Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights per draft opinion (Update: Dobbs opinion official) (1 Viewer)

[LovesMusic7360]

Not long ago Kari Lake proclaimed Arizona's abortion law was a great law and wanted it the law of the state.

Now that she has gotten her way, she is lobbying for it to be repealed.

As I have been saying since 2022, the overwhelming vast majority of women aren't going to vote for the man who proudly boasts that he got rid of Roe V. Wade. Nor are those women going to vote for a forced birther politician.

Turns out, republican belief in "pro life" was all just lies to get votes. Who is surprised? I sure am not.

How many forced birthers will do the same about face?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ka ... r-BB1ltx3I.

Arizona Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake is actively lobbying state lawmakers to overturn a 160-year-old law she once supported that bans abortion in almost all cases, a source with knowledge of her efforts told CNN.

 

[Optimus Prime]

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the state’s second highest-ranking elected official and its leading Republican candidate for governor in 2024, once hailed banning abortion as his top priority, advocating for its complete ban without exceptions.

“For me, there is no compromise on abortion. It makes no difference to me why or how that child ended up in that womb,” he said in July 2020 while campaigning for lieutenant governor.

At the time, Robinson was a political newcomer, having built his campaign off his work as a conservative influencer espousing support for gun rights, law enforcement and “protecting the life of the unborn.”

Now, as the 2024 GOP front-runner for governor, Robinson avoids mentioning abortion on the campaign trail, claiming recently that he stopped using what he calls the “a-word,” preferring instead to use the word “life.”

He’s also softened his position. Robinson denies ever supporting abortion bans without exceptions, publicly stating that he has always struggled with the issue and confirming that he once paid for an abortion for his then-girlfriend, now-wife in the 1980s, an experience he says he fully regrets.

But in comments reviewed by CNN’s KFile dating back to 2018, Robinson regularly labeled abortion as “murder” and “genocide,” comparing the anti-abortion movement to the abolitionist movement to end slavery. He also baselessly speculated that the founders of Planned Parenthood were satanists who practiced witchcraft.

Robinson characterized women who undergo abortions, even if they are just “24 hours pregnant,” as murderers.

Robinson’s current position, his office has said, is support for so-called “heartbeat” legislation, which could ban abortion after a “heartbeat” is detected — but with exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.

If victorious in this year’s election, Robinson would be the first Black governor in the state’s history.........

GOP front-runner for North Carolina governor supported banning abortions without exceptions. Now he avoids using the ‘a-word’ | CNN Politics

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the state’s second highest-ranking elected official and its leading Republican candidate for governor in 2024, once hailed banning abortion as his top priority, advocating for its complete ban without exceptions.

www.cnn.com

 

[MT15]

Yes, they will. And same sex marriage.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Mike Pence had a message: always vote against abortion rights – even if, he suggested, that means voting for Donald Trump.

“That’s why we have primaries. We sort ’em out at every level. But after the primary’s over, you vote pro-life,” the former Republican vice-president to Trump told a downtown Washington DCballroom of young, diehard anti-abortion activists on Saturday. “You go get behind men and women who are going to stand for the right to life.”

The room erupted into applause.

The activists had gathered in the ballroom for the National Pro-Life Summit, the conclusion of a two-day extravaganza of anti-abortion activism in the US capital.

On Friday, many had walked through the snowy streets of Washington to support the March for Life, the largest annual anti-abortion event in the United States.…..

‘We will never go away’: anti-abortion activists meet in Washington to plan further bans

Abortion opponents are emboldened by the fall of Roe, but many states have enacted protections after ruling

www.theguardian.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

 

[MT15]

Remember when some GOP blow hard said that rapes just rarely result in pregnancy because the human body can somehow shut it down? I remember.

 

[fooferdoggie]

Remember when some GOP blow hard said that rapes just rarely result in pregnancy because the human body can somehow shut it down? I remember.

Yes thats horrible. lets not forget the lifetime commitment to take care of that child in a state that wont help at all. How much you want to be out of those 60.000 a small percentage got the rapist caught and jailed.

