#dobbs v jackson

[jwood718]

Brittany Watts not indicted for "abuse of a corpse" in Ohio, but that was the grand jury, not the prosecutor.

"Watts’s case had sparked nationwide shock and outcry, as reproductive health and justice advocates held it up as an example of how pregnant people can easily end up facing criminal consequences – especially in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade.

'This decision does not erase the harm that Brittany has experienced as the result of this case. Brittany should have been able to focus on taking care of herself after her pregnancy loss,' said Yveka Pierra, senior litigation counsel at If/When/How, a reproductive justice advocacy group..."

Full story by Carter Sherman for The Guardian

The posit that the miscarried tissue is "a corpse" is part of the question surrounding this case, and likely a harbinger given the continued movement to legally recognize a fetus as a fully-fledged citizen.

[demdelis]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Kavitha Surana at ProPublica:

In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat. She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C. But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison. Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail. It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.

Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome. Their reviews of individual patient cases are not made public. But ProPublica obtained reports that confirm that at least two women have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state. There are almost certainly others. Committees like the one in Georgia, set up in each state, often operate with a two-year lag behind the cases they examine, meaning that experts are only now beginning to delve into deaths that took place after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion.

Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed “preventable,” is coming to public light. ProPublica will share the story of the second in the coming days. We are also exploring other deaths that have not yet been reviewed but appear to be connected to abortion bans. Doctors warned state legislators women would die if medical procedures sometimes needed to save lives became illegal. Though Republican lawmakers who voted for state bans on abortion say the laws have exceptions to protect the “life of the mother,” medical experts cautioned that the language is not rooted in science and ignores the fast-moving realities of medicine.

The most restrictive state laws, experts predicted, would pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C. “They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban. Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica. Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.

The availability of D&Cs for both abortions and routine miscarriage care helped save lives after the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, studies show, reducing the rate of maternal deaths for women of color by up to 40% the first year after abortion became legal. But since abortion was banned or restricted in 22 states over the past two years, women in serious danger have been turned away from emergency rooms and told that they needed to be in more peril before doctors could help. Some have been forced to continue high-risk pregnancies that threatened their lives. Those whose pregnancies weren’t even viable have been told they could return when they were “crashing.” Such stories have been at the center of the upcoming presidential election, during which the right to abortion is on the ballot in 10 states.

Thurman, who carried the full load of a single parent, loved being a mother. Every chance she got, she took her son to petting zoos, to pop-up museums and on planned trips, like one to a Florida beach. “The talks I have with my son are everything,” she posted on social media.

But when she learned she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022, she quickly decided she needed to preserve her newfound stability, her best friend, Ricaria Baker, told ProPublica. Thurman and her son had recently moved out of her family’s home and into a gated apartment complex with a pool, and she was planning to enroll in nursing school. The timing could not have been worse. On July 20, the day Georgia’s law banning abortion at six weeks went into effect, her pregnancy had just passed that mark, according to records her family shared with ProPublica. Thurman wanted a surgical abortion close to home and held out hope as advocates tried to get the ban paused in court, Baker said. But as her pregnancy progressed to its ninth week, she couldn’t wait any longer. She scheduled a D&C in North Carolina, where abortion at that stage was still legal, and on Aug. 13 woke up at 4 a.m. to make the journey with her best friend.

On their drive, they hit standstill traffic, Baker said. The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect. Instead, a clinic employee offered Thurman a two-pill abortion regimen approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, mifepristone and misoprostol. Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment. Getting to the clinic had required scheduling a day off from work, finding a babysitter, making up an excuse to borrow a relative’s car and walking through a crowd of anti-abortion protesters. Thurman didn’t want to reschedule, Baker said. At the clinic, Thurman sat through a counseling session in which she was told how to safely take the pills and instructed to go to the emergency room if complications developed. She signed a release saying she understood. She took the first pill there and insisted on driving home before any symptoms started, Baker said. She took the second pill the next day, as directed.

