View Full Version : The Assault on Womens Sexual and Reproductive Rights
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2013 saw a continuing erosion of access to abortion in a handful of states as conservative legislators pushed through some of the most stringent antiabortion laws in the nation’s four decades of legalized abortion.
We’re in the midst of a wave of attacks on abortion rights on the state level,” said Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager at the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that advocates for abortion rights. “This has reshaped the landscape in many states.”
Over the past three years, 203 restrictions on abortion have been enacted, with 68 in 2013 alone. This year, abortion opponents have focused efforts particularly on tightening regulations on clinic operations, banning abortions after 20 weeks post-conception, and a variety of steps designed to change women’s minds about getting an abortion.
The outlook for abortion rights advocates is not all bleak. Proponents were heartened by moves in two states: California, where legislators expanded abortion access, and New Mexico, where voters defeated a 20-week abortion ban.
Still, the conservative strategy of chipping away at abortion rights at the state level is likely to continue in 2014.
“There just hasn’t been that much movement in the ideological makeup of state legislatures,” Nash noted. “It’s the same cast of characters.”
The Worst
Texas: One of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws was adopted. It bars nearly all abortions 20 weeks post-conception, mandates clinics to meet the expensive standards of ambulatory surgery centers, requires doctors performing abortions to have formal admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic, and obligates doctors to use a particular drug protocol in medication-induced abortions. The law has caused nearly a third of Texas clinics to close. Opponents have appealed the provisions affecting doctors.
North Dakota: The state adopted the nation’s toughest abortion law yet, prohibiting abortion when a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can be as early as six weeks, as well as after 20 weeks, and on the basis of a genetic defect, such as Down syndrome. It also requires doctors who perform abortions to have hospital admitting privileges. The state has one abortion provider. Opponents believe they have a good chance of overturning the six-week ban.
Arkansas: The state outlawed abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy, a measure that has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge while legal challenges are under way. However, the state earlier in the year adopted a 20-week ban, which remains intact.
Kansas: Under a new law, an abortion provider's website home page must provide a link to a state Department of Health and Environment site on abortion and fetal development and contain a statement that the state's information is "objective" and "scientifically accurate." The law also requires doctors to provide patients with information about a fetus’ ability to feel pain, prohibits gender-selection abortion, blocks tax breaks for providers, and prohibits providers from furnishing instructors or materials for sex education classes in public schools. The law is being challenged.
Ohio: Under a new law, clinics must have an agreement with a local hospital to send patients there in an emergency, but public hospitals are barred from entering into those agreements, and a state political appointee must approve those agreements. The law also requires doctors to search for a fetal heartbeat and tell women if they find one and forces women to undergo an ultrasound of the fetus. Additionally, providers must inform women how fetuses develop and give them information on adoption and other family planning options. The law also diverts federal welfare money to “crisis pregnancy centers”; increases financing for rape-crisis centers if they do not provide abortion referrals; and tightens parental consent requirements for minors. To avoid passing along money to Planned Parenthood, the state ended competitive bids for federal family planning grants, instead giving priority to public agencies.
North Carolina: A new law requires abortion clinics to meet standards of outpatient surgical centers, and it prohibits abortions for gender selection and abortion coverage under any insurance plan offered under the federal Affordable Care Act or by cities and counties. Opponents say most of the state’s clinics cannot afford the $1 million it would cost to meet the higher standards and will have to close.
Indiana: The state adopted a law requiring clinics that dispense abortion-inducing medication to meet standards for outpatient surgical centers, even if they do not perform surgical abortions. A federal judge has temporarily blocked the law while a lawsuit proceeds.
The Good News
California: The Golden State stands out as one state that expanded abortion access. Physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and certified nurse midwives who undergo training are now allowed to perform first-trimester abortions.
New Mexico: Albuquerque voters defeated a ballot measure that sought to ban abortions after 20 weeks. The city referendum, the first attempt in the nation to restrict abortions on a municipal basis, only gained 45 percent voter approval.
http://news.yahoo.com/better-worse-american-abortion-laws-changed-ways-2013-164857151.html
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Sweet Bliss
01-05-2014, 11:07 AM
okay, who's not voting?
time to start a kitchen table revolution:cigar2:
silkepus
01-05-2014, 11:19 AM
This is kind of brilliant and provoking at the same time. A man who wants to ban abortion is asked why a woman would want to have one.
xBKieGz5QiM
In case you cant see the video, his answer is "I dont know, I'm not a woman. It's a question I never even though about"
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This is kind of brilliant and provoking at the same time. A man who wants to ban abortion is asked why a woman would want to have one.
xBKieGz5QiM
In case you cant see the video, his answer is "I dont know, I'm not a woman. It's a question I never even thought about"
):-|
Silk, are you actually proposing that legislators actually think something thru before they act on it? That would clog up the entire system.
Seriously tho, the greatest mistake both men and women are making here, is that they are presuming this war on women is about abortion and religion and the Bible.
Those are merely excuses for what this war on women is all about. Sandra Day O'Connor says it better than I ever could:
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This war on women is about male control, power, and dominance. It is about female enslavement, submission, and acquiescence.
One day, hopefully not in my lifetime, women will be scratching their heads, wondering how they became enslaved again.
This is how.
If you don't think misogyny and sexism is dangerous, or even exists, or isn't an integral part of the socialization of both males and females, there will be a rude awakening in your future.
silkepus
01-06-2014, 08:43 AM
Silk, are you actually proposing that legislators actually think something thru before they act on it? That would clog up the entire system.
That would indeed be crazycakes.
I saw someone describe conservative’s view of unwanted pregnancies (or forced pregnancies) as sending women to their room for nine months for having been a naughty girl.
You’re absolutely right, banning abortion has little to do with saving babies and everything to do with controlling women. If people who are anti-choice really cared about reducing abortion numbers they would work hard to make contraception cheap and easily available. They would fight for sexual education that taught young people how to have safe sex. They would make plan B easily available too.
But instead it is the same people who want to ban abortion who often want to ban contraception (or make it hard to obtain and thus in reality banning it for a lot of women), who want to have abstinence only sex education who say plan B and abortion is the same etc.
It really does feel like were going backwards sometimes. I don’t think women should be too comfortable with the rights we have gained. History is full of examples of oppressed groups who gained rights only to lose them again.
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That would indeed be crazycakes.
I saw someone describe conservative’s view of unwanted pregnancies (or forced pregnancies) as sending women to their room for nine months for having been a naughty girl.
Funny how the woman is a naughty girl but the sperm donor gets a 2 thumbs up eh?
You’re absolutely right, banning abortion has little to do with saving babies and everything to do with controlling women. If people who are anti-choice really cared about reducing abortion numbers they would work hard to make contraception cheap and easily available. They would fight for sexual education that taught young people how to have safe sex. They would make plan B easily available too.
Very true. The same people who are fighting against abortion are simultaneously fighting against the Obama administrations mandate for birth control to be part of health plans.
But instead it is the same people who want to ban abortion who often want to ban contraception (or make it hard to obtain and thus in reality banning it for a lot of women), who want to have abstinence only sex education who say plan B and abortion is the same etc.
Abstinence for females, not males. Females right to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies is being frowned upon. Males "right" to impregnate them - with or without their consent is still seen as a manly thing.
It really does feel like were going backwards sometimes. I don’t think women should be too comfortable with the rights we have gained. History is full of examples of oppressed groups who gained rights only to lose them again.
We are going backwards.....by design. Women won some of the battles but we lost track of the war. In addition, we have lost track of the insidious nature of sexism and misogyny and in doing so are, unwittingly, being complicit in our own victimization.
It is a prime example of the Stockholm syndrome on a nationwide/worldwide basis.
Stockholm syndrome, or capture–bonding, is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness.
Stockholm syndrome can be seen as a form of traumatic bonding, which does not necessarily require a hostage scenario, but which describes “strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.
One commonly used hypothesis to explain the effect of Stockholm syndrome is based on Freudian theory. It suggests that the bonding is the individual’s response to trauma in becoming a victim. Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself. When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, they cease to be a threat.
U.S. District Court judge ruled on Friday that a North Carolina state law requiring women to undergo ultrasound treatments before having an abortion is unconstitutional, the Carolina Mercury reported.
Judge Catherine C. Eagles wrote in her ruling that the law, approved by the state General Assembly in 2011, “is an effort by the state to require health care providers to deliver information in support of the state’s philosophic and social position discouraging abortion and encouraging childbirth, it is content-based, and it is not sufficiently narrowly tailored to survive strict scrutiny.”
Eagles had already blocked the law from taking effect in October 2011 while waiting to hear arguments concerning its effects.
Supporters argued that its requirements that doctors deliver detailed descriptions of the ultrasound and ask patients if they would like to hear the fetus’ heartbeat was an effort to spare the patients from the emotional aftereffects of having an abortion. However, a February 2012 study showed that ultrasounds often do not influence a woman’s decision to do so.
The law was challenged in court by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), as well as its North Carolina state chapter, the Center for Reproductive Rights (CPR), and Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Nancy Northrup, the CPR’s president and CEO, celebrated the verdict in a statement Friday evening.
“Today’s decision represents a robust affirmation of the First Amendment rights of physicians, making clear that politicians cannot use physicians as mouthpieces for their political agenda and interfere with patients’ personal decision making,” Northrup said. “Politicians don’t know better than doctors how to practice medicine, and they don’t know better than women how to navigate the often complicated personal circumstances surrounding a pregnancy.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/17/federal-court-strikes-down-north-carolina-ultrasound-abortion-requirement/
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WASHINGTON — When the Republican National Committee gathers for its winter meeting here on Wednesday, the action will start a few hours late to accommodate anyone who wants to stop first at the March for Life, the annual anti-abortion demonstration on the National Mall. And if they need a lift to the meeting afterward, they can hop on a free shuttle, courtesy of the Republican Party.
“We thought it only fitting for our members to attend the march,” said Reince Priebus, the party chairman.
Abortion is becoming an unexpectedly animating issue in the 2014 midterm elections. Republicans, through state ballot initiatives and legislation in Congress, are using it to stoke enthusiasm among core supporters. Democrats, mindful of how potent the subject has been in recent campaigns like last year’s governor’s race in Virginia, are looking to rally female voters by portraying their conservative opponents as callous on women’s issues.
“Republicans have turned the floor of the House into the battleground for their relentless war on women’s health care and freedoms,” said Representative Steve Israel of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Every time they launch another extreme attack against women’s rights, they lose more ground with women voters.”
Aware that their candidates at times have struck the wrong tone on issues of women’s health, Republicans in some states are now framing abortion in an economic context, arguing, for example, that the new federal health law uses public money to subsidize abortion coverage. In the House in the coming weeks, Republicans will make passing the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” one of their top priorities this year.
Democrats say their success this year will depend on how close they can come, given lower turnout, to President Obama’s overwhelming margins with female voters; in 2008, he enjoyed a 14-point advantage among women, and in 2012, it was 12 points.
The fraught politics of women’s health care are already surfacing, as restrictions on abortion are appearing on state ballots and becoming the focus of debate in congressional races — many in places like North Carolina and Colorado that could hold the key to whether Republicans can sweep Democrats from power in the Senate and maintain their grip on the House.
“I don’t think this is a niche issue anymore,” said Drew Lieberman, a vice president at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a political consultancy concern, who has advised Democratic congressional candidates and has done polling for Naral Pro-Choice America.
In North Carolina, Senator Kay Hagan, a Democrat in a difficult re-election fight, and her allies plan to make an issue of the new restrictions on abortion approved by the Republican-led state legislature.
In Colorado, where Senator Mark Udall, a Democrat, says anger over the Affordable Care Act could hurt his chances, social conservatives have succeeded in placing a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would enshrine legal protections for fetuses. Even if it fails, similar “personhood” measures in Colorado and elsewhere have given Republican turnout a boost in years past.
In Oregon, Senator Jeff Merkley could face a similar situation if supporters of an initiative there succeed in getting an anti-abortion measure with a fiscally conservative twist on the ballot: the measure seeks to outlaw the use of state funds to pay for any abortion unless the mother is in grave medical danger.
