Stolen, Illegitimate, SCOTUS Overturns Roe …

Right-wing Christians always fear "Sharia law" coming to America only because they don't like the competition. Most aspects of it, they'd love. No gay marriage, no gun control, rejecting science, religious instruction in schools, dictating what women can wear, censoring music/movies/books, etc. Y'know, just theocracy in general...

Conservatives also like to talk about "freedom" while taking 'em away from people, and complaining about "activist judges" while they work to appoint nothing but.

Here's a fun fact: Islam is actually less repressive than the right-wing-version-of-Christianity when it comes to abortion. https://www.islamawareness.net/FamilyPlanning/Abortion/abortion3.html

The scholars all agree that abortion is forbidden after the first four months of pregnancy, since by that time the soul has entered the embryo but it would allow the use of RU486 (the "morning-after pill"), as long as it could be reasonably assumed that the fertilized egg has not become implanted on the wall of the uterus. Most scholars say that abortion is legal under Islamic Shari'ah (law), when done for valid reasons and when completed before the soul enters the embryo.

O' course, the right-wing-version-of-Christianity has no real connection to actual Christianity in this case, either, since the Bible states pretty conclusively that a fetus isn't a "person." Exodus 21:22-25 says if men are fighting and cause a woman to miscarry, the one who caused it has to pay a fine for depriving them of property. Murder, however, is life-for-a-life.

Plus, God Hisownself is one hell of an abortionist! Numbers 5:11-31, Deuteronomy 28:18, 53, 2 Kings 8:12, 2 Kings 15:16, Isaiah 13:18, Hosea 9:10-16, Hosea 13:16. All kinds of stuff in there. But the right-wing-version-of-Christianity has never liked the Bible nearly as much as it does Ayn Rand. Which gives them much more in common with these folks... https://www.churchofsatan.com/satanism-and-objectivism/

Anyway, who needs the Taliban? We've got our own. They want everyone to live under a theocracy, ruled by them. And they'll take as many rights away from the American people as they can. This is just a start of what they want to do. Believe me, I was raised in a state where we weren't even allowed to buy comic books in the grocery store on Sunday because of religious mandates. Movies were banned from our theaters, and they'd even dictate what comic strips you could read in the newspaper or what songs you could play on the radio. And they're longing to get that kind of control back. And see how much more they can get. They've already created the ability to "bounty hunt" for any woman trying to get an abortion in Texas. https://fortune.com/2021/07/09/texas-abortion-law-bounty-hunting/ That's right -- now not only is oppressing women legal, it's fucking PROFITABLE. Ten grand a shot!

Now, this seems kind of extreme to me, but I've learned not to discount any possibility here on what is turning into more of a free-range lunatic asylum than a planet, and put no level of cruelty out of the reach of a fundie:

Other Texas legal officials expressed concern that the bill was broad enough to allow sexual predators to profit off their assaults. “The bill is so extreme that it could even allow a rapist to sue a doctor for providing care to a sexual assault survivor and for the rapist to recover financial damages,” wrote Travis County attorney Delia Garza.

Maybe next time people will take voting more seriously.

Texas has briefly taken the lead in the race to be the bleeding hemorrhoid on the asshole of humanity, but here comes Florida!! …

www.wtxl.com/news/politics/no-question-florida-legislature-will-hear-abortion-bill-mimicking-texas%3f_amp=true

Sal your link says Page Not Found but thanks because I found it.

'No question' Florida legislature will hear abortion bill mimicking Texas'

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) — Rep. Anthony Sabatini is planning to sponsor a heartbeat abortion bill, mimicking the new policy in Texas.

He’s failed in previous attempts but believes 2022 will be different as Republicans may no longer need to fear rejection by the Supreme Court after its recent decision to allow the Texas law to remain in effect.

“It’s time to start saving the lives of innocent unborn children in Florida,” Sabatini said. "For three years, I have been the co-sponsor of the “Heartbeat” Bill, fighting the radical left and the weak Republican establishment to get this bill past. The RINOs in Tallahassee have stopped progress every step of the way. It’s time to put them on the record and ensure a vote of the House immediately."

Florida Senate President Wilton Simpson is openly supporting the idea.

President Simpson told WFLA-Ch. 8 “there is no question” the Florida legislature will consider an abortion heartbeat bill like Texas’ in this upcoming session. “It’s something we’re already working on.”

