Women's Abortion Access and Right to Reproductive Healthcare Threatened by Extremist Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth Machinations
1). “Missouri's Abortion Ban Blocked”, Dec 20, 2024, Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day, at < https://jessica.substack.com/
2). “Abortion Is Heading to the Supreme Court—Again”, Dec 18, 2024, Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day, at < https://jessica.substack.com/
3). “The legal battle over abortion-by-mail in the US has begun – and the stakes are high: This fight will test whether pro-choice states can protect providers who mail abortion pills to anti-choice states”, Dec 17, 2024, Moira Donegan, The Guardian, at < https://www.theguardian.com/
4). “Cool! Josh Hawley Says He Expects RFK Will Restrict Abortion Pills: As Trump hedges on where he stands on medication abortion, Hawley is reassuring anti-abortion extremists that the administration will have their back”, Dec 19, 2024, Kylie Cheung, Jezebel, at < https://www.jezebel.com/cool-
5). “South Carolina Republicans Set To Reintroduce Bill Allowing Death Penalty For Abortions: It’s unlikely that the bill will become law, but abortion rights advocates in the state warn it sends a message about what’s to come”, Dec 12, 2024, Alanna Vagianos, HuffPost, at < https://www.huffpost.com/
6). “Nearly 1,400 People Were Arrested For How They Acted During Pregnancy Before Roe Fell: Pregnant women have been arrested for drinking, drug use and even refusing a C-section, according to a new report from Pregnancy Justice. Advocates worry that post-Roe abortion bans will make criminal punishments more common. Sep 19, 2023, Alanna Vagianos, HuffPost, at < https://www.huffpost.com/
7). The Rise of Pregnancy Criminalization: A Pregnancy Justice Report, 2023, Pregnancy Justice, online summary at < https://www.
8). “Listen: Disturbing audio from Trump anti-abortion policy pick”, Dec 16, 2024, Nicolle Wallace, “Deadline White House”, MSNBC, duration of video 4:19, at < https://www.msnbc.com/
9). “Only 35% of Americans trust the US judicial system. This is catastrophic American confidence in the courts has hit a record low across party lines. This is worrying – if not surprising”, Dec 21, 2024, David Daley, The Guardian, at < https://www.theguardian.com/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: The Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth movement, fully aware that they are a hated pressure group with very little public support (maybe 10% - 15%), keeps working in many behind the scene ways to impose their extremely unpopular agenda on the U.S. population. Despite losing repeatedly, in fact whenever the electorate gets to vote on a fair understandable proposal to protect Abortion Access and Reproductive Health Care Rights, the Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth operatives keep using deceptive meethods behind the scenes to keep people from asserting their rights. Item 1)., “Missouri's Abortion Ban Blocked”, discusses the attempt by anti-abortion operatives in Missouri to overcome the recently passed state constitutional amendment that guarantees abortion and reproductive healthcare rights.. Item 1)., also notes that there has been another attempt to pass laws that enable the reactionaries to execute women who obtain abortions in South Carolina. In Item 2)., “Abortion Is Heading to ….”, Valenti looks at the move by Texas Attorney General to try to extend Texas' harsh vigilante / bounty hunter ethos to a more enligthened state. The legal battle will no doubt end up in the Supreme Court, that has become just a fascist rubber stamp institution now. And another aspect of these issues is examined by Item 3)., “The legal battle over ….”, where the article takes a fairly rigorous look at the politics and socioeconomic aspects of medication abortion materials sent by mail to primitive Red States.
Item 4)., “Cool! Josh Hawley ….”; Item 5)., “South Carolina Republicans ….”; and Item 6)., “Nearly 1,400 People ….”, all discuss at some length various aspects of the repression the Ruling Class wants to use inside the U.S. to defeat women and push them back into Dark Ages conditions. And Item 7)., “The Rise of Pregnancy Criminalization: ….”, discusses in great detail the increasing use of criminalization,up to and including threats of exectution, against women and anybody who tries to help them; by the openly fascist individual states, mostly in the Deep South. It is worth noting that at this point in time the largest geographic area on the entire planet, where a Harsh Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth regime interferes with women's personal healthcare decisions, is in the United States, particularly in the Deep South, parts of the Midwest, and some Mountain States.
Of course there are ongoing battles as to what the policies will be in the 25 - 30 states, that are either progressive “Blue States”, or are in the middle somewhere. Using the exceedingly thin election support they garnered, the Crazed Trump Regime is moving as if they had some massive mandate. The situation is shown in this recent map from The Center for Reproductive Rights that illustrates the current situation with state-wide laws and enforcement.
An example of the extremely dracoonian attitudes of many personnel, either from Project 2025 or nominated to posts in the Trump Regime is found in Item 8)., “Listen: Disturbing audio ….”, in which Ed Martin, who wrote the Rethug Platform Plank for Abortion Repression and who thinks there is no reason to allow women to ever access abortions, expresses his repugnant views on abortion on Deadline Washington on MSNBC. Martin has been nominated to serve as chief of staff at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the Trump Regime. Martin was an early vocal advocate of prison terms for women who obtained abortions and a national ban on Abortions, and he believes that life begins at conception. “At the OMB, Martin will report to incoming director Russell Vought, another staunch conservative who previously served in the role during Trump’s first term.” (See, “Hardline activist who raised the idea of jailing women for abortions gets top policy job in Trump administration”, Dec 12, 2024, Andrew Kaczynski & Em Steck, CNN, at < https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/
The legal attempts to block and slow-down the Far Right's War Against Women will mostly end up in the Supreme Court, that is now a Kangaroo Court dominated Leonard Leo's billionaire financed Justice Recruitment operations, largely based in the Federalist Society. Taking a cue from the Southern Racist responses to Supreme Court decisions in the 1950s they did not like; the Blue States need to stop obeying these Fascist Decrees. We are, unfortunately, now living in a horrific scenario as the Democratic Party has failed time after time to lead a Progressive Movement that champions kitchen table issues with a background of other progressive stances. What we have seen in about half of all elections since the 1990s is that the politically “inert” majority of the population comes out and votes about 60 – 40 for the somewhat less odious Democrats. The participation of this cohort of 10 – 15 million “low propensity voters” puts the Presidential and many down-ticket races out of the reach of Republican Voter Suppression and other anti-democratic operations. This group came out to vote for Obama twice, and for Biden once. They stayed home in 2024 (along with the elections of 2000, 2004, 2016). The lack of this support allows the 4 – 5 million vote Republican Vote Stealing, Voter Suppression and other dirty campaign operations to win narrow victories. From the purging of about 100,000 votes by Katherine Harris, Sec of State in Florida during the 2000 election, to the massive True the Vote and associated voter purging operations conducted nation-wide (in 44 states according to Greg Palast) in 2024 the pattern is always the same. The 4 – 5 million voter purging and suppression operations run by the Rethugs is enough to “win narrow electoral victories” when despair and passivity are the norm for those 10 – 15 million low propensity voters.
