sex, the one whose whole purpose is to reproduce—and the chain of causation is understood. Just like anyone else, girls and women may not want to be pregnant at a particular time, just as they can not want to have a demanding job or a difficult project at a particular time. The existence of a method of ending a pregnancy is a good thing for women and girls in that situation. It’s not tragic. What’s tragic is the huge number of women who don’t have that option.

Hooray that Irish women now will.

Originally a comment by iknklast on All for the fetus, nothing for the child.

The Nebraska budget bill is currently stalled in the legislature because the governor managed to get a passage stuck into it to end all Title X funding for any agencies that perform, counsel, or refer for abortions. This would end funding for most of the current Title X agencies, meaning that a lot of low income people wouldn’t be able to get important health care.

The governor is a tea party favorite who is also obscenely rich and has attempted to pack the legislature with people who will agree with him 100% of the time, supporting them with his own money. He is bullying the legislature because there are some Democrats filibustering the bill, and they can’t get the 33 votes required to end debate (they only have 31). This is pretty amusing in some ways, because this is a deep red state with a mostly Republican legislature (although the vote is considered non-partisan). Still, the end result isn’t funny. If the budget bill isn’t passed, funding for services for children on welfare will run out in May. If it is passed, and it doesn’t have the abortion clause, likely the governor will not sign it. If it is passed and it does have the abortion clause, many people will lose all the opportunities they have to get care, not just abortions (which aren’t paid by Title X), but a lot of basic care.

Why do so many people hate women?

The ACLU blog tells us:

The attacks on reproductive rights just keep coming. Today, Congress held a hearing on a bill that would outlaw abortion as early as just six weeks of pregnancy. This amounts to an effective ban on abortion, as many women do not even know if they are pregnant by that time. In fact, it’s the second unconstitutional pre-viability abortion ban that the House has considered in the last month. Just a few weeks ago, the House passed a bill banning abortion beginning at 20 weeks. And President Trump said that he would sign that bill if it landed on his desk.

It is clear that the goal of the president and leaders in Congress is to ban abortion completely, and the anti-choice activist behind this latest piece of legislation has boasted that the bill would prohibit abortion before a woman even knows she’s pregnant and was crafted “to be the arrow in the heart of Roe v. Wade.”

She also claimed that Mike Pence expressed support for her bill in a White House meeting.

Why? Why is the pussygrabber so keen to mess with abortion rights? Because he’s a sadist and because he hates women, is my guess.

Trump, who as a presidential candidate proposed punishing women who have an abortion and pledged to appoint only opponents of Roe v. Wadeto the Supreme Court, is carrying out a virulent anti-choice and anti-women’s health agenda.

He has reinstituted and expanded the Global Gag Rule, severely undermined the ACA’s birth control benefit by allowing virtually any boss to deny coverage to their employees, signed legislation weakening protections for Title X family planning providers, and pushed for the passage of an Affordable Care Act repeal bill that would cut patients off from care at Planned Parenthood health centers and gut Medicaid coverage for millions of women and families.

Sadist and hates women.

Michelle Goldberg has more on the government’s effort to force a teenager to have a baby she doesn’t want to have.

In early September, a 17-year-old girl from Central America was apprehended trying cross the border between the United States and Mexico. After being taken to a shelter for unaccompanied minors in South Texas to await immigration proceedings, she learned she was pregnant. The girl, referred to as Jane Doe in court filings, was adamant that she wanted an abortion. Because of Texas’ parental consent law, she needed to go to court to get a judge’s permission, which she did with help from Jane’s Due Process, a nonprofit legal organization that provides representation to pregnant minors in Texas. Jane’s Due Process collected money for the procedure from local abortion funds. It was scheduled for Sept. 28, near the end of Doe’s first trimester.

Then the Trump administration stepped in. Repaying his loyal supporters on the religious right, Donald Trump has given federal appointments to a number of anti-abortion activists. They’ve been working quietly to dismantle access to reproductive health care while the country is distracted by the president’s pyrotechnic outrages…

E. Scott Lloyd had little professional experience with refugees when Trump put him in charge of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which falls under the Department of Health and Human Services, in March. He did, however, have a long history of anti-abortion activism, and had written several articles decrying birth control. (One piece was subtitled, “Why You Can’t Be Pro-Life and Pro-Contraception.”)