He released the following statement to ABC 27:

The Texas law represents a new approach and the fact that the Supreme Court didn’t block it from taking effect is encouraging.

Abortion kills children and forever changes the life of the mother, the father, and the entire extended family. As an adoptive child myself, it’s important to me that we do everything we can to promote adoption and prevent abortion; therefore, I think it’s worthwhile to take a look at the Texas law and see if there is more we can do here in Florida.

I continue to believe that being pro-life is about more than opposing abortion. I have and will continue to champion funding for options like Hormonal Long Acting Reversible Contraception, which prevents unplanned pregnancies that lead to abortions. Child welfare reforms that support children, parents, and members of the extended family willing to take on child rearing responsibilities are also important to me.

Providing approaches like HLARC give young people the opportunity to delay parenting without the trauma and carnage brought on by abortion, while investments in child welfare programs create an environment in our state where young parents can feel confident that there are options other than abortion and they will be supported in their decision to choose life for their babies.



Asked during a press conference Thursday whether he'd support a Texas-style abortion law in Florida, Governor DeSantis said, "I'm pro-life. I welcome pro-life legislation." Then added, "I'm going to have to look more significantly at it."

The Texas law banning most abortions in the state took effect Wednesday, with the Supreme Court silent on an emergency appeal to put the law on hold.

The law is the most far-reaching restriction on abortion rights in the United States since the high court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion across the country in 1973.

It prohibits abortions once medical professionals can detect cardiac activity, usually around six weeks and before most women know they’re pregnant.

States move to curb abortions
Texas has enacted the strictest abortion measure in the U.S., banning most procedures at about six weeks of pregnancy, when a fetal heartbeat can be detected. While most states limit a woman's ability to get an abortion late in pregnancy, many conservative states are seeking to ban most abortions earlier in gestation.

President Joe Biden issued a statement saying, “extreme Texas law blatantly violates the constitutional right established under Roe v. Wade and upheld as precedent for nearly half a century.”

However, the abortion rate in the U.S. has been in steady decline since the 1990s. Both proponents of abortion and anti-abortion activists credit this to the passing of laws restricting women’s access to the procedure, according to reporting by Reuters.

Senator Annette Taddeo gave ABC 27 the statement below regarding Florida Republicans announcing plans for a Texas-style abortion bill:

Understand what Florida Republicans want to do: They want to give rapists the right to sue their victims to stop them from getting an abortion - and to be able to collect money from their victims who try to have an abortion. If Republicans get their way, rapists will have more power over this decision than the victim.

There are no words for this. Women who care about their own rights, and the men who care about the women in their life, need to organize like we've never organized before. This isn't a vague threat from Republicans - they relish the opportunity to take away the rights of women to make their own health care choices. The only thing Republicans in Tallahassee fear is not being in power, so the only way this stops is for Floridians to make it absolutely crystal clear the electoral consequences of moving forward with what is essentially a bill of rights for rapists.



The Texas law does not make exceptions for pregnancies that result from rape or incest, and also allows individuals to sue those suspected of helping a woman obtain an abortion, with an award of up to $10,000.

https://www.wtxl.com/news/politics/no-question-florida-legislature-will-hear-abortion-bill-mimicking-texas

The Texas law is a ghoulishly insidious piece of legislation designed to rebuff legal challenges (and it worked!) by taking state enforcement out of the picture in favor of deputized citizens incentivized by bounties paid by violators. Texans are encouraged to file civil suits against fellow citizens they suspect of performing or facilitating an abortion. “Aiding and abetting” an abortion might include, say, handing someone the phone number of an abortion clinic in an adjacent state. If the court finds in the plaintiff’s favor, they are entitled to extract at least $10,000 from the accused, plus court costs.

There’s a lot one might say about this grotesque scheme. It’s an invitation to surveil, harass and intimidate anyone inclined to actively protect women’s reproductive autonomy. It sets citizens against each other. This is some real Stasi shit. Eyes-and-ears-are-everywhere! This is. . . not a recipe for social amity and civic health.