“We don’t make this a pro-life thing,” said Jeff Jimerson, who is organizing the petition drive. “This is a pro-taxpayer thing. There are a lot of libertarians in Oregon, people who don’t really care what you do, just don’t make me pay for it.”
Coupling the issue of abortion with a subject important to Republicans’ Tea Party followers — government spending — is one way the party is recalibrating its election-year message. Republicans say that by framing the abortion debate in terms of fiscal conservatism, they can make a connection to the issue they believe will ultimately decide who controls Congress next year — the Affordable Care Act.
“For a lot of members politically it ties into the issue they want to be talking about this election, which is Obamacare,” said Tom McClusky, vice president for government affairs for the March for Life.
Republican presidential candidates have almost universally opposed abortion rights. When Arlen Specter, then a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, ran for president in 1995 and declared he wanted to “take abortion out of politics,” the right balked, and his candidacy was short-lived. But Republicans do see a danger in talking about it the wrong way.
“It’s a matter of tone as well as substance,” said Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, who noted how Republicans hurt themselves in 2012 by picking congressional candidates like Representative Todd Akin of Missouri, whose infamous “legitimate rape” comments cost him his Senate candidacy and put his entire party on the defensive over women’s issues.
What do they want us to talk about?” Mr. Reed said. “Rape and incest. What should the pro-life candidate talk about? Late-term abortions, sex-selection and Kermit Gosnell.” Dr. Gosnell was convicted in Philadelphia last year of murdering babies after failed abortions.
Mr. Priebus, the Republican chairman, will attend the March for Life this week, rare for a party leader. So will Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader. In years past, Republican presidents have addressed the march by phone or video message to avoid speaking in person.
Nowhere was the power of the abortion issue more evident recently than in the governor’s race in Virginia, where the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, won in November in part because women preferred him by nine percentage points over the Republican, Ken Cuccinelli, whom Democrats portrayed as extreme on women’s issues.
Nearly one-third — about $4.6 million — of the $16.4 million that Democrats and their allies spent on broadcast television advertising in Virginia last year dealt with abortion or birth control, according to an analysis by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political advertising.
Abortion rights groups have built targeting models that allow them to predict an individual voter’s position on women’s health issues. These models, along with similar ones built by the Obama campaign, were factors not just in Virginia last year but also in Democratic electoral victories in 2012.
One state that Naral and Planned Parenthood Action Fund are studying is North Carolina, where they see parallels to Virginia. Demographic changes there are giving Democrats hope that it could swing back into their column.
One of the leading contenders to be Ms. Hagan’s opponent in November is Thom Tillis, the speaker of the State House, who voted for the tough restrictions on abortion. Democrats believe that would set them up to make the same kinds of sharp attacks that helped them prevail over Mr. Cuccinelli in November and over Mitt Romney in 2012.
While Democrats say such measures seeking to restrict abortions could stir votes, they acknowledge the limits of midterm turnout. “Off-year elections are difficult,” said Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “You have lower turnout, and a lot of drop-off voters are women. So in a lot of ways, making sure women are aware and voting is important.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/us/politics/parties-seize-on-abortion-issues-in-midterm-race.html?_r=1
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Kentucky state Rep. Joe Fischer (R-Fort Thomas) has added an amendment banning abortions at 20 weeks to a domestic violence bill, saying that “the most brutal form of domestic violence is the violence against unborn children.”
The bill, HB 8, would expand domestic violence protections and is strongly supported by Kentucky house Democrats. Under current Kentucky law, only couples who are currently married or living together can get protective orders against an abusive partner. The new bill would ensure that victims in an abusive dating relationship who do not live with their partner still have access to domestic violence protections in the courts.
Fischer’s amendment—like a similar bill that was just introduced into the Kentucky senate, and like 20-week abortion bans across the country—relies on debunked science to claim that fetuses feel pain at 20 weeks.
“This tactic is really sad,” Derek Selznick, Reproductive Freedom Project director at the ACLU of Kentucky, told RH Reality Check. “It’s pushing a political agenda and ignores the daily realities that thousands of Kentucky women and men face trying to get protective orders from the court system.”
House Speaker Greg Stumbo (D-Prestonsburg) said he will likely rule that Fischer’s amendments are not germane to the original legislation and can thus be ignored.
For the past decade, as John Cheves of the Lexington Herald-Leader reports, the Democratic chair of the Kentucky House Health and Welfare Committee has kept new anti-choice legislation from reaching the floor. But if Republicans were to regain control of the house in November, Kentucky women could be vulnerable to new abortion restrictions as severe and numerous as those in Texas.
“Every year we come within a hair’s breadth of awful stuff,” Selznick said. “I never feel good until [anti-choice bills] actually die.”
Kentucky’s legislature is considering at least seven other anti-choice bills this year. Many are routinely introduced every session only to die in committee, such as forced ultrasound bills or requirements that “informed consent” be given in person rather than over the phone. One such informed consent bill passed out of a senate committee on Friday.
In addition to his 20-week ban amendment, Rep. Fischer has sponsored another informed consent bill, a bill regulating abortions after a fetal heartbeat has been detected, and a bill that would forbid minors from out of state from using Kentucky’s judicial bypass system if they need a court order to get around parental consent laws. Another house bill, sponsored by Rep. Stan Lee (R-Fayette), would prohibit the use of telemedicine abortions.
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2014/01/20/kentucky-lawmaker-attempts-define-abortion-domestic-violence/
Republicans must fight the phony "war on women" tag that Democrats have slapped on them — a charge that is "incredibly demeaning" to U.S. women, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee says.
"Every woman I know who has an IQ above broccoli tells you that it's an insult to them that the Democrats play them to be incapable of anything other than helpless and hopeless victims of their own gender, who are just sitting around wringing their hands hoping that Uncle Sugar will provide for them free birth control and a free abortion because it's the only thing in life that they really care about," Huckabee told "The Steve Malzberg Show" On Newsmax TV.
"That is incredibly demeaning," he said Monday.
"It's extraordinarily outrageous to assume that women, who are capable of running everything from major corporations in this country to running a household, that they're somehow incapable of controlling their own libido and their reproductive system to the point that if the government doesn't step in with $9 a month worth of birth control, they're going to completely fall apart," Huckabee said.
In recent years, Democrats have tagged the GOP as waging a "war on women" for its efforts to regulate abortion and because of a series of insensitive remarks by Republican lawmakers.
The most infamous example was that of former Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri, who said that abortion in cases of rape was unnecessary because "if it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."
Huckabee said he can't believe the GOP hasn't fought back against the Democrats' "ridiculous" tag — but he has a theory.
"Why Republicans haven't taken that on is beyond me except for this: you have to believe something in your heart before it can come out of your mouth with much effectiveness, and a lot of times, some of our Republican leaders, they're not too sure what they believe in their hearts, and therefore they find it more difficult to articulate," he said.
"But anybody who . . . thinks about it rationally and logically would say that on its face the Democrats [who are] creating this phony 'war on women' ought to be pushed back and the Republicans ought to be talking about . . . [women being] accepted as equals, for them to be respected as people who are not victims of gender but capable of anything that a man is capable of. That's what we ought to be talking about."
http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/mike-huckabee-women-republicans-abortion/2014/01/20/id/548004
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Sometimes words fail me.
Roe v. Wade
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Supreme Court of the United States
Argued December 13, 1971
Reargued October 11, 1972
Decided January 22, 1973
Happy_Go_Lucky
01-22-2014, 07:33 AM
WASHINGTON -- Va. Gov. Bob McDonnell signed a controversial mandatory ultrasound bill into law Wednesday afternoon, making Virginia the seventh state to require women to have an ultrasound procedure before they can legally have an abortion.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/07/bob-mcdonnell-virginia-mandatory-ultrasound-bill_n_1327707.html
NOW:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/the-ugly-sordid-damning-details-in-the-bob-mcdonnell-indictment/article/2542643
News reports give readers the basic outline of the prosecution, but one has to read the indictment itself -- it's just 43 pages -- to grasp the full extent of the McDonnells' alleged corruption. The gist of the case is that the governor and his wife, in debt and constantly worried about money, cultivated a "friendship" with Virginia pharmaceutical entrepreneur Jonnie Williams and almost immediately began asking him for money and gifts, at the same time holding out hope that the governor would help Williams' company, Star Scientific, win clinical trials for its main product, an anti-inflammatory diet supplement that Williams believed had the potential to treat all sorts of ailments.
One down, how many more to go?
Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) told conservative activists on Wednesday that women should be forced to carry their babies to term because abortion “robs men” of their right to be fathers.
Speaking at the 41st annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., Hartzler opined that “abortion hurts everyone.”
“It ends a beating heart, it leaves emotional wounds with women that they carry for life and it robs men of the privilege of fatherhood,” she said. “That’s why we must do everything in our power to end this devastating practice.”
Hartzler asserted that if abortion hadn’t been legalized, “perhaps we would have had a cure for cancer now.”
“Let us not become weary in doing good,” she advised the crowd. “For at the proper time, we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”
“We will continue to do all that we can here on Capitol Hill to ensure Americans born and yet to be born enjoy the most basic right to life.”
As Right Wing Watch pointed out, anti-LGBT activist Scott Lively used similar rhetoric, saying that abortion “robs” men just earlier this week.
Link to speech (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/22/gop-rep-force-women-to-have-babies-because-abortion-robs-men-of-fatherhood-rights/)
*****Trigger Warning****
The Associated Press
January 25, 2014
FORT WORTH, Texas — For two months, Erick Munoz has sat inside a North Texas hospital room with his wife's brain-dead body, with what would be their second child together growing inside her.
Now a judge has ruled that the hospital must follow Munoz's wishes and disconnect Marlise Munoz from life support that it's refused to remove in hopes of saving the fetus inside her.
The judge's ruling Friday could give Erick Munoz a long-awaited chance to bury his wife and move forward to care for their son and his relatives. It would also mean the fetus would never be born.
Judge R. H. Wallace Jr. gave John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth until 5 p.m. CST Monday to remove life support. The hospital did not immediately say Friday whether it would appeal.
Both the hospital and the family agree that Marlise Munoz meets the criteria to be considered brain-dead — which means she is dead both medically and under Texas law — and that the fetus could not be born alive this early in pregnancy. But while the hospital says it has a legal duty to protect the fetus, Munoz contends his wife would not have wanted to be kept in this condition. And his attorneys have said medical records show the fetus is "distinctly abnormal."
The case has raised questions about end-of-life care and whether a pregnant woman who is considered legally
and medically dead should be kept on life support for the sake of a fetus. It also has gripped attention on both sides of the abortion debate, with anti-abortion groups arguing Munoz's fetus deserves a chance to be born. Several anti-abortion advocates attended Friday's hearing.
Hospital officials have said they were bound by the Texas Advance Directives Act, which prohibits withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from a pregnant patient. But in his brief ruling, Wallace said that "Mrs. Munoz is dead," meaning that the hospital was misapplying the law. The ruling did not mention the fetus.
Marlise Munoz was 14 weeks pregnant when Erick found her unconscious Nov. 26, possibly due to a blood clot. The hospital has not pronounced her dead and has continued to treat her over the objections of both Erick Munoz and her parents, who sat together in court Friday.
Larry Thompson, a state's attorney representing the public hospital, told the judge Friday that the hospital recognized the Munoz family's pain and rights, but said it had a greater legal responsibility to protect the fetus.
"There is a life involved, and the life is the unborn child," Thompson said.
As Wallace gave his ruling, Erick Munoz embraced his wife's parents and one of his attorneys. Munoz declined to comment as he left court Friday. But he told The Associated Press earlier this month, in a phone interview sitting in the hospital room, that he and his wife were both paramedics who knew they didn't want to stay on life support this way.
Munoz described in a signed affidavit filed Thursday what it was like to see her now: her glassy, "soulless" eyes; and the smell of her perfume replaced by what he knows to be the smell of death. He said he's tried to hold her hand but can't.
