#Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sen. Elizabeth Warren: suspend the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade during the next Democratic trifecta

Alexander Bolton at The Hill:

Progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) announced Wednesday that there are currently enough votes in the Senate to suspend the filibuster to codify Roe v. Wade and abortion rights if Democrats win control of the House and keep the Senate and White House. “We will suspend the filibuster. We have the votes for that on Roe v. Wade,” Warren said on ABC’s “The View.”

She said if Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress in 2025, “the first vote Democrats will take in the Senate, the first substantive vote, will be to make Roe v. Wade law of the land again in America.” The Massachusetts Democrat said her party would only need “skinny” majorities in the House and Senate to override the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the national right to an abortion established by Roe v. Wade in 1973. “We can make Roe v. Wade law of the land if we have, and I have to be clear, we’ve got to have a majority in the House — skinny majority. We can take a really skinny majority in the Senate, I’ll take fifty. And a Democrat in the White House. We have those three things we will suspend the filibuster,” she said.

Speaking on ABC’s The View Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) supports the idea of suspending the filibuster to pass a Codify Roe bill should the Dems get a trifecta.

From the 07.17.2024 edition of ABC's The View:

[tomorrowusa]

Republicans claim to be for "freedom" but they will readily tell you what you can and cannot do in your own bedroom.

The Ohio legislature wants to keep an extreme abortion ban intact despite widespread opposition to it among Ohioans.

There are two Ohio ballot measures coming up in the next few months which affect reproductive freedom. It's a little complicated, but to ensure reproductive freedom in Ohio, vote NO on the one in August and YES on the one in November.

For more details on how Ohioans can protect reproductive freedom, see our earlier post on it.

TL;DR version...

Keep freedom-hating Republicans out of your bedroom.

[demdelis]

[contemplatingoutlander]

This is a gift🎁link so anyone can read the entire NY Times article, even if they don' subscribe to the Times.

Jamelle Bouie does another excellent job of looking at current events through the perspective of American history. In this column, he compares the current Roberts Court with the infamous late 1850s/ early 1860s Taney Court--the Court that lost all credibility with its Dred Scott decision. Below are a few excerpts.

If the chief currency of the Supreme Court is its legitimacy as an institution, then you can say with confidence that its account is as close to empty as it has been for a very long time. Since the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization nearly two years ago, its general approval with the public has taken a plunge. [...] In the latest 538 average, just over 52 percent of Americans disapproved of the Supreme Court, and around 40 percent approved. [...] At the risk of sounding a little dramatic, you can draw a useful comparison between the Supreme Court’s current political position and the one it held on the eve of the 1860 presidential election. [color emphasis added]

[See more below the cut.]

NOTE: Remember that back in the 1850s/1860s the Democrats were the party that supported slavery. The Democrats and Republicans switched positions on civil rights in the late 20th century.

It was not just the ruling itself that drove the ferocious opposition to the [Taney] Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which overturned the Missouri Compromise and wrote Black Americans out of the national community; it was the political entanglement of the Taney court with the slaveholding interests of the antebellum Democratic Party. [...] Five of the justices were appointed by slave owners. At the time of the ruling, four of the justices were slave owners. And the chief justice, Roger Taney, was a strong Democratic partisan who was in close communication with James Buchanan, the incoming Democratic president, in the weeks before he issued the court’s ruling in 1857. Buchanan, in fact, had written to some of the justices urging them to issue a broad and comprehensive ruling that would settle the legal status of all Black Americans. The Supreme Court, critics of the ruling said, was not trying to faithfully interpret the Constitution as much as it was acting on behalf of the so-called Slave Power, an alleged conspiracy of interests determined to take slavery national. The court, wrote a committee of the New York State Assembly in its report on the Dred Scott decision, was determined to “bring slavery within our borders, against our will, with all its unhallowed, demoralizing and blighted influences.” The Supreme Court did not have the political legitimacy to issue a ruling as broad and potentially far-reaching as Dred Scott, and the result was to mobilize a large segment of the public against the court. Abraham Lincoln spoke for many in his first inaugural address when he took aim at the pretense of the Taney court to decide for the nation: “The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.” [color/ emphasis added]

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[transformationsproject]

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[rickmctumbleface]

[lenbryant]

They were never going to stop at abortion.

[whenweallvote]

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to an abortion with their decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. 

The impacts of the decision have been devastating — but voters in states across the country are fighting back.

Since 2022, abortion remains undefeated at the ballot box. In 2024, it’s still on the ballot. Register to vote now with us and FEMINIST at weall.vote/feminist.