Of course, the titanic hypocrisy of maintaining that it’s a tyrannical imposition on “medical freedom” even for private businesses and institutions to mandate masks or vaccines while simultaneously promoting state-sanctioned bounty-hunting to enforce a regime of coerced pregnancy and childbirth is . . . crazymaking. It is hypocrisy of infinite density — a black hole of bad faith from which nary a glimmer of moral principle or intellectual honesty can escape.

And don’t get me started on the court majority’s unsigned opinion ruling that the law ought to go into effect. The basic idea really is just that there is nothing the Court can do to secure our Constitutional Rights against a dubiously constitutional laws as long as states enforce them with bounty hunters. It’s pure arbitrary insanity! It is, as Sotomayor puts it, “untenable.” She writes, “It cannot be the case that a State can evade federal judicial scrutiny by outsourcing the enforcement of unconstitutional laws to its citizenry.”

https://modelcitizen.substack.com/p/republicans-finally-caught-the-car

"Goulishly" "grotesque" "unconstitutional"... lmao. You're delusional. Those are literally descriptive of abortion.

"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"

Sal wrote:

PkrBum wrote:"Goulishly" "grotesque" "unconstitutional"... lmao. You're delusional. Those are literally descriptive of abortion.

"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"

Glibertarians …. always gettin’ up in other people’s bidness.

lmao …. absolutely zero principles whatsoever.

Their "bidness" should be birth control or even finding out if they're pregnant when they miss their period. There's their "choice". Take some fucking personal responsibility libtards. I'm not religious or even particularly concerned with roe vs wade. But it's simple stupid to blame others for your poor personal decisions. Your parents should've been so wise.

In the early '70's, I was the assistant to the administrator of Jefferson Davis Hospital, the maternity half of the Harris County hospital system, in Houston. In 1972, there were 10,000 live births.  In 1973, some of the first legal abortions and vasectomies were performed there.  That was 48 years ago.  This is, of course, aside from my own personal experience.  What exactly do you bring to the table here, other than your potty mouth and O-pinion (and we know what opinions are like)?

I've got five minutes to kill, so let's just frag some of the right-wing "pro-life" bullshit.

First, look at this map:  https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/infant_mortality_rates/infant_mortality.htm

Notice that the states that elect the most conservatives, and enact the most conservative policies, consistently have the highest infant mortality rates, and it's not even close.  Poke around, play with it, go through the years... you will, again and again and again, see that this is the case.  You'll see that the blue states, or the ones where conservatism is weakening and thus have more social programs to help mothers and babies, keep improving their numbers, while the staunchly conservative ones do not.

So you're not "pro-life."  The fact that actions speak louder than words and results matter say that's off the table.  Conservative states are content with their high-infant-mortality levels or they'd have changed their policies to improve those numbers over the year.  They have not. And these are babies already born, that someone wanted.  So all the claims of being "pro-life" is just some hollow virtue-signal bullshit that they do a whole lot worse job backing up than the states they claim are "sinful."

Now, as far as this "personal responsibility" thing goes (which is ironic as hell given the jackoff in question's pathetic track record of childish selfishness which causes him to constantly let everyone connected with him down in the worst ways possible)... nobody uses abortion as their primary form of birth control.  It doesn't work that way.  I've known people who had them; it's not a thing they take lightly. If nothing else, it's a whole lot more expensive and inconvenient, even if you took the moral and emotional side of it away... which nobody ever does.  It's not all about "poor personal decisions."  Things aren't that simple.

Six weeks is not enough time for a woman to find out she's pregnant if she misses her period.  Periods can be late without the woman being pregnant.  Basically, Texas's law requires periods to be exactly on time, and if they aren't, you have a two-week window.  Ever had to get a doctor's appointment?  Good fucking luck to ya getting one within two weeks, and then when you do there's still a lot of time needed for tests and follow up and then discussions about those tests. The time frame is simply not realistic. Six weeks, with four of those devoted to the stretch between periods, is not reasonable at all.   And the people passing this law know that, because -- as the consistency of high infant mortality rates in conservative states have made more than obvious -- none of this is about "saving babies," it's about controlling women.  They don't like giving them any options.

I know the fundies get super-offended at being compared to the Taliban, but too fucking bad. When they stop acting exactly like 'em, maybe those comparisons won't be so unavoidable.  They may actually be worse than the Taliban, considering I'm not sure if the Taliban has made it possible for oppressing women to be lucrative.  "Abortion Bounty Hunter" is now a possible job for people, at ten grand a case.   That's flat-out sick. Even sicker is the possibility that a rapist can now sue his victim.

