Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights per draft opinion (Update: Dobbs opinion official) (2 Viewers)

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    Brennan77

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    The bill passed the Florida House on Thursday afternoon with 70 members voting for the ban and 40 voting against. The legislation not only bans abortion after six weeks ― a point at which most people don’t realize they’re pregnant ― but also prohibits telehealth for abortion care and allots $25 million annually for deceptive anti-abortion pregnancy centers.

    Republicans in both the Florida House and Senate voted down amendments to audit the $25 million, which would ensure the government knew how the taxpayer money is spent.
     
    Democrats have taken multiple actions in response to what they say is a “draconian” and “dangerous” decision by a federal judge in Texas threatening access to the most commonly used method of abortion in the US.

    Several Democratic governors have begun to stockpile doses of the drugs used in medication abortions. Nearly every Democrat in Congress signed onto an amicus brief urging an appeals court to stay the decision, while some called on the Biden administration to simply “ignore” the ruling, should it be allowed to stand. A group of House Democrats introduced a bill that would give the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) final approval over drugs used in medication abortion.

    Their fury over the ruling has been met with relative silence from Republicans.

    Only a handful of congressional Republicans offered immediate comment on judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s decision last week to revoke the FDA’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. Just a fraction of Republicans on Capitol Hill signed an amicus brief urging an appeals court to uphold the ruling. And among the party’s national field of Republican presidential nominees, just one – the former vice-president, Mike Pence – unabashedly praised the decision.

    The starkly different reactions underscores just how dramatically the politics of abortion have shifted since last June, when conservatives achieved their once-unimaginable goal of overturning Roe v Wade.

    For decades, Republicans relied on abortion to rally their conservative base, calling for the reversal of Roe v Wade and vowing to outlaw the procedure if given the chance. But since the supreme court’s ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, abortion has emerged as a potent issue for Democrats, galvanizing voters furious over the thicket of state bans and restrictions ushered in by the decision.

    Republicans have struggled to respond, lacking a unified policy on abortion in the nearly 10 months since the landmark decision.

    “Dobbs really did get Republicans, especially elected Republicans, running scared,” said Jon Schweppe, policy director at the conservative American Principles Project.

    Polling has consistently found a clear majority of Americans believe abortion should remain legal in all or most cases, though partisan divisions have deepened over the years. A new survey released by the Pew Research Center this week showed that by a margin of more than 2 to 1, Americans believe medication abortion, which is at the center of the current legal battle, should be legal in their state……..

     
    I’ve seen the clip of the extremist judge in TX who made the batshit ruling about abortion pills where he claimed he would never allow his religion to alter his rulings and he didn’t know anyone who ever had. What I didn’t know until now is that he concealed an article he wrote just before he was confirmed by the Senate that details his religious views on abortion and trans people. They’re all corrupt.

     
    It wasn’t initially clear how Marcus Silva, a Texas man, even knew about his ex-wife’s abortion. Last month, just weeks after the divorce his wife had filed for was finalized, Silva filed a “wrongful death” lawsuit against three of her closest friends, seeking $1m from each.

    He claims that the women helped his wife obtain abortion medication in July 2022 – two months after she had filed for divorce from him, and just a few weeks after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v Wade and states like Texas outlawed abortion. And Silva had text messages to prove it.

    His legal complaint included photos of what Silva claimed was a group chat between his then wife and the three women he is now suing. In it, the women can be seen working together to help their friend end her pregnancy and extricate herself from Silva.

    In the group chat, the women delegate tasks, each taking on the responsibility to look for abortion providers or financial assistance. They also speak of the need to keep both the pregnancy and the abortion from Silva, speculating that his wife will be made to suffer more if he finds out. “Delete all conversations from today,” one woman tells Silva’s then wife. “You don’t want him looking through it.”

    But it seems that Silva did indeed look through it. New reporting from NPR strongly suggests that Silva and his attorneys obtained the text messages because Silva rifled through his wife’s purse when she wasn’t looking, and took photos of her text threads with his own phone.

    The images themselves are off-center and blurry; there’s a glare on the screen, and in some of the pictures, you can see what seems to be the outline of Silva’s own thumb reflected on the glass of his wife’s cellphone. Lana Ramjit, the director of operations at Cornell’s Clinic to End Tech Abuse, was frank about her assessment of the images to NPR, describing them as “janky”. “They are pretty clearly photos of a phone,” Ramjit says…….

