Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights per draft opinion (Update: Dobbs opinion official) (4 Viewers)

Optimus Prime said:

Conservative states kick off new fight to limit access to abortion pill mifepristone despite Supreme Court decision | CNN Politics

Four months after the Supreme Court tossed out a high-profile challenge to the abortion drug mifepristone, and as abortion access is a major flashpoint in the presidential election, three conservative states are following through on a promise to bring the issue back to the forefront with a new...

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I really like that these guys can't control themselves. The smart thing to do would be to lay low until after the election, but just like the scorpion on the frog's back, they just can't control themselves.

DJ1BigTymer said:

Too bad this country will never elect this dude as POTUS! He seems to be the most genuine politician out there and the only person rom the D's to absolutely crush this 9 month abortion lie.

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That was absolutely spectacular, would vote for him as well....he would crush any R in a debate....

I’ve been practising medicine and providing abortions in Arizona for the last 29 years. When I first opened my own clinic in Phoenix back in 1999, getting an abortion was relatively straightforward.

But over the past two decades, Arizona’s Republicans have tried to make it as difficult as possible for women to terminate a pregnancy. When the state goes to the polls on 5 November, we’ll be voting not only on who becomes president, but on whether abortion is a constitutional right.

In a historically Republican swing state where Donald Trump is only just ahead of Kamala Harris in the polls, as many as 22% of respondents named abortion as their most important election issue.

That’s not surprising, given what is required to end a pregnancy in Arizona today. There are just nine abortion clinics in a state of more than 7 million people.

Since pharmacies and physicians in Arizona aren’t allowed to send out abortion pills by post, women must travel to visit one of these clinics in person. A state-mandated “information session” describing the risks of the procedure is required at least 24 hours before every abortion (even though the procedure is usually far safer than childbirth).

Federal law means most abortions aren’t covered by Medicaid, so they cost between $600 and $1,000 (£500-£770), plus two days off work, plus the cost of travelling across the state, plus two nights’ accommodation.

Perhaps that’s affordable if you have a decent job. But it’s not if you’re poor. “Pro-choice” is no longer an apt description for abortion access in Arizona, because while the procedure is technically legal up to 15 weeks (unlike in Texas, for example), many women aren’t in a financial position to make that choice.

The New York Times recently ran a story showing that 171,000 womenin the US travelled out of state for an abortion last year. Some travelled hundreds or even thousands of miles for a procedure that usually takes less than 10 minutes.

Women are furious that it’s come to this, and they will channel their fury at the ballot box…….

Don’t believe any R when they say they will leave it to the states. They’re lying their arses off.

I guess not all lawyers are snakes (including Chuck). General counsel resigned instead of continuing to push this stupid case in court and elsewhere.

John Wilson, the health department’s general counsel, sent cease-and-desist letters to multiple television stations airing the ad. Floridians Protecting Freedom then filed a lawsuit against Wilson and the state’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, saying the threats amounted to “unconstitutional coercion and viewpoint discrimination” and pressed the court to bar the state from following up on threats to sue.

On Thursday, the judge agreed the health department’s threats were “viewpoint discrimination” and wrote that the group presented “a substantial likelihood of proving an ongoing violation of its First Amendment rights through the threatened direct penalization of its political speech.”

The judge’s order, which is valid through October 29, effectively bars Ladapo from intimidating local stations for airing the Amendment 4 ad.

Walker’s granting of the restraining order comes less than a week after Wilson resigned from his post. In a letter obtained by the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald, Wilson wrote that “a man is nothing without his conscience,” adding that “it has become clear in recent days that I cannot join you on the road that lies before the agency.”

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Optimus Prime said:

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People are getting really savvy on slipping past the fascists's applications that use to scan audio for keywords in internet content that they want to bombard with counter messaging and harassment. The fascists don't have any apps sophisticated enough to recognize text in a video.

The Biden administration is proposing a rule that would expand access to contraceptive products, including making over-the-counter birth control and condoms free for the first time for women of reproductive age who have private health insurance.

Under the proposal by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Labor Department, and Treasury Department, which was announced by the administration on Monday, health insurance companies would be required to cover all recommended over-the-counter contraception products, such as condoms, spermicide and emergency contraception, without a prescription and at no cost, according to senior administration officials.

It would also require private health insurance providers to notify recipients about the covered over-the-counter products.

Infant mortality increased in the months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, leading to legislation across the country that drastically limited the accessibility of abortions with widespread reproductive health consequences.