The general situation of the U.S. Courts, now with a strong element of ultra-right personnel, is discussed in Item 9)., “Only 35% of Americans trust the US judicial system. ….”. This is the set-up for a epochal struggle over the next 4 years. Hold on it will be a wild ride as Trump's various minions try to smash all resistance and dissent. The U.S. is likely to shift from being the main destination of political refugees to the largest source of political refugees seeking safety elsewhere.
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Missouri's Abortion Ban Blocked
Click to skip ahead: In Hell Yeah Missouri, a judge has blocked the state’s abortion ban! Keep An Eye On what Missouri anti-abortion activists will do next. In the Nation, more on RFK Jr.’s plans for abortion medication. Normalizing Extremism looks at the relative silence on South Carolina’s abortion/death penalty bill. In Redefining Abortion, conservatives’ war on language is ramping up. In the Courts, the troubling attacks on buffer zones. Finally, In Better News, Arizona Dems want to do away with abortion reporting.
Missouri blocks some restrictions
UPDATE/CORRECTION: The restrictions blocked by Judge Jerri Zhang are not enough for Planned Parenthood to reopen clinics. On Friday night, a statement went out from Planned Parenthood Great Plains, Planned Parenthood Great Rivers and the ACLU of Missouri about how the state’s clinics are still unlicensed.
“As a result of today’s mixed decision. Missourians continue to be deprived of time-sensitive, essential, and constitutionally protected health care, despite voting in favor of a constitutional right to abortion.”
I’ll have a fuller breakdown of the decision in the next issue, but in the meantime I wanted to share this reel from Bonyen at NIRH (which is a great org you should all be following) and apologize for the error. I should have done better.
I am thrilled to be able to report that a judge has temporarily struck down Missouri’s total abortion ban! Judge Jerri Zhang also blocked a good deal of the state’s abortion restrictions and TRAP laws.
Zhang ruled today that the state’s ban is at odds with the newly adopted Amendment 3, which protects abortion rights in the state constitution. While this is a temporary block until the legal battle fully plays out, the injunction is a sign that Zhang will permanently strike down the law. (I mean, even Missouri maniacally anti-abortion attorney general Andrew Bailey has said it’s unconstitutional!)
There’s something incredibly satisfying about reading through the list of other now-blocked restrictions, so I’m going to tell you each one. I’m thinking of it as an early Christmas present. In addition to striking down a 72-hour waiting period, Zhang also blocked:
An “informed consent” mandate requiring patients to read this bullshit booklet that tells them they’re terminating “a separate, unique, living human being” and that fetuses feel pain.
A mandate that patients take abortion medication in the presence of a doctor (essentially a ban on telehealth)
A requirement that fetal tissue be given to a pathologist for review (!!!)
A mandate that providers have an abortion medication ‘complication plan’ in place
And a requirement that abortion providers have admitting privileges at a hospital (here’s an older article I wrote for The Guardian explaining why this particular mandate is so bogus)
She did keep a few TRAP laws, though—like a requirement that patients have their pregnancy’s gestational age confirmed in person before being prescribed abortion medication. Zhang also kept a law in place that mandates abortion clinics be licensed by the state. As The Kansas City Star points out, that hurdle could be a big one because it gives the Republican-run state the power to deny licenses.
Today’s ruling comes after Missouri pro-choice activists fought a long and difficult battle to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, going head-to-head with Republican state leaders. In the lead-up to the election, we saw Missouri top election officials try to quash the will of voters again and again: whether it was holding up the signature-gathering process, biased ballot summaries, or last minute lawsuits to keep the amendment off the ballot.
So in a moment when politics can make you feel pretty powerless, let this be a reminder that we can still get shit done. Amendment 3 isn’t perfect, and there’s still work to do. But yesterday the people of Missouri didn’t have access to any abortion and today they do.
Keep An Eye On
Sadly, Missouri anti-abortion activists aren’t just going to take the loss and move on. Republicans in the state, for example, are already proposing another ballot measure to undo Amendment 3 and enshrine fetal personhood. But what I’m really worried about is what happens at and in front of abortion clinics now that these maniacs have lost their total ban.
As I was tracking anti-abortion media today, I noticed a whole lot more chatter about the importance of clinic harassment—or, as they would put it, “sidewalk counselors.”
Coalition Life Executive Director Brian Westbrook in Missouri, for example, told Life News that his army of assholes are planning to ramp up their work outside of clinics.
“Our sidewalk counselors are often the last lifeline for women seeking help, and as states fight in the legislature and the courts over which laws will take effect, sidewalk counselors remain the only lifeline for women who have fallen through the safety net and arrived at the gates of an abortion facility with nowhere to turn. We are committed to continuing our efforts to empower women with life-affirming options…”
The phrase ‘empowering women’ makes me nauseated, honestly. Just call us sluts and murderers and be done with it already—the farce is too much to take.
In all seriousness, this is something we should be thinking about not just in Missouri—but any states where abortion restrictions are being weakened or struck down. The activists in these places are likely to be pretty pissed off and looking for a place to direct that anger and disappointment.