"Her limbs have become so stiff and rigid due to her deteriorating condition that now, when I move her hands, her bones crack, and her legs are nothing more than dead weight," Munoz said.
Jessica Hall Janicek and Heather King, Erick Munoz's attorneys, accused the hospital of conducting a "science experiment" and warned of the dangerous precedent her case could set, raising the specter of special ICUs for brain-dead women carrying babies.
"There is an infant, and a dead person serving as a dysfunctional incubator," King told the judge.
King and Janicek did not say what they would do next, pending a potential appeal by the hospital.
The hospital said in a statement that it "appreciates the potential impact of the consequences of the order on all parties involved" and was deciding whether to appeal.
The hospital argued in a court filing Thursday that there was little evidence of what state lawmakers and courts thought of this issue, but recent laws passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature to restrict abortion made it clear that they wanted to preserve a fetus' rights.
The Advance Directives Act "must convey legislative intent to protect the unborn child," the hospital said in its filing. "Otherwise the Legislature would have simply allowed a pregnant patient to decide to let her life, and the life of her unborn child, end."
Not much is known about fetal survival when mothers suffer brain death during pregnancy. German doctors who searched for such cases found 30 of them in nearly 30 years, according to an article published in the journal BMC Medicine in 2010.
Those mothers were further along in pregnancy — 22 weeks on average — when brain death occurred than in the Texas case. Birth results were available for 19 cases. In 12, a viable child was born. Follow-up results were available for six, all of whom developed normally.
Is the anti-choice movement giving up the pretense that it has no interest in policing women’s sexuality and only opposes abortion rights because of fetal life? While the rote use of the word “life” as a code word to describe a series of anti-woman and anti-sex beliefs is probably going nowhere, there does seem to be a bit more willingness among anti-choicers lately to admit that what really offends them is that women are having sex without their permission.
A report examining the demographics of women who have abortions, using self-reported numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics, was recently presented at a Family Research Council conference. Their conclusion? “OMG sluts!”
The researchers—a term that needs to be used somewhat loosely, due to the extensive statistical distortion employed in this paper—were incredibly intent on portraying abortion as a product of sexually loose women on the prowl. They mostly succeed in portraying themselves as remarkably prudish and out of step with mainstream realities. “Almost 90 percent of reported abortions are procured by women who have had three or more (male) sexual partners,” the researchers write, clearly expecting the audience to reel in terror at the idea that a woman might not marry the first boy she kisses. Which means that most women having abortions are … average. Women generally report having had about four male sexual partners, but social scientists are inclined to think the number is probably higher than that, because men report having a much higher average number of partners, and that discrepancy is mathematically impossible. Indeed, one study showed that by telling women that they’re hooked up to a lie detector, the number of sex partners they will cop to goes up. Slut-shaming, such as the kind produced by this report, causes women to round down.
“The fraction of women reporting abortions is far larger among women with multiple sexual partners than among monogamous women,” the study authors write. It’s a classic example of how this paper, which is supposed to be a study, is actually full of misrepresentations and dishonest number-massaging. After all, “monogamous” and “has had multiple partners” are not mutually exclusive groups. No doubt the study authors mean “has only had one partner ever” as their definition of monogamous, a strange and sloppy definition that would mean that a woman who lost her virginity during a one-night stand yesterday is more “monogamous” that a woman whose second marriage has lasted 30 years.
“Eighty-three percent of women who report having an abortion have cohabited at some time,” they write, clearly expecting the audience to find cohabitation to be a shockingly risqué behavior. Again, this makes women who have abortions average. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “[M]ost young couples live together first before entering marriage.” By the time they turn 30, three-quarters of women have cohabitated.
t’s almost comical how out-of-touch the authors are with their ready assumption that extremely normal and even boring sexual behavior is scandalous. But, more importantly, this report is indicative of a willingness on the part of anti-choice activists to be open about their hostility to female sexuality, an openness that was, just a few years ago, angrily denied.
Don’t get me wrong; some people are still devoted to the notion that the anti-choice movement has nothing to do with sex or gender. Recently, in Slate, Will Saletan insisted that being “pro-life” had nothing to do with negative attitudes about female sexuality, because the majority of people who tell a pollster that they’re “pro-life” also support legal contraception. What he neglected to mention is that the majority of people who say they’re “pro-life” also support legal abortion, suggesting that the label “pro-life” is a meaningless term that people just adopt because it sounds good.
To know what the actual anti-choice movement is about, you need to look at what its members do, not what some random people say about how they label themselves. And, increasingly, anti-choice activists are free about their larger objections to women being able to choose non-procreative sex. Indeed, when I first started writing on the topic of reproductive health care, even the slightest intimation that anti-choicers have a problem with female sexuality was enough to cause conservatives to cry foul and howl about how they don’t care what you do in bed, it’s about “life,” and blah blah blah.
Now we have Mike Huckabee shamelessly ascribing the desire to have insurance cover birth control—something that it has always done, by the way—to women’s inability to “control our libido.” Now anti-contraception protesters are a major part of the March for Life, making it undeniable that “life” is just a code word for efforts to punish and control women by taking away their ability to manage their ertility. Far from denying the anti-sex motivations of their movement, anti-choicers are beginning to own it loudly and proudly.
Why now? Probably because they think they’re winning. The massive shutdown of abortion clinics across the country because of medically unnecessary red tape is a major victory. A big win like that will make anyone cocky, so they’re less afraid of losing ground by admitting that the real agenda is to attack women’s sexuality. But it’s also because the attacks on abortion rights have been so successful that the only way to build on them is to go after contraception. Unlike with abortion, however, attacks on contraception pretty much have to be framed in terms of restricting women’s sexual choices.
Sure, a lot of anti-choicers are still cautious and are looking for ways to attack contraception without coming right out and saying it’s about sex. “Religious freedom” is one gambit being toss around a lot. But honestly, the sense you get lately is that conservatives generally have decided to stop pretending and just come out with it. Rush Limbaugh’s throwing caution to the wind and using Sandra Fluke’s congressional testimony to characterize women who use contraception as sluts was clearly taken as a battle cry to stop self-censoring by the right. And, frankly, it doesn’t seem to have hurt them very much. The attacks on abortion and contraception seem to be getting more, not less, successful in the wake of conservatives gradually admitting that the anti-choice philosophy was about sex all along.
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2014/01/27/anti-choicers-drop-life-pretense-increasingly-admit-theyre-angry-sex/?utm_content=buffered0fb&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
H.R.7 would do the following:
Revive the failed Stupak-Pitts amendment to the ACA, effectively banning abortion coverage in the new health system, even for women in state insurance exchanges who use their own, private funds to pay for their insurance. Experts have stated this could also jeopardize the availability of private insurance coverage of abortion for all women in all private health plans nationwide.
Impose tax penalties on small businesses that choose private health plans that cover abortion care, with the goal of driving consumers away from these plans. (Absent political interference, 87 percent of private plans cover abortion services.)
Permanently block abortion coverage for low-income women, civil servants, D.C. residents, and military women by recodifying anti-choice riders that reside elsewhere throughout federal law. Congress should be repealing these unfair and discriminatory abortion bans, not recodifying them.
The brand-new version of H.R.7, unveiled after committee mark-up last week, also adds these two new provisions:
Bans coverage of abortion services for women insured by multi-state health plans under the ACA—private health-insurance plans which offer consumers a uniform array of health benefits in every state in which they operate.
Mandates health plans to make biased, one-sided “disclosures” of abortion coverage and force plans to mislead consumers about the health-care law’s treatment of abortion coverage.
http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/media/press-releases/2014/pr01282014_hr7_vote.html
In Texas, hospital officials refused for over two months to remove 33-year-old Marlise Muñoz, who was declared brain dead, from life support because of her pregnancy. A court ruling on Friday ordered John Peter Smith Hospital to take Munoz off life support in accordance with the family’s wishes, and her body was disconnected from machines on Sunday, Jan. 26.
The tragedy of Muñoz’s case is that it fits a terrible pattern of state interventions in women’s pregnancies.
In July 2013, Alicia Beltran was arrested, shackled and confined by court order to a drug treatment center for 78 days after she refused a doctor’s orders to take an opiate blocker. Beltran had confided to medical staff at a prenatal checkup that she had battled addiction to opiates in the past, but claimed she had overcome drug dependency and had recently taken a single Vicodin tablet before becoming aware of her pregnancy.
Christine Taylor was arrested in 2010 for falling down a set of stairs in her Iowa home. Hospital staff reported Taylor to police after interpreting the fall to fit within the state statute criminalizing attempted feticide.
Melissa Rowland’s reluctance to submit to an immediate cesarean section prompted medical personnel in Utah to request her arrest. She was subsequently charged with murder for the stillbirth of one of her fetuses.
In Florida, a state court authorized Samantha Burton’s involuntary confinement because she refused bedrest against her physician’s recommendation. Several days after her hospital incarceration, she suffered a miscarriage.
As these examples illustrate, nurses and doctors in these cases often act as interpreters of state law, although most lack any legal training. Increasingly, state statutes are the primary means by which legal norms affecting low-income pregnant women’s autonomy, privacy and liberty are introduced and shaped. Arrests, forced bedrest, compelled cesarean operations, and civil incarcerations imposed against pregnant women in Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Utah, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Alabama, and Texas scratch the surface of a broad attack on the reproductive liberty of pregnant women.
A range of laws, including feticide statutes enacted in 38 states, personhood legislation designating the unborn as persons for purposes of criminal prosecutions, fetal endangerment regulations, and laws that require pregnant women to be kept on life support for fetal benefit place pregnant women in opposition not only to their fetuses, but also to their doctors.
These laws fit a pattern of politically motivated legislation that misuses pregnant women’s medical crises as opportunities to legislate about reproduction. This type of legislation conflicts with pregnant women’s fundamental constitutional interests, including autonomy, liberty and privacy. State legislation forcing a pregnant woman to carry a fetus to term directly conflicts with the constitutional precedent established in Roe v. Wade and interferes with a fundamental constitutional principle that guarantees each individual liberty.
More frequently, hospitals and doctors are called upon to serve as interpreters of state law, as in Muñoz’s case, where hospital officials believed they were required to keep the pregnant woman on life support throughout the remainder of her pregnancy or until the fetus could function on its own, which would have been several months. Instead of preparing to remove Muñoz from life support as requested by her husband and her parents, hospital officials refused, citing a Texas law that prohibits healthcare providers from ending life support to pregnant patients.
Texas is one of more than two dozen states prohibiting removing life support from a pregnant woman. The Texas law is among the strictest in the nation. Other states, including Texas, Kentucky, South Carolina, Utah, and Wisconsin, “automatically invalidate a woman’s advance directive if she is pregnant.” A study published by the Center for Women Policy Studies explains that these laws “are the most restrictive of pregnancy exclusion” legislation, because regardless of fetal viability or the length of pregnancy, the laws require that a pregnant woman must “remain on life sustaining treatment until she gives birth.”
Muñoz’s case is not unfamiliar to legal scholars. Years before, Angela Carder, a pregnant cancer patient in Washington, DC was refused chemotherapy due to her pregnancy. Doctors in that case sought a court order to deny the urgently needed medical treatment, because Carder was pregnant and physicians feared the death of the fetus. In that case, a federal judge permitted doctors to perform a forced cesarean delivery. The fetus died two hours later, and Carder died two days later.
District Court Judge R. H. Wallace Jr.’s order to pronounce Marlise Muñoz dead is a symbolic victory for her family. As long as fetal protection laws exist, medical personnel will inevitably make mistakes causing pregnant women and their families significant pain and anxiety.
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/scary-trend-across-america-attacks-pregnant-womens-rights-rise
*****warning - graphic descriptions of violence*********
The GOP’s war on the most intimate aspects of women’s lives is undoubtedly real, but it is not being applied without discrimination.