[strawlessandbraless]

With access to safe abortion and contraceptives being increasingly restricted, I just wanted to say a big ole happy international women’s day to the massive rise in vasectomies. You love to see it 💃🏻

[living400lbs]

"The reality is that I’ve never had bodily autonomy in the US—not as a Black queer woman. And there are many people who have had even less. Trans people. Disabled people. Poor Black, brown, and Indigenous people. Incarcerated people.

The shocking assault on our rights that came with the numerous anti-abortion bills and then the devastating Supreme Court ruling echoed previous attacks on marginalized and vulnerable people throughout our country’s history. And only now—when cisgender, middle-class white women can feel the threat—is this considered an emergency.

But the same people right now deciding whether or not people will be forced to carry a pregnancy to term against their will are the same people deciding that Black, brown, and Indigenous people should be funneled into our prison systems, that the quality of life for disabled people doesn’t matter, that trans people shouldn’t have gender-affirming care or the ability to financially meet their basic needs or even use a bathroom safely.

The assault on our bodily autonomy didn’t start with the Supreme Court ruling, and it won’t end there either. And it is our racism, classism, ableism, and transphobia that have stopped us from coming together to fight this threat as hard as we should have."

-from Be A Revolution by Ijeoma Oluo

[letterstothefutureme]

DON’T MAKE PERFECT THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD

Planned Parenthood and NARAL declined to offer any support to petition signature collection because they said the amendment to restore abortion rights was “too restrictive.”

Right now in Arkansas, there is a total abortion ban.

The majority of abortions are done in the first 12 weeks. This amendment would restore access to the most common and desperately needed abortion care.

Opposing it is not just absurd, it’s heartless.

Arkansas has the highest maternal mortality rate in the nation.

So, I guess we’re fine with letting more women die because it doesn’t fit neatly into our political agenda.

The campaign used conservative messaging and sought Republican support. That’s what it takes to restore access to abortion care in one of the reddest states in the country.

If you actually care about restoring reproductive rights, you should be welcoming bipartisan support.

Congratulations to Arkansans for Limited Government for pulling off an incredible petition gathering campaign with nothing but pure organizing hustle.

This is only the first hurdle but every post-Dobbs ballot initiative restoring or protecting abortion access has passed.

We can do this.

Not today, patriarchy, not today

[2mo3cm-man]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jonathan Nicholson at HuffPost:

On the first night of their national convention, Democrats highlighted three stories of how abortion restrictions after Roe v. Wade was overturned had hurt women and couples, hoping to underscore the importance of reproductive rights in one of the most poignant presentations Monday night. The message: Abortion bans put lives at risk. Giving the stage over to one couple and two women who had experienced the harm of abortion hurdles in the prime-time window of the convention’s first night shows how important Democrats see the issue for Kamala Harris’ presidential race.

An Economist/YouGov poll taken from Aug. 11 to Aug. 13 found that 75% of respondents said abortion rights were “very” or “somewhat” important to them, with 81% of female respondents feeling that way. Former President Donald Trump, who is campaigning while out on bail after his felony convictions in New York state, has said the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which tossed out Roe’s almost 50-year precedent, was good because it sent the issue of abortion to the states rather than preserving a national right. But many states have enacted total or near-total bans on abortion, and others have made abortions conditional on medical diagnoses that the woman’s life is in danger, which in turn has led to women being denied treatment until they were close to dying. “Because of Donald Trump, more than one in three women of reproductive age in America lives under an abortion ban. A second Trump term would rip away even more of our rights,” said Amanda Zurawski, who stood with her husband, Josh, on an otherwise darkened stage to discuss her experience in Texas.

[...] Kaitlyn Joshua, who was denied care in Louisiana, said she had to go to several medical facilities to confirm she was miscarrying. “Two emergency rooms sent me away. Because of Louisiana’s abortion ban, no one would confirm that I was miscarrying. I was in pain, bleeding so much my husband feared for my life,” she said. “No women should experience what I endured but too many have.” Hadley Duvall of Kentucky, the third speaker, said she had been raped by her stepfather and became pregnant at the age of 12. “I can’t imagine not having a choice. But today that’s the reality for many women and girls across the country because of Donald Trump’s abortion bans,” she said. Kentucky is listed as one of the 14 states that now have a total ban on abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

At the DNC Monday night, three women (alongside a man who was the husband of one of the speakers) who were harmed by their state’s abortion ban laws spoke the truths about how abortion bans harm women. #DNC2024 #DemConvention

[lenbryant]

Princess Leia’s mom Debby Reynolds on life pre-Roe v Wade.