    James Bond this guy is not. But perhaps the anti-choice movement has never had so perfect an avatar as Marcus Silva. Silva’s lawsuit – his transparent malice and jiltedness, his obsessive attempts to exert exacting control over his wife, his use of petty and obvious, rather than sophisticated, technological surveillance over her and the women who would help her escape his control – offer both a clear vision of the anti-choice movement’s project of enabling men’s private entrapment and abuse of women, and a decent metaphor for the creepy, stupid and cruel nature of the anti-choice movement writ large.

    Maybe it is their identification with his trifling cruelty that has drawn the leaders of the anti-choice movement to embrace Silva so closely: the attorney representing him in his lawsuit against his wife’s friends is Jonathan Mitchell, the architect of Texas’s bounty-hunter abortion ban, SB8…….


     
    It wasn’t initially clear how Marcus Silva, a Texas man, even knew about his ex-wife’s abortion. Last month, just weeks after the divorce his wife had filed for was finalized, Silva filed a “wrongful death” lawsuit against three of her closest friends, seeking $1m from each.

    He claims that the women helped his wife obtain abortion medication in July 2022 – two months after she had filed for divorce from him, and just a few weeks after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v Wade and states like Texas outlawed abortion. And Silva had text messages to prove it.

    His legal complaint included photos of what Silva claimed was a group chat between his then wife and the three women he is now suing. In it, the women can be seen working together to help their friend end her pregnancy and extricate herself from Silva.

    In the group chat, the women delegate tasks, each taking on the responsibility to look for abortion providers or financial assistance. They also speak of the need to keep both the pregnancy and the abortion from Silva, speculating that his wife will be made to suffer more if he finds out. “Delete all conversations from today,” one woman tells Silva’s then wife. “You don’t want him looking through it.”

    But it seems that Silva did indeed look through it. New reporting from NPR strongly suggests that Silva and his attorneys obtained the text messages because Silva rifled through his wife’s purse when she wasn’t looking, and took photos of her text threads with his own phone.

    The images themselves are off-center and blurry; there’s a glare on the screen, and in some of the pictures, you can see what seems to be the outline of Silva’s own thumb reflected on the glass of his wife’s cellphone. Lana Ramjit, the director of operations at Cornell’s Clinic to End Tech Abuse, was frank about her assessment of the images to NPR, describing them as “janky”. “They are pretty clearly photos of a phone,” Ramjit says…….

    James Bond this guy is not. But perhaps the anti-choice movement has never had so perfect an avatar as Marcus Silva. Silva’s lawsuit – his transparent malice and jiltedness, his obsessive attempts to exert exacting control over his wife, his use of petty and obvious, rather than sophisticated, technological surveillance over her and the women who would help her escape his control – offer both a clear vision of the anti-choice movement’s project of enabling men’s private entrapment and abuse of women, and a decent metaphor for the creepy, stupid and cruel nature of the anti-choice movement writ large.

    Maybe it is their identification with his trifling cruelty that has drawn the leaders of the anti-choice movement to embrace Silva so closely: the attorney representing him in his lawsuit against his wife’s friends is Jonathan Mitchell, the architect of Texas’s bounty-hunter abortion ban, SB8…….


    I think he'll win that case hands down. It's the poster-child for the abortion bounty law.
     
    I’ve seen the clip of the extremist judge in TX who made the batshit ruling about abortion pills where he claimed he would never allow his religion to alter his rulings and he didn’t know anyone who ever had. What I didn’t know until now is that he concealed an article he wrote just before he was confirmed by the Senate that details his religious views on abortion and trans people. They’re all corrupt.

    No, they're not all corrupt. Some are, sure, but not all of them. I get the frustration, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't the answer.
     
    No, they're not all corrupt. Some are, sure, but not all of them. I get the frustration, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't the answer.
    I just meant the Federalist Society judges. It’s been an assault on the courts, been going on for years and now we are seeing the sorts of activist rulings that they say they oppose. Trump put in so many incompetent and corrupt judges that we will be dealing with rulings like these for decades.
     
    I just meant the Federalist Society judges. It’s been an assault on the courts, been going on for years and now we are seeing the sorts of activist rulings that they say they oppose. Trump put in so many incompetent and corrupt judges that we will be dealing with rulings like these for decades.
    Fair.
     
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    The unpleasant reality facing the anti-abortion movement is that most Americans don’t actually want to ban abortion.

    This explains why the pro-life summer of triumph, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, led to a season of such demoralizing political outcomes. Voters in Montana, Kansas, and Kentucky in November rejected ballot measures to make abortion illegal; just last month, in Wisconsin, voters elected an abortion-rights supporter to the state supreme court.

    Yet the movement’s activists don’t seem to care. Thirteen states automatically banned most abortions with trigger laws designed to go into effect when Roe fell; a Texas judge this month stayed the FDA approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, setting in motion what is sure to be a drawn-out legal battle; and some lawmakers are pursuing restrictions on traveling out of state for the procedure—what they call “abortion trafficking.”