Let’s be clear—the primary targets of the right wing’s rhetorical and legislative attacks are, and have always been, white women. The war on white women is really a push for more white babies. And, that push goes hand in hand with amped-up racial profiling, vigilante policing, mass incarceration, school closures, hoarding of resources from communities of color, and blatant disregard for violence directed at African Americans and their children, including the unborn.
More white people are dying than are being born, a trend that is projected to continue. Meanwhile, the birth rates for people of color remain stable or high, primarily for Latinos. The trick for the modern American situation is to prevent people from seeing that the war for more white babies and the war against people of color are related. But the two phenomena are inseparable.
What we are witnessing is not new, but rather a familiar pattern of desperate efforts to preserve white domination through strength in numbers. It is an historic fact that when radical demographic shifts take place in the United States they are accompanied by white supremacist fears of being outbred and crowded out by immigrants and people of color, and losing majority rule.
And so here we are again. America is undergoing yet another periodic age of white fear and cradle competition. As the white population marches toward a less than majority status, the constant fear of biological extinction has infected our political discourse, policy decisions, and everyday racial interactions, whether in the comments sections of news sites or in the streets.
For those who remain skeptical about the association between fears of white race suicide and emphasis upon women’s reproductive roles, consider the words of famous and respected persons such as Teddy Roosevelt, a champion of race purity who with little embarrassment called black Americans “a perfectly stupid race that can never rise.”
Responding to the falling white birth rate, in his 1906 state of the union address Roosevelt blasted elite native-born white women for shirking their national civic duty to be mothers of the nation by engaging in “willful sterility—the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race suicide.” In his eyes, a white woman who avoided having babies was a “criminal against the race” and “the object of contemptuous abhorrence by healthy people.”
Later, in a 1913 letter to the prominent eugenicist Charles B. Davenport he wrote: “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.... Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizens of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.”
Roosevelt’s declarations came at a time when more women were pursuing education, seeking careers, voting rights, greater voice in public life, and control over their own fertility. All of these factors supposedly made women physically unfit to be good wives and mothers. Doctors of the era argued that the pursuit of higher education, participation in sports and professional life diverted too much blood to women’s brains from their reproductive organs.
Meanwhile, all this discourse was attendant by race riots, lynchings, unpunished rapes of black girls and women by white men, and other forms of genocidal violence. In 1918, in Valdosta, Georgia, an angry white mob hung an 8-months pregnant Mary Turner upside down by her ankles, doused her with gasoline and set her on fire. While still alive, a man in the mob split her swollen abdomen with a hog knife, and stomped the fetus to death before the rest of the mob riddled Turner’s body with bullets. That same year a mob of whites hung Maggie and Alma Howze from a bridge near Shutaba, Mississippi. Both had been raped by the same white man and were pregnant with his children at the time of their lynching.
Consider also Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood who believed that eugenics and birth control could prevent “biological and racial mistakes.” This contradictory historical figure saw no problem with seeking funding and support from the Ku Klux Klan. The eugenics movement was about encouraging the “fittest” to reproduce and directed toward eliminating undesirables. While thousands of black females, white “degenerates” and “ morons” were legally sterilized in the early 20th century, smut suppressors like Anthony Comstock led successful campaigns to make it illegal to send birth control literature through the mail.
Flash forward to the Obama era.
Since 2011, state legislatures across the country have introduced hundreds of provisions from “heartbeat bills” and fetal pain laws, to encouraging violence against abortion doctors and reducing women’s access to birth control and abortion services. Some right-wing politicians have even sought to redefine rape in a way that would force female victims to carry the fetus to term. Their twisted rationale is that an unborn child should not have to die because of a rapists’ crime.
Last April, Kansas Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signed a bill that bans sex-selection abortions, blocks federal tax breaks for abortion providers, forbids them from giving educational talks to students, and declares that life begins “at fertilization.”
What will we witness next—a new bill introduced, in a majority-white state of course, declaring that life begins when a man gets an erection? Will Republicans start citing Genesis 38:9 to criminalize men for masturbating and “spilling their seeds” to prevent conception? Okay, I’m being facetious here. But in fact, almost nothing is directed against controlling the sexual behaviors of men, including rapists, unless of course you are a black man accused of some sexual indiscretion with a white woman. But generally, the burden of sexual morality is placed on women.
Perhaps the worse political gaffe came from Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock, who said he opposed aborting pregnancies conceived in rape because “it is something that God intended to happen.” Are these politicians and their supporters so desperate to boost the population of white babies that they’ll even take those conceived through rape?
While Republicans and Democrats debate the war on women, they have remained conspicuously silent about the intensifying war on black adults and children. If you want a demonstration of the devaluing of black children even as white women of our time are forcibly pushed towards procreation, just do a quick Google search of police assaults against pregnant black women and you’ll see what I mean. There are news stories and graphic videos of visibly pregnant women being cursed at, punched, tasered, kicked, and body slammed to the ground by white police officers.
Though most of the babies were born uninjured, 17-year-old Kwamesha Sharp wasn’t so lucky. In June 2012, Sharp lost her unborn child when a Harvey, Illinois police officer slammed her to the ground and kept his knee pressed down on her abdomen for an extended period of time. According to court documents the arresting officer, Richard M. Jones, said he didn’t care that Sharp was pregnant. In a few of the other cases, the women were arrested and charged, and the officers’ superiors backed their actions.
A new video recently surfaced on social media showing a young black mom, who may have been drugged and raped, being strapped down to a chair inside a Warren, Michigan police station, where one officer kicked her and another chopped her hair off with a pair of scissors.
In addition to physical attacks, black mothers have been fined and jailed for “stealing” education for their children by enrolling them in safer suburban schools. Black parents have had to bury their children. Their names have made headlines: Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Kimani Gray, Darius Simmons, Jordan Davis, Renisha
McBride. Meanwhile, mass school closures in Chicago, Philadelphia and other urban districts across the country have disproportionately targeted and destabilized children in poor black and Latino communities.
The war on black children and teens is especially mean-spirited. A litany of examples makes me think of what civil rights doyen W.E.B. DuBois wrote in 1920: “there is no place for black children in this world.”
Former Idaho executive Joe Rickey Hundley made headlines last February when he slapped a crying toddler on a Delta flight headed from Minneapolis to Atlanta. Hundley told the adopted child’s white mother to “shut that nigger baby up.”
Last September, a white Texas man shot 8-year-old Donald Maiden Jr. in the face while he played tag with other children. In November, New Mexico police officers smashed out the windows and recklessly fired shots into the fleeing minivan containing Oriana Ferrell and her five children who range from age 6 to 18. The mother said she fled the scene during the wild traffic stop because she feared for her children’s safety.
Just last month, 16-year-old straight-A high-school student Darrin Manning was on his way to play a basketball game when he was stopped and frisked by a Philadelphia cop. During the search, a female officer squeezed his genitals so hard that she ruptured his testicles, rendering him sterile.
Today’s white supremacists aren’t necessarily as inflammatory in their language about race and sex. But a century ago, as now, they have never spoke about increasing the births of nonwhites, protecting the black unborn, or setting progressive economic and social policies to make the world a safe place for them to thrive once they are born. Remember when former education secretary Bill Bennett said that aborting every black infant in America would lower crime rates?
So here we are in 2014. The United States has already reached a tipping point in its ethnic and racial diversity. More than half of all babies born in this country are children of color. By 2018, the majority of all children nationwide are projected to belong to nonwhite groups.
These numbers, along with enduring white supremacist fears of dying out culturally and biologically, are the real reasons behind the GOP’s so-called “war on women,” and the continuing attacks on black adults and children. When we take a step back and widen the lens we are able to see how injustice, whether it is based on gender or race, grows from the same insidious root cause.
Stacey Patton is a senior enterprise reporter with The Chronicle of Higher Education and holds a Ph.D. in African American history from Rutgers University. She is also the author of That Mean Old Yesterday--A Memoir, and is the creator of www.sparethekids.com.
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http://www.forharriet.com/2014/02/whats-really-behind-war-on-white-women.html
In a sharply divided Supreme Court, women led the charge Tuesday in aggressively questioning the challengers of the rule under Obamacare that for-profit employers' health plans cover contraceptives for female employees at no extra cost, which the suing business owners say violates their religious liberty.
The first salvo came from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who swiftly jumped in to question the challengers' lawyer if any employer can get an exemption from a general law that they claim a religious objection to.
"There are many people who have religious objections to vaccinations," she told Paul Clement, who was representing Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood, two businesses who sued for relief from the mandate on the basis of their owners' Christian beliefs.
Clement responded that each case would have to be looked at individually in terms of whether law satisfies the strict scrutiny requirements under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).
The most forceful was Justice Elena Kagan, who repeatedly asked aggressive questions throughout the 90-minute argument about the legal dangers of exempting certain entities from laws on the basis of religion.
"There are quite a number of medical treatments that religious groups object to," she said, positing that a ruling against the Obama administration could empower business owners to seek exemptions from laws about sex discrimination, family leave and the minimum wage. "You'd see religious objectors come out of the woodwork," Kagan warned, arguing that it's problematic for judges to test the centrality of a belief to a religion or the sincerity of beliefs that are invoked in court.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also asked several deeply skeptical questions about the business owners' argument that the mandate runs afoul of RFRA.
But the outcome was difficult to predict as conservative-leaning justices appeared broadly sympathetic to the arguments put forth by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito all set their targets on the administration, with tough questions, and mostly softballs to the challengers' lawyer. Justice Clarence Thomas, the most conservative member, did not speak, as is customary for him.
Anthony Kennedy asked more skeptical questions to U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who was defending the law for the government, than to Clement. He appeared unconvinced that the birth control mandate satisfied strict scrutiny under RFRA, arguing that the government's reasoning could let it force businesses to pay for abortions. But he also wondered aloud if the right of employers trumped the right of female employees who were guaranteed contraceptive services under the Affordable Care Act.
Kagan also said a ruling against the mandate would directly harm women.
"Congress has made a judgment and Congress has given a statutory entitlement and that entitlement is to women and includes contraceptive coverage," she said. "And when the employer says, no, I don't want to give that, that woman is quite directly, quite tangibly harmed."
Outside the court, amid snow showers, women's health activists from Planned Parenthood and elsewhere held signs and chanted in support of the birth control rule.
The cases, which were consolidated, are Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius and Conestoga Wood v. Sebelius.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/supreme-court-women-hammer-birth-control-challengers
Happy_Go_Lucky
03-25-2014, 09:04 PM
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/236x/8b/f7/c0/8bf7c030b30106d93c25f6fd2db5cd2a.jpg
Medusa
03-26-2014, 08:31 PM
OMFG.
I'm SO FUCKING PISSED OFF.
So here is the article talking about about Mississippi Rennie Gibbs giving birth to a stillborn daughter and the medical examiner finding that the death was a "homicide" due to cocaine toxicity.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/26/stillbirth-murder-miscarriage-pregnant-women-criminals
Today, this case came up in a discussion at work in a very casual space at lunch. Someone was pontificating about how this "crackhead" deserves to rot in jail for "killing her baby" and proceeded to go on and on about how it was her "responsibility as a Mother to bring this child into the world".
The person then went on a rant about how pregnant women should be charged with crimes when their child is born with "preventable medical issues".
I looked at her (yes, a fucking WOMAN was saying this shit) and said, "So, if I get pregnant and my child is born with a predisposition to diabetes then clearly I should be in jail for eating twinkies during my pregnancy."
She actually looked at me and said, "Well...yes!"
So basically, women are fucking incubators and there are actual real live fucking people in this world who want to charge women with fucking CRIMES for not being a good brood mare.
Talk about a fucking Margaret Atwood world.
Gross.
deedarino
04-07-2014, 09:03 PM
Sometimes, I am truly afraid for the future.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/04/07/3423582/abstinence-only-dirty-analogies/
Whenever the subject material of an abstinence-only lesson is reported in the media, Americans are typically shocked to hear what kids are hearing in their classes or at their school assemblies. In addition to withholding valuable information about preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, some of these courses also rely on harmful shame-based attitudes about human sexuality to impart negative messages to the 95 percent of Americans who have sex before marriage.
