The Abortion Thread

[Farfromgeneva]

50 year old Mass Liquor License case may bring down the Texas Abortion Bill.

Funny that Mass tried to enact similar behavior as Texas. Might explain Trips here...

It all comes full circle eventually.

[Farfromgeneva]

Having my own brunch which is sliced up leftover spicy pork sausage w peppers and onions mixed w scrambled eggs and some pepper Jack cheese. Didn’t have hot sauce so using Texas Pete mild wing sauce (kids won’t eat hot the way I like) which is orange in color. Delicious but looking at my bowl had me thinking of this thread and 6ft...

[jhu72]

China "bans" abortions. Less restrictive than the American People's Republic of Evagelistastan.

[Farfromgeneva]

China "bans" abortions. Less restrictive than the American People's Republic of Evagelistastan.

They'd rather control the money than the babies. As long as the babies are male, otherwise check their rivers for blockages...

[CU88]

For those with moral objections to forced births.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... ious-laws/

[youthathletics]

For those with moral objections to forced births.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... ious-laws/

paywall. You can send to me in PM if you dont want to add in the open thread.

[seacoaster]

Choice.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/spor ... brief.html

"Crissy Perham had never spoken publicly about her choice.

In 31 years, Perham, a three-time Olympic medalist, told only a handful of people what it was like to be pregnant as a struggling college sophomore and decide to have an abortion. She kept quiet about the freedom and the second chance that ending her pregnancy gave her. Kept quiet about how it helped pave the way for a swimming career and the success she experienced once it was over.

But now, she said, speaking up is a must.

“I’m 51, at the point where I shouldn’t be embarrassed about the decision I made for my reproductive health,” Perham told me in an interview last week. Nobody else, she continued, should have to feel ashamed and embarrassed to tell their stories either, as is so often the case. “Especially with so much on the line.”

I sought out Perham because she was one of more than 500 female athletes who filed a startling brief to the Supreme Court last week, a bold show of support for reproductive rights in a pending case that could lead to the dismantling of Roe v. Wade, the 48-year-old high court ruling that legalized abortion in every state.

An abridged version of Perham’s story, straightforward in its honesty, is told in the brief — which was backed by a wide cast that included little-known collegiate athletes, Olympians past and present, well-known stars such as Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird, and the W.N.B.A. players’ union.

The brief’s primary claim? If women do not have the option of abortion, their lives could be disrupted and they will not thrive in sports at levels we’ve grown accustomed to — levels witnessed recently at the Tokyo Olympics, in the W.N.B.A. playoffs and the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York. Having the ability to say when or whether to become mothers directly connects to a key ingredient that has fueled the broad success of women in high-level sports: the ability to control, nurture and push the body to its limits, without breaks of months or years, and without the sometimes permanent physical changes that pregnancy can cause.

In several discussions with me, Perham expanded on her story, opening up to a reporter for the first time about the tough decision she made when she was a 19-year-old swimmer at the University of Arizona.

She spoke of the waves of raw fear she felt upon finding that the birth control pill she had been taking failed. She remembered realizing she didn’t have the maturity to raise a child, nor the means. Deep in her bones, she knew having a baby would derail the athletic dreams that had defined her for years.

Some female athletes manage to have children and remain in the upper reaches of their sport. That’s terrific. Consider the flip side: the way that steering clear of motherhood, sometimes through abortion, keeps female athletes in the game and balanced in life.

For all sorts of reasons, perhaps the biggest being societal shame, it’s rare to hear from female athletes who have ended their pregnancies.

But Perham told me about driving alone through Tucson on a morning in January 1990 to a low-slung Planned Parenthood and being greeted by steady, nonjudgmental medical staff members who performed the abortion with care.

“Ending my pregnancy, I made a decision about which direction to take my life in,” she said. “Someone else might decide to go in another direction, and that’s fine. But this was the best decision for me.”