What does anti-abortion activism have to do with refugee resettlement? Oh, nothing, but refugee resettlement does offer rich opportunities to persecute women, so naturally President Pussygrabber gave the job to Scott Lloyd.

At O.R.R., which operates the shelters that house unaccompanied minors like Doe, Lloyd was given authority over uniquely vulnerable pregnant girls. Experts estimate that around 60 percent of female migrants have been raped. Brigitte Amiri of the A.C.L.U., the lead attorney on Doe’s case, told me that at any one time, several hundred to a thousand pregnant unaccompanied minors are in U.S. custody. Under Lloyd, O.R.R. has banned shelters from helping any of these girls get abortions, instead mandating that they receive “life-affirming options counseling.”

So the Texas Jane Doe is one of hundreds, by now maybe thousands. Scott Lloyd must be so happy.

Evidently, word went down to the shelter where Doe was housed that, despite the judicial authorization she’d received, the staff was not to cooperate with her abortion. On Sept. 23, her lawyers say, she was taken to an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center, where she was forced to view an ultrasound. One of her lawyers told me that Lloyd had the shelter call Doe’s mother in her home country to tell her about the pregnancy, even though she said her mother was physically abusive. Throughout all this, Rochelle Garza, Doe’s court-appointed guardian, told me that the girl remained “unwavering in her decision to terminate the pregnancy despite the emotional abuse that she is enduring.”

A legal battle ensued. While it was fought, Garza said, the girl was placed under constant one-on-one supervision, and barred from all physical activity. When the shelter’s residents were taken on an outing to the park, Doe was made to sit on a bench while the other kids played. “They’re holding her hostage,” Amiri told me. “This is the most insane case I’ve ever worked on in my career.”

Hatred of women just never goes out of fashion.

Originally a comment by Freemage on Forced childbearing.

Fuck, these guys just don’t quit, do they?

I do greeter volunteering at PP. Since we own the property the clinic is on, women are able to drive past protestors and park in the lot, so it’s a clear walk to the door, so our main job is 50/50 between giving the women someone to talk to on the way in so they don’t have to listen to the shouts, and standing near the edge of the property to give the protestors someone else to yell at instead of women seeking health care.

It veers between rage-inducing blather and low comedy (such as the guy who struggled to put on his custom-built harness for his 20-foot tall flagpole with that ‘Christian flag’ at the top of it). But the lies and condemnation never, ever stop. Of course they repeat the bogus abortion-breast cancer claim, and they’ll invent any tale to support their skewed view of reality. (More low comedy–one of the regulars routinely talks about how “Just a couple weeks ago, I held two babies who’d been saved when their mother turned away from this place.” Per some of the old hands at the clinic, these ‘babies’ would need to be about 7 years old at this point, since that’s how long she’s been making the claim.)

I actually heard one of the worst of the regulars (they’re all bad, but some are more ‘sad’ than ‘vile’–this asshat is definitely at the ‘vile’ end of the spectrum) declare to a guy who had stopped his car to tell them to fuck off that, and I quote, “No woman ever died because of pregnancy. They died because of complications from the pregnancy.” I don’t think you could get an angel to dance on the edge of the razor he tried to split that hair with.

Here we go.

The House of Representatives passed legislation Tuesday that would criminalize abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for instances where the life of the mother is at risk and in cases involving rape or incest.

The bill passed the House by a vote of 237 for and 189 against, largely on party lines.

The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which is similar to legislation that failed in 2013 and 2015, has support from the White House this time around.

The divisive issue of abortion has once again been brought to the forefront of national conversations since President Donald Trump assumed office. Trump issued support for the bill even before he won the election. In a letter dated September 2016 that was sent to anti-abortion leaders inviting individuals to join the campaign’s “Pro-Life Coalition,” Trump said he was committed to “signing into law the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would end painful late-term abortions nationwide,” as one of four points.

Sure he did; it’s a chance to stick it to liberals and make women’s lives harder. He likes that.

Similar legislation is already enacted in several states. But opponents of the legislation argue 20-week abortion bans are unconstitutional.