Perhaps this is a bad comparison, but it’s the thought that keeps crossing my mind: Abusers are at their most dangerous when you leave.
“Doctors need to consider whether abiding by [abortion bans] at all is truly morally justifiable. Laws that force doctors to violate medical ethics are unjust and should not be obeyed.”
- Lily Sánchez, Current Affairs
In the Nation
I told you earlier this week that Sen. Josh Hawley went on a Twitter tear about how RFK Jr. promised to “reinstate President Trump’s pro-life policies at HHS.” Hawley said that Kennedy agreed to ban Title X funds for abortion, reinstate ‘conscience protections’ and more.
Today, Jezebel points out that those weren’t the only promises Hawley said Kennedy made. Reporter Kylie Cheung notes that at a press briefing, Hawley said, “It would be a wise idea to return to the rule under the last Trump administration, which required in-person dispensing” of abortion medication. He also said that Kennedy “seemed to understand it.”
Remember, Hawley is the husband of Alliance Defending freedom attorney, Erin Hawley, who has argued against mifepristone in front of the Supreme Court. And if the Hawleys can’t completely repeal access to abortion medication using the Comstock Act or the FDA, they’re going to try to reverse Biden-era protections—like access via telemedicine.
To fully understand the attacks on mifepristone, make sure to check out my breakdown of Republicans revived lawsuit against the FDA. Pretty much every tactic they’re considering has been shoved into that one brief.
Trusted sources for abortion medication Aid Access, Plan C Pills, Abortion Finder, I Need An A
Also in national news, don’t miss this piece at The Nation from Rachel Rebouché. The Temple University dean and law professor flags something really important in her piece about the abortion training crisis:
“In instances in which patients are harmed, this country’s medical malpractice system, which holds providers liable for treatment below the standard of care, will not have changed along with deficits in training. In other words, physicians who do not use reasonable care can be sued for negligence, regardless of what training they received. The pressure of civil liability combined with the threat of prosecution will make doctors with reservations about their skill level completely (and perhaps justifiably) resistant to offering care.”
In other words, in a country where doctors are not being adequately trained in abortion procedures—but will still be held liable when they do—it’s not a jump to predict that these physicians may not be super eager to perform said abortions. (Even when desperately needed.)
Quick hits:
MSNBC shares the audio of Trump appointee Ed Martin talking about jailing women for abortion and eradicating ‘exceptions’ for women’s lives;
The Center for Reproductive Rights has released an end-of-year legislative wrap-up;
KFF breaks down potential attacks on abortion rights under the Trump administration;
And in international news, an international human rights court has ruled against El Salvador after a woman was denied an abortion for a high-risk pregnancy.
Normalizing Extremism
It’s been ten days since I broke the news that South Carolina Republicans had reintroduced a bill that would make abortion punishable by the death penalty. Since then, a handful of local outlets published stories about the legislation and—as far as I can tell—only two national outlets have covered the news.
Is that how little women rate? That a move to codify killing abortion patients doesn’t warrant a mention in the nation’s top publications? This is how normalization happens. Republicans are reintroducing legislation like this again and again in the hopes that our outrage will wane over time. But without media coverage, conservatives don’t even have to worry about our outrage to begin with!
I imagine if you asked reporters why they haven’t written about South Carolina’s bill, they’d say because there’s no way it’s going anywhere. Why write about a bill that has no chance of passing? But it’s vital that we’re not dismissing legislation like this as outliers—or the lawmakers who introduce it as lone extremists.
Every bill Republicans propose is a roadmap for the future they want—a future that’s hell-bent on punishment. Not to mention, this isn’t only happening in South Carolina! Bills, policies and platforms like this are popping up everywhere. To find them, just keep your eyes open for anything that talks about “equal protection.”
Redefining Abortion
I’ve been warning about Republicans trying to redefine abortion pretty much since I started Abortion, Every Day: I’ve tracked it here, wrote about in my book, and even flagged in The New York Times. Their plan is to take abortion—which is a medical intervention—and turn it into an intention.1
Under their definition, treatments for ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages wouldn’t qualify as abortions, nor would ending a pregnancy to save someone’s life. (In 2022, the president of Americans United for Life even suggested that giving a 10-year old an abortion wouldn’t really be an abortion.)
The goal here, as I’ve repeated so many times, is to divorce abortion from healthcare; to make it something distinct, devious and shameful. That’s why they’ve been trying to make ‘maternal fetal separation’ happen—a non-medical term invented by anti-abortion activists to lend credibility to their lies.
Now, conservatives have largely been embedding these false definitions in policy, hoping that no one is paying attention to nitty gritty legislative language. But they’ve also been slowly introducing the lie into culture as well, in an attempt to confuse Americans about what abortion really means.
There’s no better proof of how that cultural campaign is ramping up than this column at the Wall Street Journal, which declares “medical authorities are reclassifying life-saving procedures to make a political statement.” That’s right—doctors are just trying to be ‘political’ when they call abortion ‘abortion.’
Penned by Rachel Roth Aldhizer—who appears to have no medical expertise—makes the same claims we’ve seen from other anti-abortion radicals: That women don’t really need abortions when their life is at risk, that they can just be induced into labor, and that saving a woman’s life isn’t really an abortion anyway. Most incredibly, she accuses abortion rights activists of playing “linguistic games.” (Us?!)
“By their standard, many treatments for pregnancy complications are now considered abortions, from removing ectopic pregnancies and miscarriage management to induction of labor for PPROM. In other words, prenatal care is complete only with abortion in the toolbox. But it is intent, not simply a procedure, that makes something an abortion.”
There it is: abortion isn’t a medical intervention, but an intent—a feeling! And while I know WSJ is a conservative-leaning publication, it’s incredibly troubling to see this clear-cut lie published in a national outlet. Especially because Roth Aldhizer isn’t an expert—just an extremist.