Going through that crisis matured her, she said, and helped her focus as never before in class and in the pool. Seven months later she won a national swimming title in the 100-meter butterfly. She went on to capture back-to-back N.C.A.A. titles in that event.

One year later, she repeated as champion. She had gone from being an athlete who, in her words, “wasn’t on anyone’s radar for the national team” to one of the best in the world.

At the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain — newly married to her first husband and known then as Crissy Ahmann-Leighton — she was co-captain of the American women’s swim team, winning two gold medals in relay races and a silver in the 100-meter butterfly.

Looking back now, with the cushion of time, Perham cannot imagine the good parts of her life happening as they have if she’d had a baby at 19. Not just her career in the pool but also her successful second marriage, her jobs coaching high school swimmers and being the mother to two sons who are now in their 20s.

Life as she knows it, the life she loves, is a product of that decision, she told me. “That’s not uncommon,” she said, adding that many athletes have similar stories.

In May, the Supreme Court announced it would hear Mississippi’s appeal of a lower court’s decision that blocked the state’s law banning abortion after 15 weeks. In the Roe decision, the Supreme Court legalized abortion up to the time of fetal viability, roughly 25 weeks. Roe recognized that deciding whether to continue a pregnancy, which impacts a woman’s well-being and future, is a matter of individual choice.

Abortion rights activists believe that if the justices decide in favor of the Mississippi ban, the Roe decision will be severely hobbled. It is unclear how many women in sports oppose abortion rights, but this much is certain: The threat to Roe incensed and mobilized female athletes who want it protected. The 73-page brief, one of dozens of friend of the court briefs filed in the case, is meant as a show of support for the right to choose. Submitted last week by the high-powered law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, the brief is another sign of the fast-paced growth of athlete empowerment. Energized to speak out on issues far beyond their sports, they are networking as never before.

Perham, for example, found out about the brief only two weeks ago from Casey Legler, an outspoken former Olympic swimmer who is now a writer and restaurateur in New York.

“It was like this wild root system that we didn’t even know was there,” Legler said. “It was swimmers calling soccer players calling their agent who called the basketball player whose girlfriend is on the diving team who remembers the kid who played hockey.”

“We all know what’s at stake,” she added.

On Dec. 1, the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in the Mississippi case, with a decision possible in the summer.

No matter what happens — and with a conservative majority on the court, but also a couple of swing justices, there is anxiety on both sides how it might rule — more than 500 female athletes have made themselves clear."

[seacoaster]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

"A federal judge in Texas on Wednesday issued an order blocking enforcement of the state’s strict abortion law, which bars the procedure as early as six weeks into pregnancy.

U.S. District Judge Robert L. Pitman granted the Biden administration’s request to temporarily halt the law, clearing a path to restore access to abortion in the nation’s second-most populous state.

The judge called out Texas officials for crafting an “unprecedented and aggressive scheme to deprive its citizens of a significant and well-established constitutional right.”

Since the law took effect Sept. 1, Pitman wrote, “women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution.”

“This Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right,” the judge wrote in his 113-page order.

How abortion laws in the U.S. compare to those in other countries

In response to the ruling Wednesday night, one of the state’s largest abortion providers said clinics were making plans to resume abortion services as soon as possible for patients up to 18 weeks into pregnancy.

“This is amazing! Finally, the justice we have been waiting for,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder and chief executive of Whole Woman’s Health, which has clinics in Fort Worth, McKinney and Austin.

However, the state of Texas has already said it intends to appeal the ruling.

John Seago, legislative director of Texas Right to Life, which backed the law, said the judge’s order showed “extreme prejudice” and he expects the ruling will be reversed on appeal.

More than a dozen other states have passed similar laws that ban abortion after a physician has detected cardiac activity, usually around six weeks. But federal judges prevented those laws from taking effect, citing the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that guarantees the right to abortion before viability, usually around 22 to 24 weeks.