In the 18 months following the Supreme Court decision rescinding the federal right to abortion in the Dobbs decision in June 2022, the infant mortality rate was 7% higher than expected, according to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics today.

This corresponded to 247 excess deaths in three months studied — October 2022, March 2023, and April 2023. More than 80% of those deaths occurred in infants with congenital abnormalities.

As of this writing, 20 states have banned abortion or passed legislation that bans abortions within early gestational limits, and the majority of these states do not have exemptions for fetal anomalies.

This pushes some pregnant people to give birth to babies with congenital anomalies and watch them die just after birth, when they may have elected for an abortion before to avoid such a traumatic experience.

Infant mortality was trending downward until 2022, when it increased for the first time in 20 years by 3%.

Negative trends in maternal and infant health have coincided with legislation that restricts abortion access, and research has shown that infants die at higher rates in states with stricter abortion bans.

A similar study also published in JAMA Pediatricsearlier this year found infant mortality rose by 13% in Texas after it banned abortions after six weeks in 2021.

Also in that study, infant deaths caused by congenital abnormalities increased more than overall deaths.……

Reproductive rights measures are on the ballots in 10 states after heated debates over how to describe their impact on abortion — and that’s just in English.

In 388 places across the U.S. where English isn’t the primary language among communities of voters, the federal Voting Rights Act requires that all elections information be made available in each community’s native language.

Such translations are meant to help non-native English speakers understand what they’re voting for. But vague or technical terms can be challenging, even more so when it comes to Indigenous languages that have only limited written dictionaries.

For example, New York’s referendum doesn’t even use the word “abortion,” complicating efforts to convey intent — advocates complain that the official Korean translation means “drop the fetus.”

And how exactly should the science of “viability” in the Florida and Nevada measures be explained in the oral traditions of the Seminole and Shoshone tribes?…….

Florida woman seeking an abortion had visited Planned Parenthood North Tampa, just one day before Hurricane Milton barrelled through the region. Amid evacuations, floods, and power outages, she needed to wait at least a day before she could return to the clinic for her second appointment, due to the state’s mandatory 24-hour waiting period for abortions.

But the Planned Parenthood clinic lost power in the storm, and couldn’t open. The woman was forced to go to another clinic, restarting the 24-hour clock and pushing her one day closer to the point of illegality, which, in Florida, is just six weeks pregnant.

“In cases like this, that’s no longer a six-week ban, that’s a five-week five-day ban, because the law allows for absolutely no wiggle room for events that are not in anyone’s control,” said Dr Chelsea Daniels, who practices at Planned Parenthood of South, East and North Florida.

Two hurricanes rampaged the southeastern US in a two-week span, upending abortion care in a region that already boasts some of the most restrictive bans in the country.…….

Florida's attorney general doubled down on the state's right to threaten television stations with criminal prosecution for airing ads in favor of a constitutional referendum to restore abortion rights.

In a new filing in Floridians Protecting Freedom v. Ladapo, Republican Ashley Moody told a federal district court in Tallahassee that the First Amendment does not protect the right to broadcast "false" claims about the state's near-total ban on elective abortion procedures, which kicks in at six weeks of gestation — before most women even know they're pregnant.

The state Department of Health under Gov. Ron DeSantis and his health chief Joseph Ladapo have threatened TV stations running an ad about a woman with cancer expressing fear about being unable to access necessary abortion care for her health. They have warned stations could face prosecution under an obscure "sanitary nuisance" law, arguing that the ad creates a public health hazard by falsely discouraging women from seeking medical services they have a legal right to.

Experts have said the ad does not make false claims about the abortion law — and that even if it were, it would be legally protected political speech under the First Amendment.

Moody insists in the new filing that this isn't the case.

"FPF claims a constitutional right to publish objectively false information about the availability of medical services, even if the publication of that false information causes a woman not to seek medical care in a life-or-death emergency," said the filing. "But the Constitution protects no such thing. Accordingly, FPF is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its First Amendment claim, and injunctive relief is improper."..............

For more than a decade, “Melinda” has raised a child she never wanted — a child that was the product of rape.

“I love my child. But if I could go back in time and get an abortion, I would 100 per cent of the time,” she told The Independent.

Melinda, whose name was changed at her request to protect her child, said her perspective often “trips people up,” but it doesn’t mean she hates her child — she just wishes she’d been able to get an abortion.

While she technically could have accessed the procedure in her home state of Tennessee at the time, it wasn’t really an option. Significant barriers stood in her way: Being a victim of rape, not having money, and reeling from the shock tactics of a fake clinic.