 

[Bigdaddysaints]

Yes thats horrible. lets not forget the lifetime commitment to take care of that child in a state that wont help at all. How much you want to be out of those 60.000 a small percentage got the rapist caught and jailed.

then give the rapists visitation rights on top of it

 

[Optimus Prime]

The fertility rate for teens in Texas rose for the first time in 15 years in 2022, a shift driven by disproportionately high rates seen among Hispanic teens in the year after a six-week state abortion ban took effect, according to a University of Houston study.

Latinas of all ages also experienced the biggest increase in births and fertility rates compared to other racial or ethnic group in the state from 2021 to 2022, according to the study released last week by University of Houston’s Institute for Research on Women, Gender & Sexuality.

Texas women delivered 16,147 more babies in 2022 than in 2021. Of those, 13,503 babies, or 84%, were delivered by Latinas, according to the study.

Additionally, the average fertility rate — the number of children born per 1,000 women — rose 5.1% among Latinas, compared to falling .2% for non-Hispanic white women and .6% for Black women. Among Latinas 25 and older, fertility rates rose 8%.

The state’s overall fertility rate rose for the first time since 2014, by 2%.

Texas’ teen birth rate increased slightly overall, while the U.S. teen birth rate continued to remain steady. Hispanic, Asian and Black teens all saw varying increases in their birth rates, while non-Hispanic whites continued to see declines.

Among Texas’ Hispanic teens, the rate rose 1.2%, or an increase from 27.22 to 27.56 births per 1,000. But for non-Hispanic white teens, the fertility rate fell 5%, from 11.71 births to 11.13 births per 1,000. The fertility rates for Black teens rose by .5% or 22.29 to 22.41. For Asian teens, birth rates rose by 8.2%, a larger ratio because of smaller numbers, 1.42 births to 1.58 births per 1,000.

The study states that the numbers suggest that while other racial and ethnic groups of women may have been affected by the state’s abortion ban, Hispanic women faced more challenges in getting reproductive care, including abortions.

“We don’t see any other reason,” said Elizabeth Gregory, director of the institute...........

Texas teen birthrate rose for first time in 15 years after abortion ban, largely affecting Latinas

Hispanic women and teens delivered 84% of all additional babies in Texas from 2021 to 2022, the year a six-week abortion ban took effect.

www.nbcnews.com

 

[Taurus]

The fertility rate for teens in Texas rose for the first time in 15 years in 2022, a shift driven by disproportionately high rates seen among Hispanic teens in the year after a six-week state abortion ban took effect, according to a University of Houston study.

Latinas of all ages also experienced the biggest increase in births and fertility rates compared to other racial or ethnic group in the state from 2021 to 2022, according to the study released last week by University of Houston’s Institute for Research on Women, Gender & Sexuality.

Texas women delivered 16,147 more babies in 2022 than in 2021. Of those, 13,503 babies, or 84%, were delivered by Latinas, according to the study.

Additionally, the average fertility rate — the number of children born per 1,000 women — rose 5.1% among Latinas, compared to falling .2% for non-Hispanic white women and .6% for Black women. Among Latinas 25 and older, fertility rates rose 8%.

The state’s overall fertility rate rose for the first time since 2014, by 2%.

Texas’ teen birth rate increased slightly overall, while the U.S. teen birth rate continued to remain steady. Hispanic, Asian and Black teens all saw varying increases in their birth rates, while non-Hispanic whites continued to see declines.

Among Texas’ Hispanic teens, the rate rose 1.2%, or an increase from 27.22 to 27.56 births per 1,000. But for non-Hispanic white teens, the fertility rate fell 5%, from 11.71 births to 11.13 births per 1,000. The fertility rates for Black teens rose by .5% or 22.29 to 22.41. For Asian teens, birth rates rose by 8.2%, a larger ratio because of smaller numbers, 1.42 births to 1.58 births per 1,000.

The study states that the numbers suggest that while other racial and ethnic groups of women may have been affected by the state’s abortion ban, Hispanic women faced more challenges in getting reproductive care, including abortions.

“We don’t see any other reason,” said Elizabeth Gregory, director of the institute...........