The Texas law is different and was specifically crafted to avoid judicial review. Private individuals are empowered to take civil action against anyone who helps a patient terminate a pregnancy after the six-week mark. That design made it difficult for opponents of the law to challenge it in court until a civil action was filed against an abortion provider or clinic employee.

Alito defends letting Texas abortion law take effect, says Supreme Court critics want to intimidate justices

Pitman’s ruling Wednesday was in response to a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department after the six-week ban took effect. The government urged the court to allow women in the state to “exercise their constitutional rights.”

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland called the ruling a “victory for women in Texas and for the rule of law” and said in a statement that the department would continue to “protect constitutional rights against all who would seek to undermine them.”

The office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said in court that the federal government had no legal grounds to sue the state because the law is enforced by private citizens rather than state government officials.

Paxton’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

In granting a preliminary injunction, the judge said Texas lawmakers had contrived an “unprecedented and transparent statutory scheme” by allowing citizens with no connection to the person seeking an abortion to interfere with a constitutional right through the state’s judicial system.

The judge’s order specifically directs Texas officials to publish the injunction on all state court websites and to “inform all state court judges and state court clerks” of the federal court’s order.

Seago said the direction from Pitman to state courts and clerks is “astonishing and an incredible overreach from a federal judge onto state courts.”

Pitman, a nominee of President Barack Obama, acknowledged the concerns of Texas officials about allowing the federal government to file such suits against a state. But, the judge said, this case is “exceptional” because of the design of the state law and its effect on the constitutional rights of women in Texas.

The judge said his injunction should discourage other states from enacting similar legislation that curtails constitutional rights while evading judicial review.

“If legislators know they cannot accomplish political agendas that curtail or eliminate constitutional rights and intentionally remove the legal remedy to challenge it, then other states are less likely to engage in copycat legislation,” he wrote.

The federal lawsuit in Texas is one of several legal battles involving the law. The Supreme Court had allowed the measure to stand while litigation continues, in part because of its novel design. The high court’s conservative majority said in early September that the challengers had not shown that they were suing the proper defendants.

Separately, the justices have agreed to hear a case Dec. 1 involving Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks, which directly presents the question of whether to overturn Roe.

In the Texas case, state officials said any injunction blocking enforcement would not provide a long-term legal shield for physicians who want to resume abortions in the state after the six-week period. If the injunction is reversed, lawsuits can still be filed up to four years after the abortion at issue is performed.

Miller of Whole Woman’s Health said she has contacted law firms prepared to represent her staff, including 17 doctors, if they are sued retroactively.

“We do expect the state to appeal, and when they do we will also be ready,” she said.

For the past month, patients in Texas have traveled long distances to Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico and Colorado to terminate pregnancies, advocates say. But some who are seeking abortions say they cannot take time off work or child care or find money for such a trip."

[Farfromgeneva]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

"A federal judge in Texas on Wednesday issued an order blocking enforcement of the state’s strict abortion law, which bars the procedure as early as six weeks into pregnancy.

U.S. District Judge Robert L. Pitman granted the Biden administration’s request to temporarily halt the law, clearing a path to restore access to abortion in the nation’s second-most populous state.

The judge called out Texas officials for crafting an “unprecedented and aggressive scheme to deprive its citizens of a significant and well-established constitutional right.”

Since the law took effect Sept. 1, Pitman wrote, “women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution.”

“This Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right,” the judge wrote in his 113-page order.

How abortion laws in the U.S. compare to those in other countries

In response to the ruling Wednesday night, one of the state’s largest abortion providers said clinics were making plans to resume abortion services as soon as possible for patients up to 18 weeks into pregnancy.

“This is amazing! Finally, the justice we have been waiting for,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder and chief executive of Whole Woman’s Health, which has clinics in Fort Worth, McKinney and Austin.

However, the state of Texas has already said it intends to appeal the ruling.

John Seago, legislative director of Texas Right to Life, which backed the law, said the judge’s order showed “extreme prejudice” and he expects the ruling will be reversed on appeal.