Do you want to know who this woman is who got column inches in one of the country’s most prestigious newspapers? A person who this time last year accused Kate Cox—a woman forced to leave Texas to end a nonviable pregnancy—of killing her ‘disabled child.’ From Roth Aldhizer last year:
“Ms. Cox needs to understand that motherhood is not signing up for just the good stuff—kids that get straight A’s, play sports, paint pictures for the fridge, and make us proud because of their accomplishments. Motherhood goes much deeper. Are you willing to give your time, resources, and comfort for the sake of another? If not, don’t seek motherhood.”
Is this person we want defining what is and isn’t an abortion? Is this the person that the Wall Street Journal thinks should decide?
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In the Courts
Well I don’t like this one bit. If you’re a regular reader, you know that anti-abortion politicians and activists have been trying to do away with buffer zones outside of clinics—arguing that they infringe on the free speech rights of those who want to scream in women’s faces.
Since Roe was overturned, we’ve seen multiple lawsuits brought against various cities and ordinances, all in an effort to get buffer zones in front of the Supreme Court.
These attacks aren’t just happening in anti-abortion states, either. The Associated Press reports today that Minneapolis, Minnesota has “softened” a buffer zone ordinance after anti-abortion activists sued on First Amendment grounds:
“The City Council this month quietly amended the ordinance to exclude constitutionally protected activities and agreed to pay the plaintiffs' legal fees. Brian Gibson, chief executive officer of Pro-Life Action Ministries, said in an interview Friday that it amounted to an admission by the city that the law violated the freedom of speech. ‘They were accepting fault for having violated our constitutional rights,’ Gibson said.”
Like I said: I don’t like it at all. And while I won’t claim to be an expert in city politics, it’s disappointing to see them give up quite this easily. Especially knowing that attacking buffer zones is such a tremendous part of anti-abortion strategy. (As is ramping up harassment outside of clinics, as I noted earlier.)
The city council's vice president says Minneapolis’ ordinance is still consistent with the FACE Act—the federal law that prohibits people from blocking entrances to reproductive health clinics. But just so you know: Republicans are going after that one, too.
In Better News
Just a bit of quick news out of Arizona, where Democrats are proposing legislation to do away with a state law requiring an annual abortion report. You all know data and reporting on abortion is a major conservative tactic—I just wrote a few days ago about the role it’s playing in state legislation, for example.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs correctly says the reporting infringes on patients’ privacy. (After all, do we require reporting on any other kind of surgery?) From Hobbs:
“The government has no place in surveilling Arizonans’ medical decision-making or tracking their health history. Starting a family is a sensitive and personal experience for a woman and her loved ones; there should be no room for government surveillance and publication of that decision.”
For as much as Republicans want to pretend that their abortion reporting efforts are about ‘protecting’ women, we know what the real goal is: a chilling effect, data manipulation, and a strategy to punish providers.
Anti-abortion activists and politicians want to intimidate patients out of getting abortions, knowing that women will be less likely to seek care if they think their procedures will be reported to the state. As we’ve seen in states like Texas, reporting can also be manipulated to make abortion seem dangerous despite all evidence to the contrary. Finally, Republicans think that if they can collect enough information on abortions that they’ll be able to find something to use to target clinics and providers. (Remember this out of Indiana?)
All of which is to say: Good for Arizona. I hope other states do the same.
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Abortion Is Heading to the Supreme Court—Again
Click to skip ahead: In the Courts, the fight over Planned Parenthood and Medicaid is going to the Supreme Court. In the States, news from New York, Texas, Minnesota, Alaska and Virginia. In the Nation, RFK Jr promises Republicans their Project 2025 wish-list. OBGYN Exodus reminds us of the generational problem with abortion providers. Stats & Studies looks at new research showing that women are often surprised by pain when using abortion medication. Finally, in Anti-Abortion Strategy, be on the lookout for abortion ‘reporting’ mandates in state legislation.
In the Courts
The Supreme Court has announced that they’ll weigh in on South Carolina’s efforts to prevent Medicaid patients from visiting Planned Parenthood—a case with national implications for low-income patients across the country.
The short version is that South Carolina Republicans sparked a legal battle in 2018 when they prohibited Planned Parenthood from participating in its Medicaid program. This past March, an appeals court found in favor of the reproductive rights organization, ruling that patients have the right to choose any qualified healthcare provider. Today, SCOTUS said they’ll hear the case (Kerr v. Edwards).
As you likely know, public funding is prohibited from covering abortion care—save for cases of rape, incest or when the pregnant person’s life is endangered. But Planned Parenthood does get reimbursed when Medicaid patients go to them for treatment like birth control, cancer screenings and check-ups. Just like any other healthcare provider. But because Planned Parenthood provides abortions at all, Republicans want to prevent them from being reimbursed.
The attorney representing South Carolina, John Bursch, says, “Taxpayer dollars should never be used to fund facilities that make a profit off abortion.” (It will come as no surprise to you that Bursch is actually a lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom—the group responsible for the end of Roe.)
Here’s the thing: This case and others like it are often framed as the ‘funding’ or ‘defunding’ of Planned Parenthood. But that gives Americans the impression that the organization is getting some sort of check from the government willy nilly. I don’t know that most voters understand that the Medicaid money Planned Parenthood gets is actually just reimbursement for medical services rendered.
In a moment when the American healthcare system is under fire and very much dominating the national conversation, it would do us well to remind the public what this case is actually about: Republicans trying to fuck over people who can’t afford healthcare.
In the States
Speaking of the Supreme Court, law professor Mary Ziegler predicts that Ken Paxton’s attack on a New York abortion provider is likely to end up there. Last week, the Texas Attorney General sued a physician who mailed abortion medication to a patient in the anti-choice state. (Read Abortion, Every Day’s coverage here.)
New York’s shield laws protect abortion provider Maggie Carpenter from Paxton’s bullshit, but Paxton will likely argue that this is his jurisdiction because the abortion took place in Texas. It will bring up all sorts of complicated legal questions—questions that Ziegler says are “certain” to be decided by the Supreme Court:
“Many of them land in enough of a legal gray area that predicting the outcome with any certainty is challenging, especially with conservative judges who are likely to sympathize with Texas’ view of reproductive rights.”