“This dangerous, out-of-touch legislation is nothing more than yet another attempt to restrict women’s access to safe, legal abortion,” Planned Parenthood Action Fund said online. PPAF also writes, “20-week bans are unconstitutional. 20-week bans are a clear attempt to erode Roe v. Wade. In fact, 20-week ban proponents are outspoken about their goal to challenge the 1973 Supreme Court decision protecting a woman’s right to safe and legal abortion.”

The Senate isn’t in a hurry to vote on it, and isn’t an easy yes…but still.

Alabama’s Attorney General is appealing a ruling by US Magistrate Judge Susan Russ Walker that blocked aspects of a state law requiring minors to get written permission from a parent or guardian before they could legally end a pregnancy.

“We’re disappointed that the state of Alabama has chosen to continue defending this reprehensible law,” Andrew Beck, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a statement. The ACLU brought the original lawsuit against the Alabama law, resulting in Walker’s ruling.

“While many teens turn to their parents when faced with an unintended pregnancy, others — particularly those with abusive parents — just can’t,” Beck continued. “Forcing a teenager to go on trial to get an abortion does nothing to promote her health or safety — if anything, it just exposes her to further harm.”

Well, yes, but of course it’s not about her health or safety – it’s about the all-important fetus. Maybe the fetus was put inside her against her will by a rapey stepfather? Doesn’t matter. It’s the fetus that has rights, not the child forced to host it.

Both the appeal and the ruling that inspired it are timely in light of an Alabama judge’s recent decision to allow a 12-year-old girl, a victim of both rape and incest, to get an abortion without parental consent. Alabama limits the legal abortion window to 20 weeks post-fertilization; at the time of her hearing, the girl was 13 weeks pregnant and recently removed from her mother’s home — which she had occupied along with four siblings, her step-father and an uncle — on allegations that her mother physically abused and neglected her, according to AL.com.

While the girl’s relationship to the relative who raped her was not spelled out in court, her case does highlight a few circumstances under which a minor might not want their family involved in terminating a pregnancy. Still, abortion opponents decried the judge’s decision. Win Johnson, the executive director of COPE crisis pregnancy center in Montgomery, Alabama, angrily questioned whether or not a 12-year-old “was mature enough … to decide to murder her own child in her womb.”

Is Win Johnson mature enough to understand that a raped child might not consider it “her own child” at all? Is he mature enough to understand that in that situation the fetus can easily be seen as an imposition, an intruder, an invader? Is he mature enough to understand that it really should not be up to him what a raped child does about her product of rape pregnancy?

Clearly not.

H/t Sackbut

The AP reports news from Alabama:

A federal judge has struck down Alabama’s one-of-a-kind law that enabled judges to put minors seeking abortions through a trial-like proceeding in which the fetus could get a lawyer and prosecutors could object to the pregnant girl’s wishes.

Alabama legislators in 2014 changed the state’s process for girls who can’t or won’t get their parents’ permission for an abortion to obtain permission from a court instead. The new law empowered the judge to appoint a guardian ad litem “for the interests of the unborn child” and invited the local district attorney to call witnesses and question the girl to determine whether she’s mature enough to decide.

“…in which the fetus could get a lawyer”

Says it all, doesn’t it. A biological process could “get a lawyer” who would argue for the process against the person who wanted to stop the process happening inside her own body. It can’t get much more grotesque than that.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Russ Walker sided Friday with the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama , writing that the law unconstitutionally and impermissibly imposes “an undue burden on a minor in Alabama who seeks an abortion through a judicial bypass,” and violates the girl’s privacy rights by enabling a prosecutor to call witnesses against her will.

Both the judge and the ACLU said they were aware of no other state with such a law.

…

The state had argued that the law was intended to allow a “meaningful” inquiry into the minor’s maturity and the process was still a “confidential, and expeditious option for a teenager who seeks an abortion without parental consent.”

The civil rights organization said it had the opposite effect, by enabling lawyers for the state or the fetus to subpoena the minor’s teacher, neighbor, relative or boyfriend to testify she’s too immature to choose an abortion, or that continuing the pregnancy would be in her best interest.

It is unclear how many such proceedings have happened since the law was enacted. Walker noted that a district attorney this summer opposed the abortion request of a 12-year-old girl who had been impregnated by a relative.