Here are five common analogies that abstinence-only curricula use to teach youth that becoming sexually active will make them worthless — and five good reasons that more states should enact comprehensive sex education requirements:
1. Dirty chocolate.
Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that a school district in Mississippi uses a Peppermint Patty in its sex ed classes. Allegedly, students are asked to unwrap the chocolate and pass it around to see how dirty it becomes after being touched by multiple people. A spokesperson from the school district says that while that lesson was part of a state-approved curriculum that passed three years ago, the “dirty chocolate” lesson is not currently being implemented. Nonetheless, there’s some evidence that this analogy isn’t unique to that particular district. Other internet commenters recall doing the same Peppermint Patty exercise in their own classes. Others did the “dirty chocolate” lesson with a Hershey Kiss.
2. Used tape.
Tape is another popular tool to demonstrate how sexually active teens become “unclean.” In these demonstrations, a piece of tape is affixed to a student’s arm, then removed, and repeated with several other students. This lesson is supposed to illustrate that, just like tape loses its ability to form a tight bond after coming into contact with multiple people, it’s hard to have an emotionally fulfilling relationship after having multiple sexual partners. Sometimes participants’ wrists are taped together to drive home the point further.
3. Chewed up gum.
Last year, a school district in Texas made headlines after some parents complained about a middle school curriculum that encouraged teachers to tell kids that having sex makes them like a used toothbrush or a chewed up piece of gum. Like the other examples on this list, that’s a popular analogy. Elizabeth Smart — the kidnapping and sexual assault victim who was held in captivity for nine months — famously pointed out emphasizing the importance of purity can make rape victims feel dirty and worthless, and described hearing the same lesson about chewed up gum when she was younger.
4. A cup of spit.
“Drink the spit” is an exercise that requires students to pass around a cup and spit in it. Then, students are asked if they would choose to drink that cup. The idea is the same as the chocolate or the tape lessons — having multiple sexual partners, and subsequently exchanging bodily fluids with multiple people, is undesirable. Sometimes the symbolism of this lesson gets pretty explicit. For instance, one variation involves pouring the cups of spit into an empty glass pitcher placed next to a pitcher of clean water. Students are asked to which pitcher they would like their “future husband” or “future wife” to come from.
5. A rose with no petals.
In this lesson, a teacher is instructed to “hold up a beautiful rose.” The rose is passed around the classroom, and each student is asked to remove a petal. Then, when nothing is left except for a thorny stem, the teacher explains that each petal symbolizes a sexual relationship, and this is what happens when people choose to give away the most personal part of themselves. “Ask: Of what value is the rose now?… The rose represents someone who participates in casual sex,” one curriculum instructs.
***
Abstinence-only programs have received over $1.75 billion in federal funding since the creation of the Title V State Abstinence Education Grant Program, which was first attached to a provision in the 1996 welfare reform bill and has been periodically renewed since then. After this funding ballooned under George W. Bush’s administration, President Barack Obama eliminated Title V when he first took office. But during the political fight over the health reform law, Republicans forced through an amendment to Obamacare that restored funding for abstinence programs.
Some lawmakers continue to fight to end abstinence-only programs for good. At the end of last year, Democrats in the House introduced the “Repealing Ineffective and Incomplete Abstinence-Only Program Funding Act of 2013,” a measure that the same group of lawmakers has repeatedly — and unsuccessfully — attempted to push through.
The U.S. Supreme Court just made it harder for women to visit their doctor’s office in peace — but we won’t let them win.
Today the Court overturned a Massachusetts buffer zone law, which since 2007 had kept protestors away from the immediate entrances of women’s health centers. Today’s ruling means that staff and patients simply trying to get in for health care could now be met with signs, shouts, and sneers right in their faces.
“This decision shows a troubling level of disregard for American women, who should be able to make carefully considered, private medical decisions without running a gauntlet of harassing and threatening protesters.” —Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
The case, McCullen v. Coakley, challenged a 2007 law in Massachusetts that established a 35-foot zone around health centers in which no protests or demonstrations were permitted during operating hours.
In today’s decision, the Supreme Court said the Massachusetts law violates the First Amendment — mostly because it includes a public sidewalk. Shockingly, Court said that the protesters seek only “to engage in personal, caring, consensual conversations with women about various alternatives.”
Let’s Look at the Facts
The 2007 law aimed to strike a balance between patient safety and free speech while helping ensure that women could get medical care without the close-up intimidation and harassment of anti-abortion protestors who had caused chaos in the past.
Before An Act Relative to Public Safety passed in Massachusetts in 2007, protesters stood shoulder to shoulder, blocking the doorway of reproductive health centers. But that’s not all. The protesters obstructed and took pictures of cars trying to enter health center driveways; dressed up as police officers in order to obtain patients’ and staff members’ personal identifying information; screamed at patients and staff; and even touched their bodies.
After the 2007 law, there was a peaceful coexistence: Protesters still got out their message, but Massachusetts women had a few short seconds of calm before walking into our doors.
Did we mention that buffer zones are not unique to health centers? Funerals and polling places have had them for years. In fact, the Supreme Court itself has a buffer zone around its 252-by-98-foot marble plaza.
Buffer Zone Background
State and local buffer zone laws for reproductive health care centers in particular came about after an era of unprecedented violence against the facilities. In the 1980s, extremists who opposed abortion initiated an epidemic of firebombing, vandalism, burglary, death threats, and assault across the nation.
In response, Congress made it a federal crime to use force to intimidate or interfere with reproductive health care providers and patients — that’s the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE). That law is still in place. Moving beyond FACE, states and many municipalities across the country created buffer zone laws for women’s health centers.
Planned Parenthood patients and staff will continue to be protected through FACE, as well as from state and local patient protection statutes across the country. However, many of the state and local buffer zone laws operate differently from one another. Moreover, one state and nine localities have ordinances like the Massachusetts law (with a fixed-distance buffer zone) that are at risk if challenged.
What Planned Parenthood is Doing
In Massachusetts, Planned Parenthood will work with the governor, the attorney general’s office, and local law enforcement on new legal remedies to protect women’s ability to access health care with dignity and respect. Already, more than 100 people have signed up to train as clinic escorts to ensure that women can safely come in and out of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts health centers.
In recent years, we’ve seen some political leaders stand with a small yet vocal fringe dead-set on turning back the clock on legal abortion access in America — and now the Supreme Court has issued this decision. But Planned Parenthood and our supporters are fighting back. We are fighting to ensure that in spite of this ruling, the privacy and safety of every patient accessing health care and every staff member doing his or her job will be protected — no matter what.
- See more at: http://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/elections-politics/blog/supreme-court-strikes-down-massachusetts-buffer-zone-law/#sthash.2l4CqSW2.dpuf
Tomorrow at 10 am, the Supreme Court will hand down its decision on the Hobby Lobby case — and it will be a big one. Here's what to expect.
http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/16/4b/71/164b71b36e46412d6b96ded5daf99812.jpg
https://www.facebook.com/PlannedParenthoodAction?fref=photo
Allison W
06-30-2014, 04:01 PM
http://online.wsj.com/articles/supreme-courts-hobby-lobby-ruling-ignites-debate-over-religious-freedom-law-1404155510
Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby Ruling Ignites Debate Over Religious-Freedom Law
Decision Cites Two-Decades-Old Religious Freedom Restoration Act
By KRISTINA PETERSON
June 30, 2014 3:11 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON—Monday's Supreme Courtdecision enabling some private companies to opt out of the federal health law's contraception coverage requirements ignited partisan dueling over not just the 2010 health-care law but over a 1993 religious-freedom law cited in the decision.
The high court's decision in the Hobby Lobby case refocused attention on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that passed Congress overwhelmingly in 1993, with the support of some lawmakers still serving in both the House and Senate. The statute requires federal laws to accommodate individuals' religious beliefs unless there is a compelling interest at stake that can't be attained through other means.
While Republicans on Monday triumphantly pointed to the law's role in the decision, Democrats said they hadn't anticipated the law would be so broadly expanded.
In the case, the owners of Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., an Oklahoma City arts-and-crafts chain owned by an evangelical Christian family, and other companies challenged the Affordable Care Act by saying their religions consider certain birth-control methods immoral and therefore they weren't obliged to help provide them under the religious-freedom law.
The Supreme Court's majority agreed, citing the religious-freedom law in its decision.
Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the lead Republican sponsor of the religious-freedom law when it passed the Senate in a 97-3 vote, said Monday's decision affirmed Congress' decision to pass the law in the first place.
"As the Supreme Court rightfully said today, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act could not have been clearer in saying religious liberty of all Americans must be equally protected and not unnecessarily burdened," Mr. Hatch said in a statement. "That's why RFRA passed Congress overwhelmingly more than 20 years ago."
The bill passed the House on a voice vote and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
But Democrats who had supported the law in 1993 said they hadn't intended for it to be used as a shield protecting for-profit employers from the health law's requirements. The 1993 law refers to "persons" and the Obama administration contended that the law doesn't include for-profit companies like Hobby Lobby.
"No matter how sincerely held a religious belief might be, for-profit employers—like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood—should not be allowed to wield their beliefs as a means of denying employees access to critical preventive health-care services," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.) who supported the law in 1993. At the time, lawmakers kept in place a principle that religion doesn't exempt for-profit businesses from complying with civil rights laws, for example, Mr. Nadler said.
The bill was introduced in March 1993 by Charles Schumer of New York, then in the House, now a member of the Senate's Democratic leadership. Mr. Schumer joined a group of 18 other Senate Democrats who filed an amicus brief supporting the Obama administration in the Hobby Lobby case. In the brief, the Democrats had urged the court to clarify that the religious-freedom law doesn't permit for-profit businesses to deny health coverage to their employees based on their owners' religious objections.
In a statement Monday, Mr. Schumer called the Supreme Court's decision "dead wrong," saying the law he introduced was intended to give individuals the ability "to exercise their religious beliefs without government interference." The law "was not intended to extend the same protection to for-profit corporations, whose very purpose is to profit from the open market," he said.
Republicans had filed their own briefs supporting the challengers and arguing that the health law's mandate violated the religious-freedom law.
The law in question was originally intended to nullify a decision from Justice Antonin Scalia in the early 1990s that denied religious exemptions from generally applicable laws. The dispute arose when Oregon denied unemployment benefits to adherents of a Native American religion who used peyote, a controlled substance, in their ceremonies.
—Jess Bravin, Beth Reinhard and Louise Radnofsky contributed to this article.
Allison W
06-30-2014, 04:34 PM
(I was just going to post the link to this article as an addendum to the above post, but after taking a look, I decided this article was better anyway. Lawl @ Boehner taking this opportunity to flog the deceased "repeal Obamacare" equine.)
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hobby-lobby-supreme-court-wins-narrow-ruling
Supreme Court rules for Hobby Lobby in contraception case
06/30/14 10:21 AM—UPDATED 06/30/14 05:03 PM
By Irin Carmon
The Supreme Court has ruled in a 5-4 decision that a closely-held company can be exempt from contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
The closely watched case pitted the administration and its allies, including women’s health advocates, against the religious right, which has repeatedly accused President Barack Obama of waging a war on religion in the public square.
Hobby Lobby stores, an Oklahoma-based, evangelical-owned craft chain with about 13,000 employees, and Conestoga Wood Specialties, a small Mennonite-owned cabinet maker in Pennsylvania, were two of the 49 for-profit companies that said the requirement violated their religious freedom.
The Obama administration had provided exemptions for the law for houses of worship and an accommodation for religious nonprofits (the subject of pending litigation) but not for for-profit corporations.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the law at issue in the case, has never been applied to for-profit entities. The Court had to decide whether corporations even have religious exercise rights – making the beliefs of the employer synonymous with the entire company – and weigh that question against the potential harms to the employees.
Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood objected to a handful of contraceptives that they speculate can block a fertilized egg, which is neither documented in the science nor the medical definition of abortion. Other for-profit plaintiffs object to any birth control coverage at all.