In the meantime, New York Democratic leaders have come out in support of Carpenter. Gov. Kathy Hochul said she’ll do “everything in my power” to protect the provider; Rep. Jerry Nadler said that New Yorkers “won’t be intimidated by bullies”; and Congressman Pat Ryan lauded Carpenter, saying, “AG Paxton chose the wrong person to mess with.”
We should be really grateful for providers like Carpenter, who are risking a whole lot in order to make sure people get care no matter what state they’re in.
While we’re on the issue of appreciation, consider saying thank you to an abortion navigator today. The Sahan Journal, reporting on how Minnesota abortion clinics are preparing for the new administration, shared this incredible statistic: Abortion navigators at Planned Parenthood North Central States have helped 5,400 patients get care, 80% of whom would not have made it to their destination without a navigator.
Organization CEO Ruth Richardson says they’ve seen a 110% increase in the number of people traveling from outside of the region in order to get care:
“You have spaces where people are oftentimes forced to travel three, four, five hours just to get access to care. It’s really concerning that we’re at this place where it’s more dangerous to be pregnant today in the United States than it was 30 years ago.”
In addition to bans, funding problems are also shuttering clinics—forcing patients to travel long distances for care. Just last week, for example, Juneau, Alaska lost their Planned Parenthood. The clinic closed in November for repairs, but patients got an email a few days ago that the location will not reopen. Alaska Public Media reports that there are no other abortion providers in Southeast Alaska.
Jennifer Martinez, a spokesperson for the regional Planned Parenthood, said the decision was based on the cost of building repairs, and reduced funding in a hostile political climate:
“We’ve been here for over 100 years. We’re going to keep fighting and do whatever it takes so that the patients in Juneau, Alaska, and the country, continue to receive the care that they need and deserve.”
Patients will still be able to get some types of care via telehealth.
Finally, the cruelty is the point in Virginia, where Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s proposed budget would prohibit Medicaid patients from accessing abortion in cases of severe fetal diagnoses. If this budget were approved, low-income women carrying doomed pregnancies would be forced to continue their pregnancies to term. That is, unless they could cover the cost of the procedure themselves.
What’s more, this is the third year that Youngkin has pushed for this mandate. Jamie Lockhart, executive director of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia, called the budget proposal “shameful.”
“This policy will disproportionately harm people of color and low-income Virginians, forcing them to carry pregnancies that will result in stillbirth or the birth of a baby who cannot survive. Governor Youngkin’s actions make it clear: he thinks it’s acceptable for low-income Virginians to be forced to endure pregnancies filled with pain and suffering.”
If you’re a regular reader, you know that I’ve spent a lot of time digging into this conservative obsession with forcing women to carry nonviable pregnancies to term—from the way they’re sowing distrust in prenatal tests to calling fetuses with fatal abnormalities ‘children with disabilities.’ For more, read my “Calculated Cruelty” series. Part I below, and click for Parts II and III.
A few last bits of state news: The 19th reports on Idaho’s maternal health care deserts; Pennsylvania Republicans are trying to pass a ‘heartbeat’ abortion ban; WAMU reports on later abortion patients in Maryland; And States Newsroom does a postmortem with ballot measure organizers in Arkansas, Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota.
In the Nation
Republicans’ initial hesitation over RFK Jr. as Donald Trump’s pick for head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) appears to have waned: Despite the initial uproar over Kennedy potentially being too pro-choice, the brainwormed nominee has reassured Republicans by promising to fully support their extreme anti-abortion agenda if appointed.
Over on Twitter, Sen. Josh Hawley (husband to Alliance Defending freedom attorney, Erin Hawley), wrote that Kennedy “committed to me to reinstate President Trump’s pro-life policies at HHS.”
What are those policies? Hawley tweeted that Kennedy promised to hire all ‘pro-life’ deputies; reinstate the Global Gag Rule and ‘conscience’ protections; ban Title X funds from going to groups that “promote abortion”; reverse a Biden-era nondiscrimination rule; and end “taxpayer funding” for abortions (which isn’t really a thing).
Now, if it sounds like this list of attacks was taken directly from Project 2025, that’s because it was! Remember, HHS played a major part in Project 2025’s plan for attacking abortion: they even want the department to be renamed the Department for Life.
Basically, what Hawley is giving us—in tweets, no less—is assurances that Kennedy will do whatever Republicans want on abortion. Which is not really a surprise to me: Last month, I speculated that Kennedy was being coached or advised by Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. His most recent comments on abortion and ‘consensus’ absolutely reeked of their talking points.
We know Republicans are dying to attack Planned Parenthood once Trump takes office. In addition to that South Carolina case headed to SCOTUS, conservatives plan to target Title X funding. (As Hawley’s tweets and Project 2025 make plain.) In fact, billionaire man-baby Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy already wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed saying that their new DOGE department will target the “nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.”
But Alice Miranda Ollstein at POLITICO points out that the last time Republicans tried to strip funding from Planned Parenthood, the Congressional Budget Office found that it would end up costing the government $130 million dollars. Because without Planned Parenthood’s work providing services like contraception, the “the number of births in the Medicaid program would increase by several thousand per year.”
And when the last Trump administration pushed Planned Parenthood out of the Title X program, Republicans promises that other healthcare providers would step up fell flat. The federal family planning program ended up serving 844,083 fewer clients. “In particular, 225,688 fewer patients received oral contraceptives; 49,803 fewer received hormonal implants; and 86,008 fewer clients received intrauterine devices,” Ollstein writes.
As I said at the top of the newsletter: in addition to the misogyny, racism and patriarchal bullshit, this is about our nation’s terrible healthcare system. And if Americans can’t go to Planned Parenthood for birth control, many won’t get contraception at all. (Or cancer screenings! And STI testing!)
“In questions of people’s essential freedoms, it is not sustainable for the country to be divided between freedom in some states and unfreedom in others. The two world views—between liberty and restriction, equality and hierarchy enforced by law—cannot abide one another. The country must choose.”