More than a dozen other states have passed similar laws that ban abortion after a physician has detected cardiac activity, usually around six weeks. But federal judges prevented those laws from taking effect, citing the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that guarantees the right to abortion before viability, usually around 22 to 24 weeks.

The Texas law is different and was specifically crafted to avoid judicial review. Private individuals are empowered to take civil action against anyone who helps a patient terminate a pregnancy after the six-week mark. That design made it difficult for opponents of the law to challenge it in court until a civil action was filed against an abortion provider or clinic employee.

Alito defends letting Texas abortion law take effect, says Supreme Court critics want to intimidate justices

Pitman’s ruling Wednesday was in response to a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department after the six-week ban took effect. The government urged the court to allow women in the state to “exercise their constitutional rights.”

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland called the ruling a “victory for women in Texas and for the rule of law” and said in a statement that the department would continue to “protect constitutional rights against all who would seek to undermine them.”

The office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said in court that the federal government had no legal grounds to sue the state because the law is enforced by private citizens rather than state government officials.

Paxton’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

In granting a preliminary injunction, the judge said Texas lawmakers had contrived an “unprecedented and transparent statutory scheme” by allowing citizens with no connection to the person seeking an abortion to interfere with a constitutional right through the state’s judicial system.

The judge’s order specifically directs Texas officials to publish the injunction on all state court websites and to “inform all state court judges and state court clerks” of the federal court’s order.

Seago said the direction from Pitman to state courts and clerks is “astonishing and an incredible overreach from a federal judge onto state courts.”

Pitman, a nominee of President Barack Obama, acknowledged the concerns of Texas officials about allowing the federal government to file such suits against a state. But, the judge said, this case is “exceptional” because of the design of the state law and its effect on the constitutional rights of women in Texas.

The judge said his injunction should discourage other states from enacting similar legislation that curtails constitutional rights while evading judicial review.

“If legislators know they cannot accomplish political agendas that curtail or eliminate constitutional rights and intentionally remove the legal remedy to challenge it, then other states are less likely to engage in copycat legislation,” he wrote.

The federal lawsuit in Texas is one of several legal battles involving the law. The Supreme Court had allowed the measure to stand while litigation continues, in part because of its novel design. The high court’s conservative majority said in early September that the challengers had not shown that they were suing the proper defendants.

Separately, the justices have agreed to hear a case Dec. 1 involving Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks, which directly presents the question of whether to overturn Roe.

In the Texas case, state officials said any injunction blocking enforcement would not provide a long-term legal shield for physicians who want to resume abortions in the state after the six-week period. If the injunction is reversed, lawsuits can still be filed up to four years after the abortion at issue is performed.

Miller of Whole Woman’s Health said she has contacted law firms prepared to represent her staff, including 17 doctors, if they are sued retroactively.

“We do expect the state to appeal, and when they do we will also be ready,” she said.

For the past month, patients in Texas have traveled long distances to Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico and Colorado to terminate pregnancies, advocates say. But some who are seeking abortions say they cannot take time off work or child care or find money for such a trip."

Wish the courts would stop blocking this. I went deep in my personal account in coat hangar manufacturers and this is messing with my retirement money.

[seacoaster]

Fifth Circuit stays the injunction:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/us/t ... n-ban.html

“ HOUSTON — A federal appeals court panel reinstated Texas’ restrictive abortion law late Friday, temporarily restoring a ban on virtually all procedures that had been blocked by a lower court two days earlier in a case brought by the Biden administration.

The decision by three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in a terse two-page ruling granting a stay as it considers an appeal by the state of Texas, had been expected by many abortion providers. While at least six clinics in Texas had begun conducting abortions beyond the limits of the new law this week, most of the state’s roughly two dozen providers had opted not to take that step as the case moved through the courts.

“Tonight the Fifth Circuit has granted an administrative stay in the #SB8 case,” the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, wrote on Twitter on Friday night. “I will continue to fight to keep #Texas free from federal overreach.”