The case was the first time the Affordable Care Act returned to the nation’s highest Court since it was first largely upheld as constitutional, and was argued by current Solicitor General Don Verrilli and former Bush administration solicitor general Paul Clement.
Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood got two very different results at the appeals court. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals declared of Hobby Lobby that “such corporations can be ‘persons’ exercising religion.” In ruling on Conestoga’s bid for exemption from the requirement, the Third Circuit disagreed: “For-profit secular corporations cannot exercise in religious exercise.”
Kyle Duncan, lead attorney on the Hobby Lobby case and general counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, told msnbc earlier this year. While employers can’t stop their employees from using birth control (including paying for it with their wages), Duncan said, “Their moral objection is being made to participate in the process.”
Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell praised the ruling Monday. ”Today’s Supreme Court decision makes clear that the Obama administration cannot trample on the religious freedoms that Americans hold dear,” he said in a statement.
Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) weighed in, too, saying “The mandate overturned today would have required for-profit companies to choose between violating their constitutionally-protected faith or paying crippling fines, which would have forced them to lay off employees or close their doors.” He also renewed calls for the repeal of Obamacare.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said in a statement: ”Today’s decision jeopardizes women’s access to essential health care. Employers have no business intruding in the private health care decisions women make with their doctors.”
“This ruling ignores the scientific evidence showing that the health security of millions of American women is strengthened by access to these crucial services,” he added.
Reid pledged that Democrats would “continue to fight to preserve women’s access to contraceptive coverage and keep bosses out of the examination room.”
“Although the Court restricted their ruling to ‘closely-held’ companies, this ruling will immediately affect the lives of millions of women across the country. Over 90 percent of America’s businesses are ‘closely-held,’ including such large employers as Koch Industries and Bechtel,” said Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. “Women should not be forced to jump through extra hoops to secure the fundamental health care they need.”
The White House released a statement in disagreement with the decision, in which they said: “We’ll continue to look for ways to improve America’s health by helping women have more, not less, say over the personal health decisions that affect them and their families.”
The decision was met with chants of ”HOBBY LOBBY WINS, HOBBY LOBBY WINS” from a group gathered outside the courthouse in support of the company. One pro-Hobby Lobby woman reportedly ripped up her “losing speech” following the verdict.
Barbara Green, the co-founder of Hobby Lobby, said she was “overjoyed” by the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“The Court’s decision is a victory, not just for our family business, but for all who seek to live out their faith. We are grateful to God and to those who have supported us on this difficult journey,” said Green.
Lori Windham, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, called it a “landmark decision” arguing that “American families do not lose their fundamental rights when they open a family business.”
Most Americans disagree with the majority opinion of the Court. According to a March 2014 NBC/WSJ poll 53% of Americans believe that employers should not be able to be exempt from the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that health plans cover prescription birth control.
“This is a deeply troubling decision. For the first time, the highest court in the country has said that business owners can use their religious beliefs to deny their employees a benefit that they are guaranteed by law,” said Louise Melling, deputy legal director of the ACLU.
At oral argument, as hundreds of women rallied outside in support of birth control access, Paul Clement argued, “This is not about access to the contraception, it’s who’s going to pay for the government’s preferred subsidy.” Justice Elena Kagan, for her part, had a different answer: ”Congress has made a judgment and Congress has given a statutory entitlement and that entitlement is to women and includes contraceptive coverage, and when an employer says, no, I don’t want to give that, that woman is quite directly, quite tangibly harmed.”
The contraceptive benefit was widely seen as a political win for Obama in the 2012 election, galvanizing single women to go to the polls. Democrats are hoping a similar strategy pays off in key elections this fall.
ProfPacker
08-02-2014, 05:45 PM
Speaking with Katie Couric on Yahoo Global News, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that five of her male counterparts on the court have “a blind spot” when it comes to women’s issues.
After noting that all three female justices were in the minority in the recent Hobby Lobby decision, Couric asked Ginsburg whether she “believed the five male justices truly understood the ramifications of their decision.”
Following a long pause, Ginsburg said, “I would have to say, ‘No.’”
“But,” she added, “justices continue to think, and can change. So I’m ever hopeful that if the Court has a blind spot today, its eyes can be opened tomorrow.”
“But you do, in fact, feel that these five justices had a bit of a ‘blind spot’?” Couric asked.
“In Hobby Lobby?” Ginsburg replied. “Yes.”
“Because they couldn’t understand what it is like to be a woman?” Couric asked.
“They all have wives. They have daughters. By the way, I think daughters can change the perception of their fathers.”
Ginsburg went on to note that her opinions on these matters are contained in her dissents, and that there is a tradition of dissents becoming “unquestionably, the law of the land.”
In her scathing dissent in the Hobby Lobby case, Ginsburg noted that the majority’s willful misreading of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act would have unintended consequences.
“Little doubt that RFRA claims will proliferate, for the Court’s expansive notion of corporate personhood – combined with its other errors in construing RFRA – invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith,” she wrote.
Earlier this week, in fact, the Satanic Temple declared that it would use the majority’s interpretation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act just as Ginsburg predicted groups would.
*Anya*
05-01-2015, 09:06 PM
Colorado’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program Works, and That’s Why Conservatives Want to Kill It
by Amanda Marcotte
April 28, 2015 - 3:52 pm
One of the most interesting political battles over reproductive health-care access is currently going down in Colorado. As has been extensively documented here at RH Reality Check, an experimental program launched in the state in 2009 has resulted in a shocking 40 percent drop in the teen birth rate and a 35 percent drop in the teen abortion rate. Naturally, Colorado anti-choicers are trying to kill it.
This is about more than some budget struggle. Instead, it’s about the escalating battle over contraception access, both in Colorado and in this country as a whole. Make no mistake about it: The better women get at preventing unintended pregnancy, the uglier this fight is going to get. And intrauterine devices (IUDs), which have an extremely low failure rate, are increasingly at the center.
This week, the National Journal released a massive feature by Nora Caplan-Bricker about the battle over Colorado’s IUD fund. Three years ago, a private donation was made to the Colorado Family Planning Initiative and earmarked to give IUDs and other long-acting reversible contraception (LARCs) to low-income women. The program was a smashing success—not only lowering unintended pregnancy rates, but also saving the state an estimated $5.85 for every dollar spent on the program. Now, the private money for the fund has run out. Democrats, and one Republican named Don Coram, want the state to replenish it.
The arguments for doing so are rock-solid: The program has already saved the state piles of money, unintended pregnancy has all sorts of negative outcomes best avoided, and the demand for the subsidized IUDs is clearly there. But Republicans in the state are most likely going to kill the program anyway.
What becomes clear, especially reading Caplan-Bricker’s piece, is that Republicans are using this battle to beta-test various arguments against any future attempts, on any level, to make it easier for women to get affordable long-term contraception. It’s a classic case of starting with the conclusion—in this case, that low-income women should not get IUDs—and arguing backwards.
This is a delicate operation for anti-choice Republicans, because they have to find a way to argue against contraception without appearing to do so, which could hurt them with voters in a swing state like Colorado. For months, they’ve been tossing out arguments to see which ones stick. The whole “IUD is abortion!” lie was an early contender, but it has a couple of problems with it, starting with the fact that it’s not true. It’s also hard to imagine the voters of Colorado being unduly impressed by politicians putting the fortunes of hypothetical fertilized eggs ahead of the desires of teen girls to avoid pregnancy.
Now, as Caplan-Bricker reports, Republicans are trying a new tack: Arguing that the program is a redundancy because Obamacare supposedly gives you all the free IUDs your heart desires. She writes:
When the debate finally commences in earnest, moral and religious arguments are scarcer than the initiative’s proponents had expected. Republican House members have settled on a more pragmatic line of attack: The funding, they argue, is unnecessary because the Affordable Care Act requires insurers to cover all forms of contraception—IUDs and implants included. “We don’t need to spend this money on the same program, which is available otherwise,” Rep. Janak Joshi, a Republican from socially conservative Colorado Springs, asserts. “We can use this money for some better use—maybe education, maybe roads, but not duplicating the same services which are available.”
Caplan-Bricker outlines all the reasons why this isn’t true, mostly that there are a lot of holes in the health-care distribution system this program plugs up. It’s obvious, though, that this redundancy argument isn’t being offered sincerely. It’s just a gambit to shut down the program before it becomes entrenched in Colorado—and certainly before it starts to spread to other states, causing unintended pregnancy rates to plummet across the country. The program’s success is the very reason that anti-choicers want to kill it.
While most Republicans stuck to the boring budgetary talking points in Caplan-Bricker’s piece, the real concern leaked out of state representative Kathleen Conti, who called IUDs the “Cadillac” of contraception and argued, very unpersuasively, that “I see firsthand the devastation that happens to” girls who have sex. In other words, her fear appears to be that IUDs work too well—that they’re Cadillacs, as it were—and that without the danger of unintended pregnancy, more girls might choose to have sex.
Common sense would dictate that a high failure rate would be a negative. But from the anti-choice perspective, it’s a good thing. The fact that contraception fails is used all the time as a way to threaten young people in hopes of scaring them away from sex, in anti-choice propaganda and in abstinence-only or abstinence-focused programs. So the IUD, which has a typical-use failure rate of less than 1 percent—compared to 9 percent for the pill and 18 percent for condoms—threatens to upend conservative narratives demanding abstinence across the board for unmarried people.
The same thing happened when the HPV vaccine came out. Prior to the vaccine, abstinence-only propagandists loved HPV, because nearly everyone who has sex gets it at some point, giving credence to the doom-awaits-all-you-fornicators messaging. The vaccine threatened that, and so anti-choicers subjected it to a scare campaign that has, sadly, worked. Many parents still refuse to vaccinate their girls for HPV for fear that it somehow causes risky sexual activity, even though research shows that vaccinated girls actually take fewer sexual risks.
The same thing has been shown, by the way, for birth control: Women who have access to itdon’t have more sex. But so what if they did? Sex is a good thing, and we should be able to enjoy it as much as we want without having to incur unnecessary risks. This argument should not be lost in the mix.
As the situation in Colorado shows, conservatives are willing—eager, even—to keep the teen pregnancy rate sky high on the slim hope that doing so might scare someone, sometime out of having sex. At best, that suggests that their priorities are completely screwed up, because they would literally prefer to have widespread preventable public health issues than to admit that it’s fine if people want to have sex. At worst, it suggests that they want people to suffer unnecessary problems like STIs and unintended pregnancy, to punish them for engaging in sexual activity.
Either way, we are at a crossroads here. Most Americans may have mixed feelings about sex, but would be able to set that aside in the face of overwhelming evidence that a teen pregnancy prevention program works. If the Colorado program is allowed to continue, there is no doubt other states will follow.
So this isn’t just a local story. The fate of this little initiative in Colorado could determine the shape of reproductive health care for generations to come.
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/04/28/colorados-teen-pregnancy-prevention-program-works-thats-conservatives-want-kill/
*Anya*
05-02-2015, 08:35 AM
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/colorado-gop-blocks-successful-birth-control-program
Colorado GOP blocks successful birth-control program
05/01/15
By Steve Benen
Colorado launched a health initiative a few years ago with a specific target: reducing teen-birth rates. To that end, Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) implemented a program that provided tens of thousands of contraceptive devices at low or no cost.
The results were amazing: teen-birth rates dropped 40% in just five years. This week, the state even won an award from the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, celebrating Colorado’s success story.
Ironically, the award came the same week Colorado Republicans chose to scrap the effective policy.
Republicans on a Colorado Senate committee Wednesday killed an effort to set aside money for a birth-control program that provides intrauterine devices, or IUDs, to low-income, young women. […]
The legislation would have provided $5 million to expand the Colorado Family Planning Initiative program that health officials say lowered the teen birth rate in Colorado by an impressive 40 percent.
As one local report noted, “Opponents of the bill worried that increasing access to birth control would not have a net public health gain because it would increase promiscuity.” One GOP lawmaker accused the policy of “subsidizing sex.” Another said of the program, “Does that allow a lot of young women to go out there and look for love in all the wrong places?”