- Moira Donegan, The Guardian
OBGYN Exodus
It’s no secret that OBGYNs, maternal fetal medicine specialists and other types of reproductive healthcare workers are fleeing anti-abortion states—often with great guilt. Healthcare providers don’t want to leave vulnerable women without care, but they’re also terrified of working in a state where they could go to prison just for doing their jobs.
A related issue is generational: these states aren’t just having a hard time retaining doctors, but recruiting new ones. Tennessee, for example, has seen a 21% drop in OBGYN residency applications; Texas (where 1 in 5 OBGYNs are considering leaving) has seen a 16% drop.
“We’re an aging workforce,” Austin-based OBGYN Dr. John Thoppil tells KXAN. “I think about half of OB-GYNs are over 55, so we’re aging out, and if we don’t have young new docs coming to the state, we’re going to have a serious crisis,” he says.
That’s to say nothing of the loss of generational knowledge. Even when med students and residents do stay in anti-abortion states, they won’t get the comprehensive training that they need. Students are having to leave their states to learn abortion care—which is a necessary skill in order to be an accredited OBGYN.
Some are learning on models like papayas, while others take limited programs while staying hotels on their own dime. From Dr. Anitra Beasley, OBGYN and assistant dean at Baylor College of Medicine:
“I think when the residents are going there, they’re getting a really good experience, but they’re getting a really good experience for three to four weeks, and that does not substitute for the comprehensive, longitudinal experience that they would get if abortion care were available in Texas.”
As I’ve said before: who would you rather have treating your miscarriage? Someone who has performed an abortion multiple times, who can do the procedure like muscle memory? Or someone who only got a few weeks training on a model? As incredible as these doctors are who are fighting to make sure they get the education they need, we all know it’s not enough.
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The legal battle over abortion-by-mail in the US has begun – and the stakes are high | Moira Donegan
The legal battle over the interstate mailing of abortion pills has begun. On Friday, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, sued Dr Margaret Carpenter, a New York-based OB-GYN and reproductive justice activist, over what he alleges was Carpenter’s choice to mail abortion pills from New York to a 20-year-old pregnant woman in Texas.
The lawsuit, filed in a Texas state court but almost certainly the beginning of a federal legal battle, marks the first formal legal challenge by an anti-abortion attorney general against a Democratic-controlled state’s shield laws, which protect abortion providers from out-of-state liability, and is slated to test how far pro-choice states can go to protect providers within their state borders – and how much force anti-choice states can give to their abortion bans beyond theirs.
The alleged facts go something like this: sometime last summer, a young Texas woman from the Dallas suburbs discovered that she was pregnant, and contacted one of Carpenter’s advocacy organizations seeking access to abortion medication. Carpenter is part of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, or Act, a national network of doctors located in pro-choice states that dispense abortion medication through the mail; she has also worked with the abortion access advocacy groups Hey Jane and AidAccess.
Through the group, Carpenter prescribed the woman the pills, which she took as directed. The woman’s abortion was discovered by authorities after the patient, concerned about heavy bleeding, asked her boyfriend to take her to the hospital. The Texas attorney general’s complaint makes repeated, disconcerting reference to the fact that the boyfriend had evidently not been told about the pregnancy and abortion before this, suggesting that he was entitled to the information or had somehow been wronged.
Doctors like Carpenter have become a central part of the public health and civil rights response to Dobbs. They have stepped in to provide American women with the safety and dignity that their states seek to deny them. An estimated 8,000 women in ban states access pills by mail every single month, getting prescriptions from doctors like Carpenter in safe states and from providers located abroad.
The ability to access the pills this way has meant that the abortions being conducted in these states, outside of clinical settings, are overwhelmingly safe. The pills, that is, keep women from seeking out the much more dangerous illegal surgical abortions, whose incompetent or careless administration by black market providers were the source of large numbers of deaths in the pre-Roe era. Doctors like Carpenter, then, do not merely give their patients control over their own bodies and destinies; in giving them a safe, reliable way to end their pregnancies in ban states, they may well be saving these women’s lives.
It is this safe, effective and accessible form of self-managed abortion that the state of Texas is trying to end. Now, Paxton’s office is claiming that Carpenter, though she never set foot in the state of Texas, violated Texas state law. Further, Paxton believes that Texas’s law can reach all the way to New York: the suit aims to make Texas’s law shape the conduct of people outside its borders, curtailing both Carpenter’s medical practice and her freedom of expression.
Texas’s suit will quickly force a confrontation over one prominent obstacle: New York’s abortion shield law. In the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade, many Democratic-controlled state legislatures, anticipating an influx of abortion seekers from out of state and lawsuits seeking to prevent women from accessing care in places where it is legal, passed laws seeking to protect abortion providers in their states from lawsuits and prosecutions brought by Republican state governments.
Known as shield laws, these bills prevent any state resources from being used to cooperate with abortion lawsuits and prosecutions. That means that, by law, the state of New York cannot cooperate with Paxton’s lawsuit, and they can’t force Carpenter to do so, either.
This conflict – between New York’s attempt to protect abortion and Texas’s increasingly expansive attempts to eradicate it – is the conflict that will probably arrive in federal court. When it gets there, it will raise some fraught constitutional questions. If Dobbs was based partly on a states’ rights argument, about the freedom of states such as Texas to ban abortion – as Brett Kavanaugh said – then do pro-choice states also have a similar right to robustly enforce their own preferred abortion policy? Or do states like Texas, with their anti-choice agendas, get to have a longer arm, extending their own policy preferences beyond their borders and compelling other states to help enforce them?
The looming conflict over whether states such as New York have a right to protect their abortion providers has reminded some historians of the constitutional conflict that arose over slavery in the 19th century: when enslaved people escaped the south, and made their way to free states, slave states cried foul, and tried to compel the free northern states to kidnap and return the fugitives to enslavement.