The law, which bans abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected, at about six weeks of pregnancy, has altered the landscape for abortions in the nation’s second-most-populous state because of its unique structure, which bars state officials from enforcing its provisions, leaving that instead to private citizens.”

[jhu72]

I'm a Christian minister who's had 2 abortions.

[youthathletics]

I'm a Christian minister who's had 2 abortions.

Presbyterian ...is that even a denomination?

[RedFromMI]

I'm a Christian minister who's had 2 abortions.

Presbyterian ...is that even a denomination?

Actually over two dozen denominations in the US. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_P ... th_America)

All are in the ~300K or less members except for the PCUSA group at a bit over a million members. (Disclosure - I am an Elder in the PCUSA). Extremely influential in the development of the constitution - parts are close to Presbyterian polity (governance) at the time.

Always has been a small grouping within the mainline Protestants chiefly due to the requirement that all ministers have an advanced degree which limits the growth of congregations...

[Brooklyn]

The Supreme Court seems poised to overturn Roe v. Wade


https://www.newsday.com/opinion/comment ... 1.50439995


Chief Justice John Roberts is searching for a compromise to preserve some basic right to abortion while moving it earlier in pregnancy, perhaps as early as 15 weeks. But based on Wednesday’s oral argument, it seems unlikely that any of the other justices is interested. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in particular, seemed to telegraph a willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade altogether.

In Wednesday’s historic oral argument about the Mississippi ban, the court’s liberals predictably emphasized the value of following precedent and hence not overturning Roe. The hardline conservatives made it clear that they do not like the "undue burden" on abortion standard that the court articulated in Casey v. Planned Parenthood (thus Justice Neil Gorsuch) — and that the viability line doesn’t make much sense if the fetus has an interest in life (per Justice Samuel Alito).

The potential swing voters, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, seemed pretty set on making history by overturning Roe. Neither engaged Roberts’ hints about compromise. Kavanaugh asked Mississippi’s lawyer to clarify that the state was not arguing for a constitutional ban on abortion but merely saying that abortion law should be left to the states. Barrett asked the state’s lawyer whether upholding the Mississippi law would threaten rights to contraception or same-sex marriage.

Both lines of questioning make sense primarily as part of an effort by Kavanaugh and Barrett to prepare the ground to overturn Roe while reassuring the public that the only effect would be to make abortion unavailable in certain states, not to undercut the court’s jurisprudence or other fundamental rights more broadly.

Kavanaugh then went further, suggesting that the court should be "scrupulously neutral" with respect to abortion rights, hence allowing states to adopt whatever laws they might choose. He reasoned that, given that different people have different ways of balancing the interests of the fetus and the mother, the court should stand back and let each state decide.

And he suggested that mistaken precedents should be overturned, invoking Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned the separate-but-equal principle of Plessy v. Ferguson. Barrett was more restrained, but said nothing that would give hope to Roberts — or to supporters of the right to choose.

Roberts began with a comment about viability. He noted that the issue was not part of the initial oral arguments in the Roe v. Wade case. And he added that Justice Harry Blackmun, who famously introduced the viability framework when he wrote the majority opinion in Roe, later said that he considered viability not to be part of the holding of Roe, but to be dicta — nonbinding judicial speculation.


From there, Roberts made his gambit more explicit in the form of a question to the lawyer representing Mississippi’s sole functioning abortion clinic. He asked, "If you think that the issue is one of choice ... viability, it seems to me, doesn’t have anything to do with choice. If it really is an issue about choice, why is 15 weeks not enough time?"

To decode what Roberts was getting at, you have to understand that the Mississippi law, which prohibits abortion after 15 weeks, clearly violates Roe’s viability rule. Viability is ordinarily treated in the law as occurring at around 23-24 weeks gestation.