The girl was 13 weeks pregnant and had just completed fifth grade when she went before a family court judge, according to a court record. The judge approved the abortion on June 27, and the district attorney appealed the same day, arguing that the girl was too immature to make an informed decision. The Alabama Court of Civil Appeals on July 12 ruled in favor of the girl.

The DA argued that the girl was too immature to decide to get an abortion…but not too immature to carry a pregnancy to term, to give birth, and to care for an infant or else give an infant up for adoption. How does that work exactly? How is the second scenario less of a demand on her maturity than the first?

Thanks ACLU and Judge Walker.

H/t Sackbut

Updating to add: The Daily Show reported on the fetal attorney program.

Rewire reports:

A federal judge on Friday issued a preliminary injunction blocking the State of Texas from implementing rules that require cremation or burial of “fetal remains.”

Judge Sam Sparks wrote in the decision that the rules implemented by Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) constituted an “undue burden” on access to abortion care.

“It seems unlikely DSHS’s professed purpose is a valid state interest and not a pretext for restricting abortion access,” Sparks wrote. “By comparison, Plaintiffs face likely constitutional violations, which could severely limit abortion access in Texas.”

The Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit in December challenging the rules, and will now seek an order from the court to permanently strike down the rules.

The rules could add up to $2,000 to the cost of abortion care, according to the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Texas.

It’s hard to imagine anything more intrusively insulting. Maybe next they’ll be writing laws that tell women to enroll their aborted fetuses in school.

Ohio is super excited about our new Trump future.

Ohio lawmakers passed a bill late Tuesday that would prohibit abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected — at around six weeks, before many women realize they are pregnant.

If Gov. John Kasich (R) signs the bill, it would pose a direct challenge to Supreme Court decisions that have found that women have a constitutional right to abortion at least until the point of viability, which is typically pegged around 24 weeks. Similar bills have been blocked by the courts. Because of this, even many antiabortion advocates have opposed such measures.

But some Ohio Republicans said they were empowered to support the bill because of President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 high court decision that legalized abortion nationally.

Yay! Return women to bondage! Women aren’t people anyway, they’re just conduits.

Abortion rights groups immediately condemned the measure, including how it was passed: As a last-minute amendment to an unrelated bill. They said it contains no exceptions for rape or incest. And they noted that the Ohio legislature is set to vote on another abortion restriction today, one that would ban the procedure at 20 weeks of pregnancy.

“Make no mistake — these bills punish women,” Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said in a statement. “We call on Governor John Kasich to veto these unconstitutional abortion bans.”

But punishing women is what makes it so much fun.

This is being shared all over Facebook:

This is my Charlotte clinic. Right now. There are 4,000 people blocking access to our clinic. Tell me again how this isn’t terrorism?

The Times sent an undercover reporter to a Dublin-based pregnancy counselling centre where she was told a pack of outrageous lies by the “counsellor.”

A counsellor at the clinic, which is unregulated under Irish law, was filmed giving advice to an undercover Times reporter that was described as dangerous, outrageous and inaccurate by the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

The Women’s Centre on Berkeley Street in Dublin 7 advertises itself as an impartial source of advice for women who want to travel to the UK to access an abortion but has direct links to a Catholic anti-abortion group.

They posted a helpful video compilation of the whoppers.

https://youtu.be/UFvOoMvpJGE

Is it just a coincidence? Jacquielynn Floyd at the Dallas Morning News wonders.

A 2011 law forced through by the state’s Republican-led Legislature placed such demanding restrictions on clinics performing abortions that dozens of them have shut down. In some cases, women in poor and rural areas have been left with no access to reproductive care at all.

The law was overturned by a sharply worded U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June, but the damage has been done.

During roughly that same time span, Texas saw a dramatic spike in the number of women who die while pregnant, during childbirth, or in the first postnatal months. According to a disturbing study published by the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, U.S. rates are among the worst in the developed world, and Texas’ problem is the worst in the nation.

“After 2010, the reported maternal mortality rate for Texas doubled within a two-year period to levels not seen in other U.S. states,” the recently published report states. “There were changes in the provision of women’s health services in Texas, including the closing of several women’s health clinics.”

Still, the report hastened to add, the reduction in services alone cannot explain such a dramatic increase. These are complicated issues, and researchers caution that while they may overlap, the oft-misunderstood maxim that “correlation does not imply causation” applies as much in this case as in any.