Her story exposes the hurdles that pregnant women faced more than a decade before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in June 2022 changed the landscape of abortion in the US…….

Optimus Prime said:

Florida's attorney general doubled down on the state's right to threaten television stations with criminal prosecution for airing ads in favor of a constitutional referendum to restore abortion rights.

In a new filing in Floridians Protecting Freedom v. Ladapo, Republican Ashley Moody told a federal district court in Tallahassee that the First Amendment does not protect the right to broadcast "false" claims about the state's near-total ban on elective abortion procedures, which kicks in at six weeks of gestation — before most women even know they're pregnant.

The state Department of Health under Gov. Ron DeSantis and his health chief Joseph Ladapo have threatened TV stations running an ad about a woman with cancer expressing fear about being unable to access necessary abortion care for her health. They have warned stations could face prosecution under an obscure "sanitary nuisance" law, arguing that the ad creates a public health hazard by falsely discouraging women from seeking medical services they have a legal right to.

Experts have said the ad does not make false claims about the abortion law — and that even if it were, it would be legally protected political speech under the First Amendment.

Moody insists in the new filing that this isn't the case.

"FPF claims a constitutional right to publish objectively false information about the availability of medical services, even if the publication of that false information causes a woman not to seek medical care in a life-or-death emergency," said the filing. "But the Constitution protects no such thing. Accordingly, FPF is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its First Amendment claim, and injunctive relief is improper."..............

MSN

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Ohh the hypocrisy. It was in Florida that Fox used a court case, not directly about the news having a right to lie, to legally end run their way into establishing legal precedent that news has a right to lie.

The arguments made by antiabortion states to sugarcoat their manifestly misogynistic policies have always borne the acrid odor of cynicism and hypocrisy.

You know what I mean: that their restrictions on reproductive medical care are all about protecting the health of women, preserving the lives of the unborn, fulfilling a moral imperative to honor the sanctity of life, etc., etc.

So we should thank the red states Missouri, Kansas and Idaho for at least being honest. As they disclosed in a federal lawsuit this month, their real goal is to farm pregnant teenagers and their unwanted babies to keep up their population numbers, in order to avoid shrinkage in their congressional delegations and lose federal dollars from programs based on population.

That may sound incredible, but it's set forth in black and white in a joint legal filing in federal court.

"Each abortion," they write, "represents at least one lost potential or actual birth." Because of this "loss of potential population," the states face "subsequent 'diminishment of political representation' and 'loss of federal funds,' such as potentially 'losing a seat in Congress or qualifying for less federal funding if their populations are' reduced or their increase diminished."

The target of their legal filing is the dispensing by mail of mifepristone, the abortion drug that the Supreme Court allowed to remain on the market in a decision in June. "Remote dispensing of abortion drugs," they assert, "is depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers."

So there you have it. Missouri, Kansas and Idaho think it's of paramount importance to keep up the rates of teen pregnancy, lest they lose a congressional seat here or there or a few bucks in federal handouts. One might ask whether this sounds humane or even sane, but to ask the question is to answer it.

Here's the background on this ghastly argument. It started with the Supreme Court's ruling in a lawsuit brought by a passel of antiabortion fanatics that aimed to roll back the Food and Drug Administration's approvals of mifepristone dispensing by mail. The lawsuit persuaded federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Amarillo, Texas, one of the Trumpiest of Trump-appointed federal judges, to overturn FDA approvals dating to 2020 and throw the drug off the market............

An Ohio judge has decided that the state’s ban on most abortions was unconstitutional and could not be enforced.

Judge Christian Jenkins, of the Hamilton county common pleas court, also granted a permanent injunction in his ruling on Thursday.

Jenkins said that Ohio’s abortion prohibition flouted language in a voter-approved amendment to the state constitution that protected reproductive healthcare,


“Ohio voters have spoken. The Ohio constitution now unequivocally protects the right to abortion,” Jenkins said in his ruling.

Jenkins’s decision stems from a law that prohibited doctors from performing abortions after the detection of fetal cardiac or embryonic activity. This activity can be as early as six weeks into pregnancy, the Columbus Dispatch reported.

While Republican lawmakers in Ohio passed this law in 2019, the legislation did not go into effect until June 2022 – when the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade.

Jenkins temporarily paused the law less than three months after it went into effect. Healthcare providers in Ohio filed suit to permanently end the legislation, as it drove patients to seek reproductive care outside of the state and imperiled several clinics.

A young girl who was sexual assaulted in Columbus, Ohio, even had to travel to Indiana for abortion care, spurring still more anger over the measure.…..