Deaths due to complications from abortion pills are extremely rare. Out of nearly 6 million women who’ve taken mifepristone in the U.S. since 2000, 32 deaths were reported to the FDA through 2022, regardless of whether the drug played a role. Of those, 11 patients developed sepsis. Most of the remaining cases involved intentional and accidental drug overdoses, suicide, homicide and ruptured ectopic pregnancies. Baker and Thurman spoke every day that week. At first, there was only cramping, which Thurman expected. But days after she took the second pill, the pain increased and blood was soaking through more than one pad per hour. If she had lived nearby, the clinic in North Carolina would have performed a D&C for free as soon as she followed up, the executive director told ProPublica. But Thurman was four hours away.

The consequences of draconian abortion bans are being felt, as at least two women in Georgia died over being denied emergency medical care.

[jwood718]

Oh, I can hear so many men screaming.

[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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[shinygemstone]

THEY FUCKING OVERTURNED THE CHEVRON DOCTRINE WHAT THE FUCK

WE KIND OF NEED THAT

It's only, like, the ruling that gives the EPA (and all other federal agencies) the power to define environmental law when actual laws aren't specific enough. Tell me, do you want lead in your water?

If not, you'd better move out of the US!!!

This is appalling. We want experts handling our water and air quality, not politicians who have no idea what they're talking about!!

Call your senators. Call your house representatives. Hell, send hate mail to the asshats who overturned Chevron (John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, Samuel Alito, Niel Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh). This is appalling.

Source 1 | source 2

[jwood718]

"...an abortion food truck..."

WTF does that even mean?

Oh, it was Planned Parenthood's mobile clinic. More from PolitiFact

These people are dangerous, they will believe anything you tell them

[jwood718]

“Supreme Court blocks lower court decision in case on FDA approval of abortion pill” by Nina Totenberg for NPR.

“The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday blocked lower court decisions banning or limiting the FDA-approved use of the abortion pill mifepristone for the foreseeable future.

But the justices, for now, left the case in the hands of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has scheduled oral arguments in the case for May 17...for now at least, the drug will be widely available, at least in those states where abortion is legal for up to 10 weeks into a pregnancy.

The court's action came on a vote of 7 to 2.  Dissenting were Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. [emphasis added]

In his dissent, Alito argued, ‘As narrowed by the Court of Appeals, the stay that would apply if we failed to broaden it would not remove mifepristone from the market. It would simply restore the circumstances that existed (and that the Government defended) from 2000 to 2016 under three Presidential administrations’...

‘I continue to stand by FDA's evidence-based approval of mifepristone, and my Administration will continue to defend FDA's independent, expert authority to review, approve, and regulate a wide range of prescription drugs,’ [President] Biden said in a statement...

There is little likelihood that the appeals court will substantially change its view after oral arguments in the case. Its 42-page preliminary order is based, in part, on the Comstock Act, a law that for generations has not been enforced. Enacted in 1873, the statute sought to prevent the mailing of obscene or lewd materials and to bar the mailing of any substance, article or drug used for birth control or for the purpose of ‘unlawful abortion.’"

Full story

[rickmctumbleface]

[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:

[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 💃🏻

[jwood718]

Ximena Bustillo and Lexie Schapitl reporting for NPR: SCOTUS puts rulings concerning Mifepristione on “pause,” with hours to spare before a Texas district court ruling to take effect.

“Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has placed a hold on a lower court ruling that restricts access to the abortion drug mifepristone until Wednesday night. Alito also instructed that any responses be filed by April 18 at noon.

Friday's hold was in response to a formal request earlier in the day from the Justice Department to block a federal appeals court decision that limits access to the abortion drug mifepristone.

Portions of a Texas district court's order that limits the drug would have otherwise taken effect April 15, but Alito's order put it on pause.

The government, on behalf of the Food and Drug Administration, earlier today requested an immediate administrative stay to preserve the status quo while the court considers the request.”

Justice Alito of all people; huh--makes me wonder what the future will bring.  And it’s only a pause on  U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ‘s injunction, which, again, makes me wonder what the future will bring.

Nina Totenberg, Sarah McCammon and Becky Sullivan contributed to this report.

Full story