Now, as for not caring about Roe vs. Wade, that's pretty much the same thing as saying "I don't care about women's rights.  I don't care about women having body autonomy."   Which is fine, if you feel that way, but just know that it makes you, beyond any motherfucking doubt, an asshole of the highest possible magnitude and a piece of garbage as far as a human being goes, just disregarding half the human race and saying their rights aren't important.  If you wanna do that, you certainly can, but, wow, what a smear of shit you are, especially if you've got any women in your life.  And woe be to any that may be.

I know y'all regret the end of the leftist eugenics program. But you still have abortion to kill off the "unfit".

Pull it together.

PkrBum wrote:I know y'all regret the end of the leftist eugenics program. But you still have abortion to kill off the "unfit".

Pull it together.

Your ignorance is on full display here, and I recall the same stupid argument from you over a period of years. You just don't want to get it, do you? This is about a woman's right to her own bodily autonomy. It's not "leftist" and it's not "eugenics". This is the cover of a book my mother gave me in 1968, written by Michael Crichton under the pseudonym Jeffrey Hudson.



Plot summary

Dr. John Berry, the protagonist, is a pathologist working in Boston during the 1960s, a time when abortion was illegal in the United States. The story opens with an introduction of the various requirements and challenges of the medical profession during the era. Subsequently, Dr. Berry is notified that his friend, an obstetrician named Arthur Lee, has been arrested and accused of performing an illegal abortion that led to the death of Karen Randall, a member of a prominent Boston medical dynasty. Berry does not believe the allegations, but the situation is further complicated by the fact that Lee is already well-known within the medical community as an abortion provider and that Berry has in the past helped Lee disguise medical samples to hide the fact that Lee's dilation and curettage patients were pregnant.

After visiting his friend in jail, Berry sets out to prove Lee's innocence. He investigates the personal life of the dead woman, creating an accurate portrait of her past, psychology, and character. During his search, which lasts several days, vandals attack Lee's home. The protagonist's knowledge of medicine and law are helpful in overcoming various barriers in his search, including a hostile police captain and bribes from the scion of the Randall family itself: Karen's father, a well-established (though mediocre) doctor.

Eventually, with the aid of an unscrupulous lawyer named Wilson, Berry is able to obtain solid evidence showing Karen Randall's uncle (who had already performed three previous abortions for her) to be the culprit. Nonetheless, Berry is troubled by this conclusion and continues his investigation despite Wilson's displeasure. Eventually, he discovers that Karen's drug-dealing friends, Roman and Angela, performed the botched abortion, but Berry is attacked and sent to the hospital before he can reveal his discovery. Subsequently, Berry's attacker, who turns out to be Karen's African-American boyfriend, is also brought in an ambulance, dead after a fatal fall. The actual abortionist attempts to commit suicide. Berry forces her to confess in the hospital by threatening her with what she believes is an excruciatingly painful dose of Nalorphine (but is actually water).

Berry continues to be suspicious about Karen's boyfriend's death, and ultimately forces one of his old friends and colleagues (the uncle of the woman who did Karen's abortion) to admit to his involvement before turning him in to the police. However, despite being proven innocent, Lee's reputation has been ruined, and he decides to move to California. The novel ends with several appendices describing some lesser-known aspects of the medical profession and a postscript discussing current problems in medicine, including abortion.

(Wikipedia)

CONCLUSION
Roe v. Wade transformed abortion from an unsafe, clandestine procedure to one performed under safe, medical conditions. The 1970s thus saw a reduction in abortion-related complications and deaths as safer options became available to American women choosing to terminate an unplanned pregnancy. Since Roe v. Wade, a full generation of Americans have come to expect abortion services to be available alongside other health services.

However, the topic of abortion remains one of the most controversial areas of public policy. The intense public debate has allowed us to know more about legally induced abortion than about any other procedure. Although the available medical evidence does not directly address society's moral issues, it allows an objective insight to the health effects of wider access to legal abortion. Despite polarized opposition to the choice of legal abortion, the public health data have helped guide judicial rulings, legislative actions and surgeon general's reports, which have together allowed safer choices for American women of reproductive age.

