#dobbs v jackson

[probablyasocialecologist]

According to the Turnaway Study conducted by researchers at the University of California San Francisco, people who are denied abortions are almost four times more likely than those who are granted them to wind up in poverty, even if they began on equal economic footing. Sixty percent of people who seek abortions in the US have at least one child (CDC), and almost half are poor: 49 percent live below the federal poverty line. An additional 26 percent are low income. The median cost of a first-trimester abortion is $508; a second-trimester abortion, $1,195; and a later-term abortion can cost $3,000 or more, which is nearly a quarter of a single person’s annual income before the cost of travel, fuel, or lodging often required for an out-of-state abortion. Meanwhile, the average cost of raising a middle-class American child from birth to 17 years of age is $233,610 — $292,051 in 2022 dollars.

Pregnancy is thirty times more dangerous than abortion. A 2022 study from the University of Colorado Boulder estimates that a nationwide abortion ban would cause pregnancy-related deaths to increase by 24 percent. Among Black women, who are already two to three times more likely than white women to die of pregnancy-related complications, the rate of pregnancy-related death would increase by 39 percent.

[...]

It is easier to tell yourself that abortion is not health care when you suppress all knowledge of pregnancy’s less beatific aspects. In no other field of medicine are US doctors required by law to deny their patients the contemporary standard of evidence-based care. “It is impossible to take care of pregnant people safely where abortion doesn’t exist,” Dr. Thaxton said. “Anybody who’s capable of pregnancy is unsafe in an environment where they cannot access abortion care.”

[zimshan]

say it with me now

it’s not “pro-life”

it’s “forced birth”

and any government who can force someone to give birth?

can also force someone to be sterilized.

(do you hear that, “save the babies” crowd? you hear that men?)

do you want a government deciding whether you are worthy enough to procreate?

no? then you don’t want to give a government the power to force people to give birth.

it’s the same right. it’s bodily autonomy. your right to decide what happens to your body.

if you want to have a child

if you don’t want to have a child

the overturning of roe affects you

it means ob/gyn practices caring more about breaking laws than practicing medicine

it means distrust and suspicion among ob/gyn healthcare teams (at a time of already high burnout thanks to the pandemic)

that means less safe healthcare

that means higher maternal mortality rates

thats real women dying

what on earth is “pro-life” about that?

call “prolifers” what they are: pro–forced birth.

they are for governments forcing people to give birth.

government-mandated birth.

even if it kills you.

the real death panels.

[eve-is-a-terf]

in honor of the 51st anniversary of roe v wade, take your anger to the polls

[morepopcornplease]

people who still think the Dobbs decision was entirely motivated by religious belief of the SC justices are so desperately clinging to their own tinfoil hat fashion they can’t see that if that was true, they wouldn’t have just left it to the states to decide. 

they would have fully banned it. 

there IS a world in which the SC could have said abortion violates the 14th amendment. in fact when the draft was leaked and it was clear that thomas was going to write a separate opinion from the majority, many conservatives speculated he might make this argument. 

but he didn’t. 

thats why all the ~clever~ arguments about how banning abortion actually violates religious freedom are so frustratingly farcical. you didn’t read the Opinion, chucklefucks. you read the cliffnotes version through the lens you wanted to.  

you are building your strawman and burning him, and now you want to file a suit for arson. 

[arcticdementor]

Is the extra-spicy version about how the kinds of babies that normally get murdered by abortion are exactly the type that will now grow up to vote Democrat?

I somehow missed this one in my inbox. It, I believe, refers to this post last July on theories around the Dobbs decision.

To answer the question, no, it's not. The extra-spicy version is even spicier than that; and also a little more parallel to the "regular" version.

Both versions of the theory hold that the left “let” the right have a (more symbolic than practical) “win” in Dobbs so as to trick the right into putting their energy into an ultimately less-effective “Christian nationalism,” instead of a more-effective alternative.

In the “regular” version, the better alternative is economically populist class politics, and Christian nationalism is preferable because defeating it would just be a repeat of the George W. Bush/New Atheist years.

The “extra spicy” version — again, not my view, not endorsed; merely reporting the opinions of others here — postulates a different alternative and different motivations: that (((they))) gave us Dobbs so the right will pursue (less-effective) Christian nationalism instead of white nationalism. Because if Christian nationalism has a problem with Jews, it will be with Judaism as a religion, and since things like Vatican II, you don’t find much of the “Christ-killers” religious antisemitism outside of mostly-black denominations these days; and anyway, it would still be easier to withstand than the alternative, because white nationalists are quite actively racial antisemites, and the last time a modern, industrialized nation had a white supremacist government hostile to Jews as an ethnic group, well…

[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.