The federal government ultimately agreed, resolving the issue with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced free states to help slave states enforce slavery by returning escapees to captivity. But in attempting to solve a legal problem, the Fugitive Slave Act created a political one: free states resented the imposition of the slave states’ will on their own policy and functioning, and their anger over being forced to participate in a legal system they found morally abhorrent eventually contributed to the outbreak of the civil war.
In questions of people’s essential freedoms, it is not sustainable for the country to be divided between freedom in some states and unfreedom in others. The two world views – between liberty and restriction, equality and hierarchy enforced by law – cannot abide one another. The country must choose. Now, as Texas seeks to force the issue, it looks like it will eventually be the US supreme court that decides.
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Cool! Josh Hawley Says He Expects RFK Will Restrict Abortion Pills
As Trump hedges on where he stands on medication abortion, Hawley is reassuring anti-abortion extremists that the administration will have their back.
About two-thirds of abortions in the U.S. are medication abortions, but that could change quickly under the incoming Trump administration. The president-elect himself has hedged on where he stands, suggesting he wouldn’t touch the matter, but then recently, and predictably, declaring that “things change.”
Under the current administration, abortion providers can mail the pills, including to states where abortion is banned, and without an in-person consultation. But according to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, will likely change these rules. In fact, Hawley reportedly told reporters that Kennedy “pledged” to change them.
“It would be a wise idea to return to the rule under the last Trump administration, which required in-person dispensing” of abortion pills, Hawley said to a Capitol press pool. He continued, “He [Kennedy] acknowledged all of that, I think, seemed to understand it.” Hawley further claimed that Kennedy told him during their meeting that “there are far too many abortions in the U.S. and that we cannot be the moral leader of the free world with abortion rates so high.” Kennedy is currently making the rounds with GOP senators to try to secure the votes he needs to get confirmed and assuage the concerns of some senators on his abortion record and his position on the polio vaccine.
If in-person dispensing requirements for abortion pills are reinstated, not only could abortion be pushed out-of-reach altogether for large swaths of the country, but abortion clinics in states where the procedure is legal will be further overwhelmed. Several studies this year have shown that despite abortion bans, the abortion rate has remained relatively consistent through the help of access to medication abortion by mail. That’s not to say abortion bans haven’t thrown abortion access into chaos—only that abortion pills by mail have served as a lifeline, and one that the Trump administration seems poised to take away.
During his short-lived campaign for president, Kennedy took up a range of positions on abortion, including, at varying points, supporting a federal ban and then backing a right to abortion until viability. Now, his abortion position seems to be whatever GOP senators ask of him in order to get confirmed. Some anti-abortion groups are reportedly trying to appeal to Kennedy’s notorious nuttiness and affinity for health-related conspiracy theories by pushing the lie that embryonic remains from medication abortions are poisoning the water supply. This… is not a thing!
“Will you restrict the availability of abortion pills when you’re in office?” NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Trump earlier this month. He replied, “I’ll probably stay with exactly what I’ve been saying for the last two years. And the answer is no.” But when asked if he’ll “commit to that,” he refused: “Will I commit, I mean… things change. I think they change.”
Between Trump’s noncommittal language and Hawley’s assurances on where Kennedy stands on medication abortion, things are looking good for Project 2025—the far-right Heritage Foundation’s agenda for Trump’s second term. The 900-page blueprint details how key federal agencies can all but ban medication abortion, through the FDA revoking its approval, HHS reinstating old requirements, and the Justice Department enforcing the Comstock Act of 1873 to prohibit the mailing of pills.
Hawley has his own connections to the crusade on abortion pills: Last year, his wife represented plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to restore medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion pills. On Wednesday, he also tweeted that Kennedy committed to reinstating the global gag rule, a policy that strips reproductive health organizations of federal funding if they offer or “promote” abortion services abroad.
“[Kennedy] said President Trump has not given him direction yet on this issue, but he will absolutely do whatever President Trump wants to do, that he will not put his thumb on the scale for any pro-choice position,” Hawley told reporters.
Taken altogether, now seems like a great time to heed the advice of groups like Plan C Pills and buy some abortion pills in advance, whether you’re pregnant or not.
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South Carolina Republicans Set To Reintroduce Bill Allowing Death Penalty For Abortions
A handful of South Carolina Republicans plan to reintroduce a bill that would define abortion as homicide — a crime punishable by death under state law.
State Rep. Rob Harris (R) pre-filed the South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act earlier this month, and it will be introduced in the judiciary committee when the legislative session begins in January. The proposed bill seeks to amend the state’s criminal code to widen the definition of “person” to include “an unborn child at any stage of development.”
The bill would define abortion, with few exceptions, as equivalent to killing a person under the criminal code. South Carolina currently has a six-week abortion ban in effect. If passed, this bill would effectively enact a total abortion ban because it considers all abortion, starting “from the moment of fertilization,” to be homicide.
South Carolina’s criminal code carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 30 years in prison for homicide. Under special circumstances — including when a victim is under 11 years old — the minimum sentence can be life in prison or the death penalty. Taken together, this could mean anyone aborting a pregnancy in the state would face life in prison or execution.
The proposal does include some exceptions for “spontaneous” miscarriage and life-saving procedures, but all too often these types of exceptions are real in name only.
Harris originally introduced the same bill in 2023, and the idea that lawmakers would consider using capital punishment on people who get abortions sparked national outrage. Several Republicans who co-sponsored that bill quietly removed their names after public outcry. The 2023 version died shortly after it was introduced in the state House.
Harris did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment this week, but defended the bill in 2023 to HuffPost reporter Lydia O’Connor.
“My bill does not single out women,” Harris said at the time. “It prohibits everyone from committing murder. It provides the same due process that everyone enjoys under our current laws.”
It’s very unlikely that the bill will go anywhere this time around. The current version has six co-sponsors, including Harris, all of whom are white men and members of the South Carolina Freedom Caucus, part of the more extreme sector of the Republican Party.
“I think that the majority of people, even the most strident Republicans, would say the death penalty bill is not where we want to go with abortion,” Vicki Ringer, the director of public affairs at Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, told HuffPost.