FOOTNOTES
*The Supreme Court used the pregnancy trimester concept as the basis for Roe v. Wade: Because early induced abortion was much safer than a continued pregnancy, the Court recognized the right of a woman and her physician to choose to terminate a pregnancy during the first trimester, independent of any statutory limitations. However, curettage procedures were considered too dangerous for the woman after the first trimester. In Doe v. Bolton, the companion decision to Roe v. Wade, the Court ruled that although the state could not prohibit a woman from choosing to terminate a pregnancy in the second trimester, it could, for health reasons, regulate the conditions under which the abortion was performed (source: reference 25).

https://www.guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/2003/01/public-health-impact-legal-abortion-30-years-later

***********

Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent:

The Court’s order is stunning. Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand. Last night, the Court silently acquiesced in a State’s enactment of a law that flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents. Today, the Court belatedly explains that it declined to grant relief because of procedural complexities of the State’s own invention. Because the Court’s failure to act rewards tactics designed to avoid judicial review and inflicts significant harm on the applicants and on women seeking abortions in Texas, I dissent.

In May 2021, the Texas Legislature enacted S. B. 8 (the Act). The Act, which took effect statewide at midnight on September 1, makes it unlawful for physicians to perform abortions if they either detect cardiac activity in an embryo or fail to perform a test to detect such activity. This equates to a near-categorical ban on abortions beginning six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period, before many women realize they are pregnant, and months before fetal viability. According to the applicants, who are abortion providers and advocates in Texas, the Act immediately prohibits care for at least 85% of Texas abortion patients and will force many abortion clinics to close.

The Act is clearly unconstitutional under existing precedents. The respondents do not even try to argue otherwise. Nor could they: No federal appellate court has upheld such a comprehensive prohibition on abortions before viability under current law.

The Texas Legislature was well aware of this binding precedent. To circumvent it, the Legislature took the extraordinary step of enlisting private citizens to do what the State could not. The Act authorizes any private citizen to file a lawsuit against any person who provides an abortion in violation of the Act, “aids or abets” such an abortion (including by paying for it) regardless of whether they know the abortion is prohibited under the Act, or even intends to engage in such conduct. Courts are required to enjoin the defendant from engaging in these actions in the future and to award the private-citizen plaintiff at least $10,000 in “statutory damages” for each forbidden abortion performed or aided by the defendant. In effect, the Texas Legislature has deputized the State’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.

The Legislature fashioned this scheme because federal constitutional challenges to state laws ordinarily are brought against state officers who are in charge of enforcing the law. By prohibiting state officers from enforcing the Act directly and relying instead on citizen bounty hunters, the Legislature sought to make it more complicated for federal courts to enjoin the Act on a statewide basis.

Taken together, the Act is a breathtaking act of defiance—of the Constitution, of this Court’s precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas. But over six weeks after the applicants filed suit to prevent the Act from taking effect, a Fifth Circuit panel abruptly stayed all proceedings before the District Court and vacated a preliminary injunction hearing that was scheduled to begin on Monday. The applicants requested emergency relief from this Court, but the Court said nothing. The Act took effect at midnight last night.

Today, the Court finally tells the Nation that it declined to act because, in short, the State’s gambit worked. The structure of the State’s scheme, the Court reasons, raises “complex and novel antecedent procedural questions” that counsel against granting the application, ante, at 1, just as the State intended. This is untenable. It cannot be the case that a State can evade federal judicial scrutiny by outsourcing the enforcement of unconstitutional laws to its citizenry. Moreover, the District Court held this case justiciable in a thorough and well-reasoned opinion after weeks of briefing and consideration. Instead, the Court has rewarded the State’s effort to delay federal review of a plainly unconstitutional statute, enacted in disregard of the Court’s precedents, through procedural entanglements of the State’s own creation.

The Court should not be so content to ignore its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and of the rule of law.

I dissent.

****************

(from Steady, by Dan Rather)

Architect of Texas abortion ban also wants SCOTUS to overturn same-sex marriage, recriminalize interracial marriage and gay sex.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/17/texas-abortion-ban-jonathan-mitchell-supreme-court-brief

"such a decision could open the door"

Those things aren't being litigated... or on any docket.

Take a deep breath. Plenty of black babies are still being killed.