[tomorrowusa]

Reproductive freedom is on the line this election. Not everybody is a GOP member of Congress who is rich enough to leave the state or leave the country to get an abortion.

Remind the Trump-curious about which president intentionally appointed the three Supreme Court justices who helped kill Roe v. Wade.

Trump: 'I was able to kill Roe v. Wade'

Now is the time to speak up and speak out. You don't stop assaults on reproductive freedom by being politely quiet about it in real life. A potentially awkward moment now in real life could prevent a potentially devastating four (or more) years.

[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]

[formatting edited]

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Just a few years ago, maternal mortality was the rare reproductive justice issue that seemed to transcend partisan politics. In late 2018, Republicans and Democrats in Congress even came together to approve $60 million for state maternal mortality review committees (MMRCs) to study why so many American women die from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Donald Trump—not exactly famous for his respect toward pregnant women and new mothers in his personal life—signed the bill.

But some Republicans’ enthusiasm for these committees began to wane at around the same time abortion rights advocates began warning that draconian restrictions on reproductive care would only push the shamefully high US maternal mortality rate—the worst among affluent countries—even higher. Nor did conservatives, like Idaho lawmakers, appreciate the policy recommendations that came out of many MMRCs.

Texas, whose record on maternal mortality (and maternal health more broadly) has been an embarrassment since long before Dobbs, has a history of controversial attempts to play down potentially unwelcome findings from its MMRC. After the Dobbs decision, when the state committee was working on its report examining maternal deaths in 2019, Texas officials decided to slow-roll its release until mid-2023—too late for lawmakers to act on its recommendations. “When we bury data, we are dishonorably burying each and every woman that we lost,” one furious committee member told the Texas Tribune. Ultimately, officials released the report three months late, in December 2022. Soon afterward, the Legislature reconfigured the MMRC, increasing its size—but also ejected one of its most outspoken members.

Now Texas officials have stirred up the biggest furor yet, appointing a leading anti-abortion activist to the panel. Dr. Ingrid Skop, an OB-GYN who practiced in San Antonio for 25 years, will join the MMRC as a community member representing rural areas (even though she is from the seventh-largest city in the US). But she also represents a largely overlooked segment of the anti-abortion movement: researchers who seek to discredit the idea that abortion restrictions are putting women’s lives in danger. To the contrary, Skop and her allies argue that abortions are the real, hidden cause of many maternal deaths—and that abortion restrictions actually save mothers’ lives.

One of several doctors suing to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, the medication abortion drug at the center of one of this term’s blockbuster Supreme Court cases, Skop has been a familiar face on the anti-abortion expert-witness circuit for more than a decade. She has frequently testified in favor of strict abortion bans in court cases, state legislatures, and before Congress. In a high-profile case this winter, she submitted an affidavit stating that a Dallas woman named Kate Cox— who was seeking a judge’s permission to terminate a nonviable pregnancy—did not qualify for an abortion under Texas’s medical exception. The Texas Supreme Court rejected Cox’s petition, and to get medical care, the 31-year-old mother of two had to flee the state. Apparently, Skop’s hard-line stance against abortion-ban exemptions extends to children. At a 2021 congressional hearing, she testified that rape or incest victims as young as 9 or 10 could potentially carry pregnancies to term. “If she is developed enough to be menstruating and become pregnant, and reached sexual maturity,” Skop said, “she can safely give birth to a baby.”

Skop’s relatively new role as vice president and director of medical affairs for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, has solidified her standing in the anti-abortion firmament. Lozier, which has positioned itself as the anti-abortion alternative to the Guttmacher Institute, described Skop’s role as “coordinat[ing] the work of Lozier’s network of physicians and medical researchers who counter the abortion industry’s blizzard of misinformation with science and statistics for life.” Elsewhere on its website, Lozier notes that Skop’s “research on maternal mortality, abortion, and women’s health has been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals.”

What her Lozier bio doesn’t mention is that three of the studies Skop co-authored about the purported risks of abortion were retracted by their publisher this February. Attorneys representing Skop and her fellow anti-abortion doctors had cited the studies in the FDA-mifepristone case. As my colleague Madison Pauly reported, an independent review of the papers found “fundamental problems,” “incorrect factual assumptions,” “material errors,” “misleading presentations,” and undisclosed conflicts of interest between the studies’ authors (including Skop) and anti-abortion advocacy groups (including Lozier). In a rebuttal on its website, Lozier called the publisher’s move “meritless,” adding, “There is no legitimate reason for [the] retractions.”