Texas being what it is, there are likely to be other causes in play too or instead.

But the urgency with which state lawmakers went after family planning clinics in the cause of promoting women’s health seems curiously absent in the face of this tragic trend.
Last week, a spokesman for Gov. Greg Abbott called the Texas mortality findings “alarming.” But contrast that tepid response with the governor’s criticism of the June Supreme Court ruling, when he said Texas pushed for the severe law that shuttered clinics because the state wanted “the highest health safety standards for women.”

Or with Attorney General Ken Paxton’s insistence last year that the law was put in place to “protect the health of Texas women.” Or with former Gov. Rick Perry, who signed the clinic restrictions into law while hailing the measure as “an important day for the health of Texas women.”

What about the health of the nearly 600 Texas women who died of pregnancy-related causes between 2011 and 2015? Or the thousands more who suffered life-threatening events related to their pregnancies, emergencies widely attributed to poor prenatal and postnatal care, and to inadequate access to health services?

You might ask that. I couldn’t possibly comment.

Reuters reports:

Reverberations from the U.S. Supreme Court’s major ruling backing abortion rights were felt on Tuesday as the justices rejected bids by Mississippi and Wisconsin to revive restrictions on abortion doctors matching those struck down in Texas on Monday.

The laws in Mississippi and Wisconsin required doctors to have “admitting privileges,” a type of difficult-to-obtain formal affiliation, with a hospital within 30 miles (48 km) of the abortion clinic. Both were put on hold by lower courts.

The Mississippi law would have shut down the only clinic in the state if it had gone into effect.

There’s only one abortion clinic in all of Mississippi. That’s a big state, you know. It’s not big like Montana or New York, but if you need an abortion and the only clinic is hundreds of miles away…it’s big enough.

In addition, Alabama’s attorney general said late on Monday that his state would abandon defense of its own “admitting privileges” requirement for abortion doctors, in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The laws in Texas, Mississippi, Wisconsin and Alabama are among the numerous measures enacted in conservative U.S. states that impose a variety of restrictions on abortion. But the Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday in the Texas case, providing its most stout endorsement of abortion rights since 1992, could imperil a variety of these state laws.

Good. Good good good good. Just accept it, you bastards – women have rights over their own bodies that the putative rights of a fetus cannot overrule.

Jennifer Dalven, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the action in Mississippi, Wisconsin and Alabama is just the start of the fallout from Monday’s ruling.

“States have passed more than 1,000 restrictions on a woman’s ability to get an abortion. This means for many women the constitutional right to an abortion is still more theoretical than real and there is much more work to be done to ensure that every woman who needs an abortion can actually get one,” Dalven added.

Let’s do this thing.

CFI on the ruling in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt:

A 2013 Texas law placed onerous and unnecessary restrictions on abortion providers, which would have forced the closing of all but a handful of the state’s clinics, cutting off abortion access to millions of women, particularly minorities and those of low income. The plaintiffs in this case argued that these restrictions impose an undue burden on women’s right to end a pregnancy. The Supreme Court today ruled against the state, preserving constitutionally protected abortion access for the women of Texas.

CFI filed an amicus brief with the Court in January, which was cosigned by dozens of prominent scientists and public intellectuals including Steven Pinker, Carol Tavris, Eugenie Scott, Jill Tarter, Lawrence Krauss, and Richard Dawkins. The brief argued the evidence presented by the state of Texas was based on manufactured, unscientific information, coordinated by known anti-abortion ideologue Vincent Rue, a hyper-partisan with no medical qualifications and who has been cited for ghostwriting manufactured, pseudoscientific testimony for alleged expert witnesses in federal court.

“The zealots behind the Texas law thought they could do an end run around Roe v. Wade by feigning concern for women’s safety and fabricating unscientific testimony,” said Nicholas Little, Legal Director of the Center for Inquiry. “They failed utterly. The fight is not over, and we will continue to work toward the day when the religious right will have to give up on trying to control the lives of women. That will be a good day.”

The ruling is great news – but really it’s just the reversal of a bad law. It would be nice if we could celebrate more actual good news, that’s not just the reversal of bad news.

Still – it is good news though.