Texas teen birthrate rose for first time in 15 years after abortion ban, largely affecting Latinas

Hispanic women and teens delivered 84% of all additional babies in Texas from 2021 to 2022, the year a six-week abortion ban took effect.

www.nbcnews.com

Wow. Misogyny vs racism. Which way will the GOP tilt?

At this rate they're looking at 60,000 more brown voters every Presidential cycle. Can even their best voter suppression tactics keep up?

 

[zztop]

Wisconsin Republicans approve bill banning abortions after 14 weeks of pregnancy

Republicans who control the Wisconsin Assembly have passed a bill that would call for a binding statewide referendum to ban abortion after 14 weeks of pregnancy.

apnews.com

If voters approved the referendum, the prohibition would take effect the day after the results are certified.

“A vote against (the bill) is a vote against the will of the people,” Republican Rep. Amanda Nedweski, the bill’s chief Assembly sponsor, said during a news conference before the floor session began.

 

[zztop]

wtf is this insanity. I can't imagine the trauma of going through this, then being arrested on top of it all.

at least some common sense prevailed, but this will probably haunt her for a very long time:

"An Ohio grand jury decided on Jan. 11 that Watts would not be indicted. In a statement, Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins said that “Watts did not violate the Ohio criminal statute.”

Black woman charged after miscarrying in bathroom shares feelings about arrest

Brittany Watts shared shocking details surrounding her miscarriage last September.

www.nbcnews.com

Upon arriving at the hospital a third time in the middle of her miscarriage, Watts said a nurse reassured her that “everything’s going to be OK.” Meanwhile, that nurse, whom the hospital has not identified, called the police

 

[Taurus]

wtf is this insanity. I can't imagine the trauma of going through this, then being arrested on top of it all.

at least some common sense prevailed, but this will probably haunt her for a very long time:

"An Ohio grand jury decided on Jan. 11 that Watts would not be indicted. In a statement, Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins said that “Watts did not violate the Ohio criminal statute.”

Black woman charged after miscarrying in bathroom shares feelings about arrest

Brittany Watts shared shocking details surrounding her miscarriage last September.

www.nbcnews.com

Upon arriving at the hospital a third time in the middle of her miscarriage, Watts said a nurse reassured her that “everything’s going to be OK.” Meanwhile, that nurse, whom the hospital has not identified, called the police

This is the thing. Like with soldiers and unlawful orders, like the border patrol separating families. These vile, cruel things are carried out by regular people. There's just far too many of them who'll take any opportunity to hurt someone to trust that our institutions will hold a second time.

 

[Optimus Prime]

First time hearing about the Mexico City Policy
=================================


Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has made a bigbet that outrage over abortion will keep the president in the White House come November.

Over the last several days, the Biden administration has unleashed a blitz of ads and events to spotlight the devastation wrought by the overturning of Roe v Wade.

Biden met with a reproductive health task force, while his vice-president, Kamala Harris – who he has entrusted to lead this effort – embarked on a national tour to talk about abortion. They even devoted their first joint campaign stop of 2024 to the issue.

From the podium, Biden promised to sign any bill that would codify Roe’s protections into law and to fight back efforts by Congress to diminish abortion access.


“Donald Trump and Maga Republicans, including the speaker of the House, are hellbent on going even further,” Biden said, a reference to the hard-right Republican speaker, Mike Johnson. “As long as I have power of the presidency, if Congress were to pass a national abortion ban, I would veto it.”

Congress is unlikely to ban or protect abortion anytime soon. Not only is Congress largely frozen – it passed just 27 bills last year – but both politicalparties seem wary of tackling national legislation around a third-rail topic like abortion.

Now that Roe is gone, the question of if and how to regulate abortion access is largely up to state governments to answer. But the executive branch of the US government still maintains several powers to protect abortion access – and undermine it.

What has Biden done to protect abortion access?​

The Biden administration’s ability to enforce remaining federal laws that touch on abortion is perhaps its greatest weapon in the fight over the procedure.

Shortly after Roe’s demise, the Biden administration announced that it believed a 1986 federal law that protects people’s access to emergency care at hospitals also applies to emergency abortions.

The administration later sued Idaho, arguing that the state’s near-total abortion ban flew in the face of that law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala).…….