Skop’s work on maternal mortality hasn’t received the same attention as those papers—yet. But her reflections on maternal deaths in the US have raised plenty of eyebrows.

Skop has argued repeatedly that abortions are directly and indirectly behind the rise in maternal mortality in the US. In a 53-page “Handbook of Maternal Mortality” she wrote for Lozier last year, she says that CDC maternal mortality data can’t be trusted in part because “there is much unreported maternal mortality and morbidity associated with legal, induced abortion, often obscured due to the political nature of the issue.” She claims that a history of abortions puts women at risk in pregnancy, childbirth, or during the postpartum period—whether from maternal complications she contends are linked to prior abortions, or from mental health problems, such as drug addiction and suicide, purportedly caused by abortion regret.

In another paper co-written with some of the same co-authors as in her retracted studies, Skop and her colleagues call for an overhaul of how states and the CDC collect maternal mortality data, urging the inclusion of “mandatory certification of all fetal losses,” including abortions.

And whereas the vast majority of public health experts predict that maternal deaths and near-deaths will increase in states with abortion bans, Skop takes the opposite view. In yet another Lozier paper, she lists 12 reasons why states with abortion bans will have fewer maternal deaths. For instance, she argues, because of abortion restrictions, women will have fewer later-term abortions, which tend to be more dangerous to women than first-trimester procedures. (In fact, researchers report, that state bans have led to an increase in second-trimester abortions.) She claims that since women who don’t have abortions won’t have mental health problems supposedly associated with pregnancy loss, their alleged risk of postpartum suicide would be reduced. (In fact, the idea that abortion regret is widespread and dangerous has been thoroughly debunked.) Skop makes a similar argument about abortion’s purported (and disproven) link to breast cancer, arguing that fewer abortions will mean fewer women dying of malignant tumors.

Much of Skop’s advocacy work has been done in collaboration with colleagues who share her strong ideological views. MMRCs, by contrast, have a public health role that is supposed to transcend politics—their focus is on analyzing the deaths of expectant and new mothers that occur within a year of the end of the pregnancy. Typically, committee members come from a wide range of professional backgrounds: In Texas, these include OB-GYNs, high-risk pregnancy specialists, nurses, mental health providers, public health researchers, and community advocates. Panels also aim to be racially and geographically diverse, the better to understand the communities—Black, Indigenous, rural, poor—where mothers are at disproportionate risk of dying. In a country that hasn’t prioritized maternal health, MMRCs are uniquely positioned to identify system failures and guide policy changes that can save lives.

Texas’s most recent maternal mortality report found that 90% of maternal deaths were preventable, racial disparities in maternal outcomes weren’t improving, and severe childbirth complications were up 23%—all before the state’s abortion bans took effect.

It remains to be seen how someone with Skop’s background and agenda will fit in with her new colleagues, especially at this dire moment for women in the state. Maternal health advocates aren’t optimistic: “This appointment speaks volumes about how seriously certain state leaders are taking the issue of maternal mortality,” Kamyon Conner, executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, told The Guardian. “It is another sign that the state is more interested in furthering their anti-abortion agenda than protecting the lives of pregnant Texans.”

Skop, contacted through Lozier, didn’t respond to a request for comment. In a statement to the Texas Tribune, Skop said she was joining the Texas MMRC because questions about maternal mortality data deserve “rigorous discourse.” “There are complex reasons for these statistics, including chronic illnesses, poverty, and difficulty obtaining prenatal care, and I have long been motivated to identify ways women’s care can be improved,” she said. “For over 30 years, I have advocated for both of my patients, a pregnant woman and her unborn child, and excellent medicine shouldn’t require I pit one against the other.”

Meanwhile, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists criticized Skop’s appointment, asserting that members of any maternal mortality review committee should be “unbiased, free of conflicts of interest and focused on the appropriate standards of care.”

“The importance of the work done by MMRCs to inform how we respond to the maternal mortality crisis cannot be overstated,” the group said in a statement. “It is crucial that MMRC members be clinical experts whose work is informed by data, not ideology and bias.”

[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

[transformationsproject]

 Read our newsletter for more information.

[rickmctumbleface]