The amazing thing to remember here is that Colorado wasn’t talking about experimenting with a new policy measure; state lawmakers were considering whether to keep an existing policy in place. That’s important because, in this case, Colorado already knows the program was working.
In other words, Republican critics of the idea raised concerns that the policy might fail – which might be a credible point were it not for the fact that the policy has been in place for five years, offering real-world proof that those concerns are unfounded.
I half expected to find quotes from GOP lawmakers saying, “Sure, the idea works in practice, but does it work in theory?”
Colorado’s state House has a Democratic majority, while the state Senate has a Republican majority. In this case, both chambers had to approve funding for the birth-control program to continue, and this week, the GOP-led chamber voted it down.
This is consistent with the posture adopted by some high-profile Colorado Republicans. Cory Gardner (R) has spent much of his political career opposing contraception access, and Coloradans nevertheless elected him to the U.S. Senate last year. At the same time, former Rep. Bob Beauprez (R) falsely claimed last year that IUD contraceptives are “abortifacients,” not long before narrowly losing Colorado’s gubernatorial race.
The more the fight over contraception access seems like a thing of the past, the more we’re reminded it’s not.
Since stealing the presidency for Bush caused a host of unforeseen difficulties for the Republicans, and ultimately for everyone, the GOP luckily discovered it really doesn't matter that much who is POTUS if they can control the House, the Senate, the Media, and the Supreme Court. Of course there is that pesky issue of nominating Supreme Court judges, that does make POTUS somewhat desirable. So we will see how that plays out for them this time around.
But until then, through gerrymandering, voter suppression and legislative tricks, the GOP has managed to gain control of the House and the Senate. The Supreme Court is systematically dismantling individual rights and freedoms, while protecting the personhood of corporations. Since corporations have the same rights as people, except corporate rights are more diligently protected, it is only a matter of time before the Corporate powers that be decide to exercise their 2nd amendment rights. But I digress. Here's a look at the next assault on a woman's right to choose.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/11/supreme-court-agrees-hear-texas-abortion-case
The Supreme Court Just Agreed to Hear a Case that Could Destroy Roe v. Wade
On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it will hear its first abortion case in nine years. At issue in Whole Woman's Health v. Cole is HB 2, an omnibus Texas abortion law that made national headlines in 2013 after Texas Sen. Wendy Davis spent 11-hours filibustering the bill that eventually passed anyway.
Since 1992, the court has ruled on three abortion cases, each time affirming further abortion restrictions. In 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a divided court upheld the right to abortion, but left it to the states to set abortion restrictions, saying that these regulations can't put an "undue burden" on abortion access. This broad ruling opened the door for the hundreds of so-called Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers or TRAP laws that states have passed in recent years—onerous regulations placed on abortion providers, often purporting to protect women's health. In its last ruling in 2007, the court upheld a law outlawing dilation-and-extraction second-trimester abortions. If the court continues its pattern of voting against abortion rights and rules to allow Texas to move forward with several burdensome abortion restrictions, it will open the door for other states to do the same, dealing a serious blow to the right to legal abortion guaranteed by Roe v. Wade.
"The Court now has the opportunity to decide whether we will continue to allow elected officials to play politics with women's health," wrote Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, in a statement. "This case represents the greatest threat to women's reproductive freedom since the Supreme Court decided Roe vs. Wade over 40 years ago. Laws like the ones being challenged in Texas are designed to subvert the Constitution and end the right to a safe and legal abortion."
In this case, the justices are expected to focus on two of the Texas law's most onerous requirements: that abortions be performed in ambulatory surgical centers, hospital-like facilities that specialize in outpatient surgery, and the requirement that abortion providers obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. Many medical professionals argue that these restrictions put unnecessary burdens on abortion providers: Building and maintaining an ASC is expensive, given the strict requirements regarding features like hallway width and ventilation. Nor do ASCs enhance the standard of care for abortion; the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other medical groups have repeatedly noted that the procedure can be safely performed in a typical doctor's office. The admitting privileges' provision gives hospitals in conservative communities or with a religious affiliation the power to effectively stop abortions by denying the necessary admission privileges to doctors.
"The common-sense measures Texas has put in place elevate the standard of care and protect the health of Texas women," wrote Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a statement released following Friday's Supreme Court's announcement. "We look forward to demonstrating the validity of these important health and safety requirements in Court."
The number of abortion clinics in Texas has already been cut by more than half, as elements of HB 2, such as restrictions on medication abortion, a 20 week abortion ban, and the admitting privileges requirement, have gone into effect over the last two years. Before the law, there were 41 clinics in Texas. Today, there are 18. As my colleague Molly Redden reported in September, this has created large swathes of the state where women must travel hundreds of miles to get abortion care. If the Supreme Court upholds HB2 in full, including the ambulatory surgical center requirement, the number of abortion clinics in Texas could fall to ten.
http://www.truthdig.com/images/made/images/cartoonuploads/sw0408cd_590_356.jpg
This morning an article about a Washington Post poll explained 3rd party voters are hurting Clinton and not Trump. It stated that the large majority of 3rd party voters would usually be voting Democrat. It also mentioned these people are voting Gary Johnson 3 to 1 over Jill Stein. This is really puzzling to me, this love of Libertarian ideology. Not that I am advocating anyone vote 3rd party instead of voting for Clinton, but if you must vote 3rd party, why Libertarian over Green? Isn't what is going on environmentally scary enough to get people's attention? What is it going to take? And I really don't get this attraction to Libertarian ideals. I am not going to get into what those ideals entail in this thread but this is a simplistic interpretation of the ideology that would shred the social contract between the government and its citizens; libertarians generally believe the power of government should be limited to what is necessary to protect the rights of the citizenry. The government does little to protect the rights of the citizenry as it is, we don't need more limitations. Here is an article explaining how Catholic hospitals are putting women's lives at risk and getting judicial support allowing them to continue medical negligence.
https://rewire.news/article/2016/09/09/appeals-court-wont-hold-catholic-hospital-responsible-denial-care/
Appeals Court Won’t Hold Catholic Hospital Responsible for Denial of Care
In 2010, when Tamesha Means showed up at Mercy Health Partners in Muskegon, Michigan, while having a miscarriage, she had every reason to expect the hospital doctors and staff would treat her emergency medical condition. Instead, the Catholic-affiliated health-care entity turned her away twice, effectively telling her to just “wait and see” what would happen.
Means filed suit against Mercy Health Partners and the United Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) in 2013. On Thursday, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that she had failed to state a viable legal claim.
Thursday’s ruling is a narrow one. It does not prevent other patients who have faced similar denials of care from Catholic-affiliated health care facilities from suing based on those denials. But it does suggest those claims will be very difficult to win.
Means’ case is, in some ways, the perfect example of conservative federal courts’ reluctance to second-guess the medical decisions made at religiously affiliated hospitals. When Means first showed up at Mercy, the only hospital in her county, she was 18 weeks pregnant. Her water had broken, and she was beginning to miscarry. Doctors and staff at Mercy Health—which is operated by Trinity Health, a multi-billion dollar network of Catholic-run hospitals—told Means there was no medical care they could offer her. That was because treatment would mean the termination of her pregnancy: a violation of Catholic directives preventing any care resulting in the death of a fetus, even a non-viable one.
So instead, they sent Means home.
Means came back the next day, in pain and this time bleeding vaginally. As detailed in court documents, doctors and staff at Mercy again told Means the only thing they could do was to wait and see how the miscarriage progressed.
Means returned to Mercy Health a third time just days later. Now, she was suffering from a significant infection from her untreated miscarriage. This time, instead of telling Means to just wait it out, hospital staff gave Means some aspirin to treat her fever and prepared to send her home yet again. But before the hospital discharge process for Means was complete, she started to deliver her dying fetus. It wasn’t until then that the hospital agreed to admit her; she delivered a baby who died within hours of birth.
Means eventually sued, claiming the Catholic directives followed by the hospital amount to the provision of negligent care.
These “Ethical and Religious Directives” are not the same thing as professional standards of care, which dictate when a hospital or doctor has committed an act of medical negligence. Rather, they are expressions of religious beliefs. Still, Mercy deferred to them as a defense for its actions, saying its doctors and staff did nothing wrong in relying on those directives, rather than medical standards, when they turned away Means and refused to treat her.
And both a lower court and, now, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled Means’ case could not go forward. This was, in part, because the court felt it was not its job to judge the directives and decide whether or not following them amounted to negligence in the delivery of health care by Mercy and its doctors and staff.
Part of these decisions rests in a legal doctrine dating back more than 100 years called “ecclesiastical abstention.” Both the federal district court and the court of appeals ruled in part that this doctrine prevents courts from reviewing cases like Means’.
According to the doctrine of ecclesiastical abstention, civil courts should be limited in their role in deciding matters of religious controversy. The idea behind the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine is that courts should not settle what would amount to disputes about religious doctrine, which Catholic-affiliated hospitals like Mercy claim their refusal to provide health care to patients like Means amounts to. Specifically in Means’ case, the defendants claimed the directives offer “a statement of the Roman Catholic Church’s moral and religious postures as it relates to health care issues” and are in place “to provide authoritative guidance on certain moral issues that face Catholic health care today.” That means, the bishops and Mercy argued, that interpreting the directives in the context of whether or not carrying out those directives amounts to medical malpractice means interpreting Catholic theology. And according to the bishops and Mercy Health, that is exactly the kind of thing which the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine prohibits.
Thursday’s ruling did not decide definitively whether or not the directives are insulated from judicial review in cases of medical negligence. Instead the court ruled that the USCCB could not be sued in Michigan in this case. According to the court, USCCB’s action of publishing the directives does not “create a substantial connection” between USCCB and Michigan hospitals sufficient to justify bringing the bishops into court to respond to claims like Means’.
But the court used topsy-turvy logic to justify refusing to allow Means to sue the USCCB. According to the court, “Michigan—like every state—does have Catholic hospitals, and USCCB does intend the Directives to be implemented by all Catholic healthcare institutions. USCCB may even have known that Trinity Health is a Catholic hospital network operating in Michigan,” the court wrote. But this is not a “substantial connection” enough that USCCB could expect to be sued when following those directives results in medical negligence, according to the court. Similarly, Mercy cannot be sued in this case for following those national directives.
Approximately one in six hospital beds in the United States are in a facility where health-care delivery is governed by the Catholic directives. In some states, more than 40 percent of all beds fall into that category, with those hospitals routinely refusing to provide comprehensive reproductive health care to patients. As Means’ case illustrates, some patients’ only choice is to seek care at a Catholic-affiliated hospital. If courts are unwilling to hold those institutions accountable for delivering to their patients shoddy and substandard care, in part on the grounds that those hospitals have a religious imperative that courts cannot second-guess, where does that leave patients like Means, whose lives are being put at risk in the name of religiously driven health care?
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Hospitals and hospital staff have judicial backing to put lives at risk because of their religious beliefs. It seems like it would be possible to not treat someone who had medical issues because they used birth control. I guess it would be possible to refuse treatment to a person who was gay or transgender for religious reasons. It's very scary.
Kätzchen
10-01-2016, 12:18 PM
This morning an article about a Washington Post poll explained 3rd party voters are hurting Clinton and not Trump. It stated that the large majority of 3rd party voters would usually be voting Democrat. It also mentioned these people are voting Gary Johnson 3 to 1 over Jill Stein. This is really puzzling to me, this love of Libertarian ideology. Not that I am advocating anyone vote 3rd party instead of voting for Clinton, but if you must vote 3rd party, why Libertarian over Green? Isn't what is going on environmentally scary enough to get people's attention? What is it going to take? And I really don't get this attraction to Libertarian ideals. I am not going to get into what those ideals entail in this thread but this is a simplistic interpretation of the ideology that would shred the social contract between the government and its citizens; libertarians generally believe the power of government should be limited to what is necessary to protect the rights of the citizenry. The government does little to protect the rights of the citizenry as it is, we don't need more limitations. Here is an article explaining how Catholic hospitals are putting women's lives at risk and getting judicial support allowing them to continue medical negligence.
https://rewire.news/article/2016/09/09/appeals-court-wont-hold-catholic-hospital-responsible-denial-care/
Appeals Court Won’t Hold Catholic Hospital Responsible for Denial of Care
In 2010, when Tamesha Means showed up at Mercy Health Partners in Muskegon, Michigan, while having a miscarriage, she had every reason to expect the hospital doctors and staff would treat her emergency medical condition. Instead, the Catholic-affiliated health-care entity turned her away twice, effectively telling her to just “wait and see” what would happen.
