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Old 01-19-2014, 12:54 PM   #261
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Default Federal court strikes down North Carolina ultrasound abortion requirement

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/2014/01/1...n-requirement/
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Old 01-20-2014, 09:51 AM   #262
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Old 01-20-2014, 09:52 AM   #263
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Old 01-21-2014, 12:09 PM   #264
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Default Parties Seize On Abortion Issues in Midterm Race

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...race.html?_r=1
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Old 01-21-2014, 12:13 PM   #265
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Old 01-21-2014, 12:21 PM   #266
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Default Kentucky Lawmaker Attempts to Define Abortion as Domestic Violence

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/20...stic-violence/
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Old 01-21-2014, 03:07 PM   #267
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Default Huckabee: Democrats' 'War on Women' Claim Demeans Females

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/mik...1/20/id/548004

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Old 01-22-2014, 06:39 AM   #268
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Default Roe vs Wade Anniversary

Roe v. Wade




Supreme Court of the United States

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

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Old 01-22-2014, 07:33 AM   #269
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Default Kismet

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.


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Old 01-22-2014, 04:16 PM   #270
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Default GOP rep.: Force women to have babies because abortion ‘robs men’ of fatherhood rights

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.

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Old 01-25-2014, 07:00 AM   #271
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Default Women as incubators? A different twist.

*****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.
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Old 01-28-2014, 06:24 AM   #272
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Default Anti-Choicers Drop the ‘Life’ Pretense, Increasingly Admit They’re Angry About Sex

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
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Old 01-29-2014, 08:38 AM   #273
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Default HR7 passed in the House of Representatives yesterday

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
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Old 01-30-2014, 10:24 AM   #274
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Default Scary Trend: Across America, Attacks on Pregnant Women's Rights On the Rise

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
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Old 02-13-2014, 11:06 AM   #275
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Default What’s Really Behind the War on (White) Women?

*****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.
-------
http://www.forharriet.com/2014/02/wh...ite-women.html
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Old 03-25-2014, 08:51 PM   #276
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Default Female Supreme Court Justices Hammer Birth Control Challengers

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/supr...ol-challengers
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Old 03-25-2014, 09:04 PM   #277
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Old 03-26-2014, 08:31 PM   #278
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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/commentis...omen-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.
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Old 04-07-2014, 09:03 PM   #279
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Sometimes, I am truly afraid for the future.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014...rty-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.
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Old 06-29-2014, 02:33 PM   #280
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Default Supreme Court Strikes Down Massachusetts Buffer Zone Law

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.o....2l4CqSW2.dpuf
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