    Even as the anti-abortion movement lacks a Next Big Objective, a new generation of anti-abortion leaders is ascendant—one that is arguably bolder and more uncompromising than its predecessors. This cohort, still high on the fumes of last summer’s victory, is determined to construct its ideal post-Roe America. And it’s forging ahead—come hell, high water, or public disgust.

    The groups this new generation leads “are not afraid to lose short term if they think the long-term gain will be eliminating abortion from the country,” Rachel Rebouché, a family-law professor at Temple University, told me.

    One such leader is Kristan Hawkins, the president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life. After Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, “some organizations had to go through this period where they had to reflect and figure out what they were going to do,” she told me. “But nothing changed in our organization—we’d already had that conversation years ago.” Students for Life participants have been calling themselves “the post-Roe generation” since 2019; that’s the year they launched a political-action committee to beef up their state-level presence and begin drafting legislation for a post-Roe society. In 2021, the organization started the Campaign for Abortion-Free Cities to promote what they call “alternatives to abortion” and neighborhood resources for pregnant women.

    “What the anti-abortion movement is, who’s leading it, and what it stands for are still being contested,” Mary Ziegler, a UC Davis law professor who has written about abortion for The Atlantic, told me. But organizations such as Students for Life will, in all likelihood, “be the ones running the movement going forward.” To understand the goals of people like Hawkins is, in other words, to peer into the future of America’s anti-abortion project.

    The thing about Hawkins is that she’s an optimist—and not a cautious one. So when the draft opinion suggesting that the Supreme Court was about to overrule Roe v. Wade leaked last May, she wasn’t particularly surprised, she told me—she felt vindicated. Other pro-lifers had refused “to let themselves even dare think that a post-Roe America was coming,” Hawkins said. “Of course it was.” She’d always assumed it would happen in her lifetime.

    As soon as the draft opinion came out, anti-abortion leaders began to consider their response. Some were worried that taking any kind of victory lap would be inappropriate—that it might scare the justices into moderating or reversing their ultimate decision. Hawkins didn’t care about any of that. “Why would we be guarded? It was important, good news!” she told me. “Folks across the country needed to see this generation celebrating.” Students for Life was one of the first anti-abortion organizations to release a statement praising the draft opinion—while being careful to condemn the leak itself.

    Hawkins, who is 37, styles herself as a straight shooter. She doesn’t dress up arguments with religious rhetoric—despite being Catholic herself—and she can be an effective, if sometimes abrasive, debater. Which makes sense, because she came to the pro-life movement through electoral politics. Hawkins knocked on doors for local and state Republican candidates; in college, she worked for the Republican National Committee to reelect President George W. Bush—and, for a year, she worked in his administration. Then, when Students for Life came looking for a new president in 2006, she eagerly accepted.............

    The Students for Life YouTube channel has a 22-minute highlight reel called “Greatest Pro-Choice Takedowns,” in which Hawkins responds to questions from young, often-emotional abortion-rights advocates. As you might expect, the videos feel mean. In each clip showing Hawkins facing off against a different student with a shaky voice, she makes them look silly and ill-informed, a relatively easy thing to do when your opponent is not being paid to perfect her talking points. But these exchanges don’t seem intended to change minds; they’re meant instead to humiliate—and thereby reveal the purported weaknesses in abortion-rights arguments.

    Doggedness and moral conviction have always characterized the anti-abortion movement. Activists have sustained their energy for 50 years “by believing that success was possible, even in the absence of clear victories,” Daniel K. Williams, a history professor at the University of West Georgia, told me. Dobbs gave this new generation a taste of victory. Activists like Hawkins are bolder now. Without Roe, they reason, anything is possible...........
    https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=286759


     

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    This makes me think they're trying to figure a way out of this...

    Yeah, they're probably pissed that they're dealing with this, but that's their job. To me, it's a pretty obvious case. The FDA has the authority to approve the drug and their authority can't be usurped by the states.

    Yeah, it's an oversimplification, but that's basically the general direction I think it needs to go.
     
    See, I read the delay differently. They’re trying to figure out a way to justify banning it.
    Not really. Even if they return it to the 5th Circuit, that hardly means they're done with it. They can't ban it anyway. It's my understanding that what this is really about is whether they take the case or not. If they take the case, then it's going to be several months before this issues is decided because they have to add it to the docket, listen to arguments and write opinions. The question is whether they would stay the lower court rulings in the meantime.

    Hopefully they do something expedited so we can get some sense of how to proceed going forward.
     

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