Means filed suit against Mercy Health Partners and the United Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) in 2013. On Thursday, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that she had failed to state a viable legal claim.
Thursday’s ruling is a narrow one. It does not prevent other patients who have faced similar denials of care from Catholic-affiliated health care facilities from suing based on those denials. But it does suggest those claims will be very difficult to win.
Means’ case is, in some ways, the perfect example of conservative federal courts’ reluctance to second-guess the medical decisions made at religiously affiliated hospitals. When Means first showed up at Mercy, the only hospital in her county, she was 18 weeks pregnant. Her water had broken, and she was beginning to miscarry. Doctors and staff at Mercy Health—which is operated by Trinity Health, a multi-billion dollar network of Catholic-run hospitals—told Means there was no medical care they could offer her. That was because treatment would mean the termination of her pregnancy: a violation of Catholic directives preventing any care resulting in the death of a fetus, even a non-viable one.
So instead, they sent Means home.
Means came back the next day, in pain and this time bleeding vaginally. As detailed in court documents, doctors and staff at Mercy again told Means the only thing they could do was to wait and see how the miscarriage progressed.
Means returned to Mercy Health a third time just days later. Now, she was suffering from a significant infection from her untreated miscarriage. This time, instead of telling Means to just wait it out, hospital staff gave Means some aspirin to treat her fever and prepared to send her home yet again. But before the hospital discharge process for Means was complete, she started to deliver her dying fetus. It wasn’t until then that the hospital agreed to admit her; she delivered a baby who died within hours of birth.
Means eventually sued, claiming the Catholic directives followed by the hospital amount to the provision of negligent care.
These “Ethical and Religious Directives” are not the same thing as professional standards of care, which dictate when a hospital or doctor has committed an act of medical negligence. Rather, they are expressions of religious beliefs. Still, Mercy deferred to them as a defense for its actions, saying its doctors and staff did nothing wrong in relying on those directives, rather than medical standards, when they turned away Means and refused to treat her.
And both a lower court and, now, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled Means’ case could not go forward. This was, in part, because the court felt it was not its job to judge the directives and decide whether or not following them amounted to negligence in the delivery of health care by Mercy and its doctors and staff.
Part of these decisions rests in a legal doctrine dating back more than 100 years called “ecclesiastical abstention.” Both the federal district court and the court of appeals ruled in part that this doctrine prevents courts from reviewing cases like Means’.
According to the doctrine of ecclesiastical abstention, civil courts should be limited in their role in deciding matters of religious controversy. The idea behind the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine is that courts should not settle what would amount to disputes about religious doctrine, which Catholic-affiliated hospitals like Mercy claim their refusal to provide health care to patients like Means amounts to. Specifically in Means’ case, the defendants claimed the directives offer “a statement of the Roman Catholic Church’s moral and religious postures as it relates to health care issues” and are in place “to provide authoritative guidance on certain moral issues that face Catholic health care today.” That means, the bishops and Mercy argued, that interpreting the directives in the context of whether or not carrying out those directives amounts to medical malpractice means interpreting Catholic theology. And according to the bishops and Mercy Health, that is exactly the kind of thing which the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine prohibits.
Thursday’s ruling did not decide definitively whether or not the directives are insulated from judicial review in cases of medical negligence. Instead the court ruled that the USCCB could not be sued in Michigan in this case. According to the court, USCCB’s action of publishing the directives does not “create a substantial connection” between USCCB and Michigan hospitals sufficient to justify bringing the bishops into court to respond to claims like Means’.
But the court used topsy-turvy logic to justify refusing to allow Means to sue the USCCB. According to the court, “Michigan—like every state—does have Catholic hospitals, and USCCB does intend the Directives to be implemented by all Catholic healthcare institutions. USCCB may even have known that Trinity Health is a Catholic hospital network operating in Michigan,” the court wrote. But this is not a “substantial connection” enough that USCCB could expect to be sued when following those directives results in medical negligence, according to the court. Similarly, Mercy cannot be sued in this case for following those national directives.
Approximately one in six hospital beds in the United States are in a facility where health-care delivery is governed by the Catholic directives. In some states, more than 40 percent of all beds fall into that category, with those hospitals routinely refusing to provide comprehensive reproductive health care to patients. As Means’ case illustrates, some patients’ only choice is to seek care at a Catholic-affiliated hospital. If courts are unwilling to hold those institutions accountable for delivering to their patients shoddy and substandard care, in part on the grounds that those hospitals have a religious imperative that courts cannot second-guess, where does that leave patients like Means, whose lives are being put at risk in the name of religiously driven health care?
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Hospitals and hospital staff have judicial backing to put lives at risk because of their religious beliefs. It seems like it would be possible to not treat someone who had medical issues because they used birth control. I guess it would be possible to refuse treatment to a person who was gay or transgender for religious reasons. It's very scary.
Just the other day, I saw several cars with bumper stickers advertising that the owner of the car is supporting Libertarian Gary Johnson. Most all of those I saw were on very expensive vehicles.....on the surface , it appears to me that affluent people are supporting this type of mindset? I know that appearances can often be misleading, but that's what came to mind when I happened to see bumper stickers on various cars I've seen.
Also, I haven't seen the usual jingoistic rhetoric in support of either Clinton or Trump in bumper stickers on cars either. Or in yards. It's a rather odd thing, this year, because in years past, when there's been tons of open support for any presidential candidate, you didn't have to look too hard to find bumper stickers or yard signs.
My role at work takes me all over the metro area I live in, so it's kind of weird, if not creepy (to me), to notice hardly any physical sign of support for those who are competing for the presidential seat of power.
Although, when Senator Sanders was actively holding rallies for his own campaign, it was at fever pitch to see support for his presidential run for office.
*Anya*
10-01-2016, 01:33 PM
Just the other day, I saw several cars with bumper stickers advertising that the owner of the car is supporting Libertarian Gary Johnson. Most all of those I saw were on very expensive vehicles.....on the surface , it appears to me that affluent people are supporting this type of mindset? I know that appearances can often be misleading, but that's what came to mind when I happened to see bumper stickers on various cars I've seen.
Also, I haven't seen the usual jingoistic rhetoric in support of either Clinton or Trump in bumper stickers on cars either. Or in yards. It's a rather odd thing, this year, because in years past, when there's been tons of open support for any presidential candidate, you didn't have to look too hard to find bumper stickers or yard signs.
My role at work takes me all over the metro area I live in, so it's kind of weird, if not creepy (to me), to notice hardly any physical sign of support for those who are competing for the presidential seat of power.
Although, when Senator Sanders was actively holding rallies for his own campaign, it was at fever pitch to see support for his presidential run for office.
Here in right wing Orange County, I have seen several expensive cars, including Escalades and Range Rovers, with Trump bumper stickers.
I also just saw a beat up truck with a bumper sticker that in big letters said: Hillary and in smaller ones: For prison.
John Birch still lives here.
Also, not long ago, I posted about a KKK gathering in an Anaheim park.
*Sigh*
Shystonefem
10-01-2016, 01:48 PM
The group, AAFL, in Florida is obtaining or has obtained enough signatures to put abortion on the ballot once again.
This proposal would classify abortion as first degree murder and eligible for the death penalty.
Although the law, even if passed, would be illegal due to Roe V. Wade, it may go the way to the SCOTUS, essentially giving the high Court an opportunity to reverse Roe.
If Hillary wins the election, that's a non-issue.
If Trump wins the election, it is safe to say that it would be cause for concern.
Another personhood issue. SMH
Kätzchen
10-01-2016, 01:51 PM
Here in right wing Orange County, I have seen several expensive cars, including Escalades and Range Rovers, with Trump bumper stickers.
I also just saw a beat up truck with a bumper sticker that in big letters said: Hillary and in smaller ones: For prison.
John Birch still lives here.
Also, not long ago, I posted about a KKK gathering in an Anaheim park.
*Sigh*
My son's are biracial -- predominantly their physical appearance is of black ethnicity. When I first moved to the place I've lived, the first thing I learmed, for our own safety, from an d.v. counselor and personal friend, what that the KKK has *always* had strong roots in my home state in the Pacific northwest.
But it's not just reduced to something simple as the KKK, when dealing with White privilege and it's other driving counterparts of hate, racially motivated hate, etc.
Having lived the better part of life, wirh raising my biracial sons in what used to be considered a safe social segment of society, has not always been easy for my son's or myself.
30+ years of fielding racially motivated behaviors of others has impacted my son's and I for what seems to be an eternity.
I'm not surprised at all that white privilege and racialized hate is still an driving factor in American present day society.
Kätzchen
10-01-2016, 02:03 PM
Note to Cin:
To 'steer' the conversation back to your post about Catholic hospitals not being challenged for their pious bedside directives, I agree that the medical empire community needs to take up that issue and develop policy to take back their profession of medical care credo.... to help all who need medical intervention, and not just serve people with tenets of religiosity.
Biased medical care is life threatening, just as unchecked bias (prejudicial treatment) is, and can be, in any profession or social station in society.
‘Death of women’s rights’: Thousands march in Poland to protest planned blanket abortion ban (https://www.rt.com/news/361316-poland-protest-abortion-law/)
*Anya*
10-01-2016, 02:16 PM
The group, AAFL, in Florida is obtaining or has obtained enough signatures to put abortion on the ballot once again.
This proposal would classify abortion as first degree murder and eligible for the death penalty.
Although the law, even if passed, would be illegal due to Roe V. Wade, it may go the way to the SCOTUS, essentially giving the high Court an opportunity to reverse Roe.
If Hillary wins the election, that's a non-issue.
If Trump wins the election, it is safe to say that it would be cause for concern.
Another personhood issue. SMH
Note to Cin:
To 'steer' the conversation back to your post about Catholic hospitals not being challenged for their pious bedside directives, I agree that the medical empire community needs to take up that issue and develop policy to take back their profession of medical care credo.... to help all who need medical intervention, and not just serve people with tenets of religiosity.
Biased medical care is life threatening, just as unchecked bias (prejudicial treatment) is, and can be, in any profession or social station in society.
If Trump is elected, please lord no, he will appoint a majority of conservatives and women's rights/abortion rights (and equal marriage), are gone.
The clock will be turned back.
Bubala
10-01-2016, 04:39 PM
By far the most demoralizing fact in the light of all this war, is the number of passive young women, unaware, uninterested and not willing to lift a finger in an effort to uphold the slightest level of rights stolen by the generations before them.
I called these rights "stolen", as they might have been gently borrowed by a generation or two, who cared enough to rally around these issues. Women's reproductive rights in America were not g-d given legislative charity, nor were they ever fully and completely "won". What has been won cannot be taken away without another war, without the counter-acttack. The struggle is real, the battle continues every day, every little bit we do not hold on to tightly may just slip away rapidly and for good.
Call me nuts but I feel personally responsible to carry on the torch. I feel compelled to do everything in my power to uphold the existing rights and fight for further amelioration. Social justice is in my blood, I owe it to my mother and my grandmothers. For this reason I do not understand carless young women of today who are so eager to simply lay down and let the sprit of this new war transport them back a century without knowledge, tools or means of hope. :glasses:
Kätzchen
10-09-2024, 09:40 AM
Bumping my friend’s forum thread on matters that concern us all. Kobi was a social worker with a brilliant mind at mapping social issues and keeping up up to date. Miss you Kobi. This bump is for you! And so others can read back on how things have been mapped prior to the Robert’s Court annihilating women’s once secured rights.
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