What more could Biden be doing?​

The answer depends on who you ask. Abortion rights advocates have long been dissatisfied with Biden’s approach to the procedure; Biden has supported Roe’s protections but also said that, as a Catholic, he is personally not “big on abortion”.

During his campaign and the first several months of his presidency, he seemed wary of even saying the word “abortion”, leading reproductive justice advocates to launch a website devoted to answering the question “Did Biden Say Abortion Yet?” (He has now said it multiple times.)

The Biden administration has pursued several cases under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or Face Act, a federal law that penalizes people for threatening, obstructing, or injuring someone who is trying to access a reproductive health clinic, or for vandalizing a clinic. But abortion providers have long complained that the law is not being enforced enough.

Abortion rights supporters have also proposed a litany of other, experimental ways to protect abortion access, such as by leasing federal land to abortion providers or advocating for the repeal of the Comstock Act.

Biden could also loosen regulations around abortion pills, although Ziegler cautioned that such actions run the risk of politicizing the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to a dangerous degree.……

What could Donald Trump do to further restrict abortion?​

If Trump wins the presidency in November 2024, he may reverse course on many of the Biden administration’s decisions around how and if to enforce federal abortion law.

He could try to implement the Comstock Act to ban abortion in some form, including in states that haven’t passed bans. He could also decrease Face Act prosecutions, or tighten regulations on mifepristone.

Unlike Biden, he likely wouldn’t worry about politicizing the FDA, Ziegler said. “There’s a lot of asymmetry that hurts Democrats, but also Democrats do value some of these institutional separations that Republicans don’t.”

Trump’s first four years in the White House also offer a blueprint for how he may further dismantle access to both abortion and contraception if he returns to power.

Since the 1980s, whenever a Republican becomes president, he has implemented what is known as “the Mexico City policy” or the “global gag rule”, as abortion rights supporters call it.

This policy typically blocks foreign NGOs that receive US family planning funding from providing abortion-related services or even advocating for increased access to the procedure. (Historically, whenever a Democrat replaces a Republican as president, he has rescinded the Mexico City policy.)

Trump, however, turbocharged the Mexico City policy during his presidency. Rather than stripping funding only from family planning assistance, in 2017 his administration expanded it to apply to all US global health assistance.

Rather than impacting $600m worth of funding, by 2018 it impacted $12bn, according to estimates by the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights.

As president, Trump also implemented a “domestic gag rule”, which blocked members of Title X, the nation’s largest family planning program, from even referring people for abortions.

Rather than comply with this rule, a quarter of Title X-funded health centers simply left the program. Six states were left with zero Title X providers, who offer low-cost access to family planning services like birth control.……..

Biden hopes abortion will keep him in the White House. But has he done enough to protect rights?

The president has made big promises and held the line against legal challenges, but activists say he could be doing more

www.theguardian.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

For years, the beltway set had a standard line of advice for Democratic candidates: stick to the economy. The idea was that white, male, blue-collar voters – those magical creatures, somewhere out there in the windswept lands of the upper midwest, who always qualify in the pundit imagination as “real Americans” – would be turned off by so-called culture-war issues.

These guys, we were told, didn’t want to hear about civil rights or social equality: they wanted to hear about economic growth.

According to this advice, Democrats could be pro-choice, pro-racial justice, or pro-LGBTQ+ rights, but not openly, avowedly so. They had to play their progressive social positions in a minor key.

It’s not clear that this advice ever really paid off for Democratic candidates. At any rate, you don’t hear it much any more. That’s because, for the past two years, Democratic electoral victories up and down the ballot have been driven disproportionately by one of those culture-war issues that candidates were typically told to avoid: abortion.

American women’s anger over the US supreme court’s Dobbs ruling is the single most potent political force in America right now, and if Joe Biden wins re-election – a distinct if imperiled possibility – it will be because his campaign succeeded in making the election a referendum on Republicans’ abortion bans. There is no one issue with greater importance; there are few issues that have ever motivated voters so dramatically.

You would think that this would be a gift to the Biden campaign. On paper, Republicans are almost solely responsible for the overturning of Roe and the draconian, morbid and dangerous abortion bans that have followed.