Roberts was hinting that, if the core of Roe v. Wade is a woman’s right to choose whether to have an abortion, but Roe allows the state to restrict abortion at some point in pregnancy, then there is no particular reason to treat viability as the cutoff.

According to Roberts’s implicit theory, the justices could vote to uphold the Mississippi law while simultaneously saying that they were not overturning Roe v. Wade. They could hold that, properly interpreted, Roe allows states to restrict abortion at some point — so long as they allow women "enough time" to end their pregnancies.

What would count as enough time? Here Roberts could, if he could get another conservative justice on board, rely on the Casey decision, which said that the government may not impose an "undue burden" on the right to abortion. The words "undue burden" could be said, on this view, to represent a sliding scale.

If the court took up Roberts’s invitation, it would not need to say at how many weeks’ gestation abortion would have to be allowed. It could say only that there must be enough time that the woman’s right is not unduly burdened. Such a conclusion would presumably still rule out the so-called fetal heartbeat laws — like the one passed by the Texas legislature — that ban abortion at six weeks’ gestation.

Roberts has long signaled that he wants to restrict abortion rights but also does not want the Supreme Court to arouse the potential backlash and loss of legitimacy that would come with overturning Roe. But he can’t get there on his own. To control the outcome in the case, his decision would have to be necessary to the holding. That means that if the five other conservatives all vote to overturn Roe, an opinion by him proposing to move back the viability line to uphold the law would be a concurrence, not a controlling opinion.

In other words, Roberts needs one conservative to say Roe should be upheld and reinterpreted. Based on Wednesday’s oral argument, that seems even more unlikely than it did before.


Article by Professor Noah Feldman (Harvard). He makes a point that is often overlooked in all these discussions about abortion: that if Roe vs Wade is overturned (which, in truth, would be unusual in that it overturns legal precedent) all states will now be free to enact their own laws on the subject. Laws that could not be overturned by federal law as issues relating to health are within a state's governance under the ancient concept of police power. Thus, if a pregnant woman cannot secure an abortion in North Dakota she remains free to cross into Minnesota for that procedure.

[Farfromgeneva]

I'm a Christian minister who's had 2 abortions.

Presbyterian ...is that even a denomination?

I mean if Presby isn’t then am I a Christian as an Episcopalian?

[Brooklyn]

Episcopalian

I believe St John the Divine Cathedral [largest church in NYC] is Episcopalian. In all the years I lived in NY, I passed by several times but never went in there. Dunno why.

[Farfromgeneva]

Episcopalian

I believe St John the Divine Cathedral [largest church in NYC] is Episcopalian. In all the years I lived in NY, I passed by several times but never went in there. Dunno why.

John Henry Hobart is buried at Trinity Church-was the third bishop of NYC

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Hobart

[Brooklyn]

Episcopalian

I believe St John the Divine Cathedral [largest church in NYC] is Episcopalian. In all the years I lived in NY, I passed by several times but never went in there. Dunno why.

John Henry Hobart is buried at Trinity Church-was the third bishop of NYC

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Hobart

Interesting character! Thanks for sharing.

[PizzaSnake]

Well, this os one way to get people to return from Tejas.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/08/us/c ... state.html

Given rge employment situation, what company would stay in or go to Tejas or any of these 17th century states? Maybe all of the baby boomers can puck up the slack? Or, shudder, immigrants?

[CU88]

The Food and Drug Administration has announced it will relax controversial restrictions on a heavily regulated medication used to induce abortions — easing access to the drug at a time when abortion rights are being increasingly restricted nationwide.

The drug, mifepristone, is approved for use in combination with another medication, misoprostol, to terminate pregnancies up to 10 weeks and is sometimes used to treat women experiencing miscarriages.

Before the pandemic, doctors could only prescribe the pills to patients who were able to pick them up in person. But in response to COVID-19, the Biden administration suspended that requirement, allowing them to be mailed to patients instead. The decision by the FDA on Thursday makes that change permanent.

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/15/10645985 ... tion-pills