The Assault on Womens Sexual and Reproductive Rights

[Kobi]

Roe v. Wade




Supreme Court of the United States

Argued December 13, 1971
Reargued October 11, 1972
Decided January 22, 1973

[Happy_Go_Lucky]

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/2012/0...n_1327707.html

NOW:

http://washingtonexaminer.com/the-ug...rticle/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?

[Kobi]

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

[Kobi]

*****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.

[Kobi]

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/20...ampaign=buffer

[Kobi]

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/medi..._hr7_vote.html

[Kobi]

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-libert...ns-rights-rise