Donald Trump continually brags about appointing three of the six justices who ruled to eliminate the abortion right; Republican politicians nationwide, not content with being able to ban abortion, have sought to eliminate life and health exemptions, to further restrict gestational age limits, and to impose criminal and civil penalties for things like advocating for abortion rights or transporting a patient across state lines.

These are hateful, bigoted, invasive and lawless moves, ones that degrade women’s citizenship and are hated by the public.

And they’re Republican moves.

But the new prominence of abortion in electoral politics presents something of a conundrum for the Biden campaign: because while Republicans are vehemently anti-choice, Biden himself is not a particularly convincing abortion rights advocate.

He is, at best, unenthused about the issue. Biden speaks of abortion in stilted, euphemistic terms, talking about “restoring the protections of Roe” or “a woman’s right to choose” more than “abortion”. (He did not use the word in public remarks until he was forced to after facing pressure from activists.)

On the stump, he frequently ad libs, straying from prepared remarks to make his dislike of abortion clear. In one set of remarks last year, he unhelpfully offered that he was “not big on abortion”.

In remarks this past week, he characterized his own position using anti-choice buzzwords, saying he was opposed to “abortion on demand”. Most of the campaigning on the issue has been passed off to Kamala Harris, admittedly a more comfortable messenger for a women’s rights platform.

But outsourcing such a prominent issue to the vice-president is itself fraught with symbolic dangers: the campaign risks signaling that they consider abortion to be a second-tier issue by assigning it to their second-tier principal.

And Harris is limited in what she can say by the somewhat narrow extent of the president’s comfort.…….

Abortion rights are Biden’s most powerful re-election issue. He should act like it | Moira Donegan

Abortion is a crucial issue in this election – and a powerful motivator for voters. Yet the president is still tiptoeing around it

www.theguardian.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

Following the November 2023 elections, Utah Republican Sen Mitt Romney admitted: “The more we talk about abortion, the worse we’re doing.”

The idiom “the dog that caught the car” often comes up when discussing conservatives’ aspiration-turned-reality of dismantling the constitutional right to abortion in the 2022 Dobbs decision.

“We caught the car, it doesn’t sell,” Ariel Hill-Davis, co-founder of Republican Women for Progress, told The Independent.“Almost no Republicans are out there touting [Dobbs ] as a victory.”

Republican voters made it clear they don’t actually want to see a federal abortion ban. Even in deep-red states, reproductive rights have won at the ballot box since Roe was overturned. Yet it looks increasingly likely that Trump will be the GOP candidate this year — and his repeated boasts about the Dobbs decision put congressional Republicans who want to hold onto their jobs in a tricky spot.

What does one do in such a situation? Perhaps quietly start deleting references to being anti-abortion off their websites.


Texas Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz recently deleted mentions of her pro-life stance on her website, The Daily Beast reported earlier this month. “Monica believes in finding common ground on this issue. This includes protecting sensible exceptions for women in heartbreaking situations and improving access to prenatal care,” her campaign manager Andrew Baughman told The Independent in a statement……

Republicans are quietly deleting mentions of abortion from their sites. We asked why

Republicans who previously campaigned on a pro-life position are now ‘in a tough spot,’ experts say. Kelly Rissman speaks to GOP strategists and campaign managers about what’s going on behind the scenes

www.independent.co.uk

 

[Optimus Prime]

Brittany Watts, Ohio woman charged with felony after miscarriage at home, describes shock of her arrest

Brittany Watts, the Ohio woman charged with a felony after a miscarriage, says she doesn't want "any other woman to go through what I had to go through."

www.cbsnews.com

 

[MT15]

She’s a comedian so she puts it in a funny way, but people do need to think about this. It isn’t only parents of girls who have to think about it.

 

[Booker]

Hmmm, wonder why that would be?

More women said they would support Biden over Trump in this latest survey, with 58 percent backing Biden and 36 percent backing Trump. Last month, the Quinnipiac poll found 53 percent of women supported the incumbent Democrat, compared to 41 percent for the Republican challenger.

Gender gap expands between Biden and Trump, new poll shows

Biden holds a slight lead over Trump in Wednesday’s poll from Quinnipiac University.

www.yahoo.com