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Support for prosecuting abortion patients is a fringe position, even within the anti-abortion movement, and most large groups have distanced themselves from the idea. Most anti-abortion laws include carve-outs to ensure that patients aren’t criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes. Still, many have been arrested despite these laws.
Although Ringer believes the bill will be dead on arrival, she hopes people will not dismiss how frightening it is that some lawmakers are comfortable introducing legislation like this.
“I don’t know who is getting equal protection, but it appears in South Carolina that only fetuses and embryos get equal protection,” she said. “Women and trans people do not.”
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Nearly 1,400 People Were Arrested For How They Acted During Pregnancy Before Roe Fell
Women have long been at risk of being arrested for their behavior while pregnant ― and advocates worry that state laws passed since the fall of Roe v. Wade will make such punishments more common.
A new report from Pregnancy Justice, a legal advocacy organization for pregnant people, reveals that hundreds of pregnant Americans were criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes, including miscarriage, even when Roe was in effect. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defines the criminalization of pregnancy as penalizing people for actions that could be seen as harmful to their fetuses, even if those behaviors wouldn’t otherwise be considered criminal.
Nearly 1,400 criminal arrests took place between 2006 and June 2022, according to Pregnancy Justice’s report, for things like using illicit substances or drinking alcohol while pregnant. Other cases include pregnant women being criminalized for not wearing a seatbelt, refusing a C-section, not getting prenatal care while pregnant and having HIV.
“We should all be incredibly concerned about the fact that pregnant people are getting arrested, prosecuted, separated from their children and incarcerated for actions that should not be illegal,” Lourdes Rivera, the president of Pregnancy Justice, said during a press call on Tuesday.
Many of the stories included in Pregnancy Justice’s report made national headlines. In 2014, for example, a Tennessee woman who was nine months pregnant was arrested for driving without a seatbelt. She had engaged “in conduct which placed her baby in imminent danger or death or serious bodily injury,” according to the warrant for her arrest.
“The Dobbs decision basically flung open the gates for these types of criminalizations to continue and increase.”
- Lourdes Rivera, Pregnancy Justice
Geography and income level are the greatest factors when it comes to pregnancy criminalization, according to the report. White pregnant people who are low-income are the most criminalized group, while Black pregnant people who are low-income are also overrepresented in the data.
Around 80% of these arrests occurred in five Southern states: Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Oklahoma. Three of those states ― Alabama, South Carolina and Oklahoma ― recognize fetuses as people in their criminal codes, an increasingly common type of legislation known as fetal personhood laws.
“We can tie this increase in criminalization directly to the expansion of the increased ideology of fetal personhood. The idea that a fetus or a fertilized egg has the same, if not more rights, than the actual person carrying the pregnancy,” Rivera said. “During the period that we’re looking at 2006 to June 2022, fetal personhood gained influence and has increasingly become embedded in laws in judicial decisions.”
Fifteen states had some form of criminal fetal personhood laws in effect before Roe fell last summer. Many, like South Carolina and Alabama, center on drug use during pregnancy and have historically been weaponized against the most marginalized, including poor women and people of color.
Over 95% of the nearly 1,400 cases of pregnancy criminalization dealt with substance use during pregnancy, Pregnancy Justice found. The three most common substances found in these cases were methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana; the latter is legal in many states. One-quarter of the cases involved the alleged use of legal substances, such as prescription opiates, nicotine and alcohol.
One case included in Pregnancy Justice’s report was a 19-year-old woman from Oklahoma who, in 2020 went to the hospital after experiencing a miscarriage, but she was arrested and charged with manslaughter after she told hospital staff she had used marijuana and methamphetamine while pregnant. The young woman couldn’t afford her $20,000 bail and remained in jail for a year and a half before she was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to four years in prison.
And these cases don’t just happen in red states. A pregnant woman in California gave birth to a stillborn baby in 2018. She was later charged with murder, and the prosecutor in her case argued that her meth use caused the stillbirth, and she spent four years in prison before the charge was dropped.
Fetal personhood laws that focused on pregnant people and drug use, like those in effect before Roe fell, allowed prosecutors to charge pregnant women with “chemical endangerment of a child.” For example, Alabama passed its chemical endangerment law in 2006 to protect children from dangerous fumes and chemicals found in home-based meth labs.
Not long after, district attorneys started applying the law to drug-using pregnant women, despite the law including nothing about fetuses. Prosecutors stretched the interpretation of the law, reasoning that a fetus is a child, and by ingesting drugs, the pregnant person is bringing chemical harm to the so-called child. As a result, Alabama’s law has been used to criminalize dozens of pregnant people in the state when they test positive for an illegal drug or legal medication.
Pregnancy Justice’s report also contextualizes the history of substance use for pregnant people in the U.S., pointing to the racist and politically motivated “war on drugs” campaign of the 1980s.
“Pregnancy criminalization first became widespread in the 1980s, amid the sensationalized, racialized, and resoundingly debunked ‘crack baby epidemic,’” the report reads. “This armed the anti-abortion movement with a perfect narrative to move their agenda forward: it played on racist and sexist tropes about Black women and their right to reproduce… and it created a new category of crime victim: the innocent fetus, fertilized egg, or embryo. Black women were overwhelmingly the targets of pregnancy criminalization in the first several decades after Roe.”
Chemical endangerment laws and other fetal personhood laws are still in effect in those 15 states and will likely target even more pregnant people without the protections of Roe. Last year, Georgia became the first state to pass a fetal personhood law after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, which overturned Roe.
“The Dobbs decision basically flung open the gates for these types of criminalizations to continue and increase,” Rivera said. “Unless we do something about it, this is unfortunately going to be the trend.”
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The Rise of Pregnancy Criminalization: A Pregnancy Justice Report
In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and took the extreme step of eliminating the federal, constitutionally protected right to abortion. The decision sparked warranted outrage over the dangers it poses to both clinicians and people seeking abortions. Thus far, however, conversations surrounding reproductive rights have largely neglected a burgeoning trend: even prior to Dobbs, people have increasingly been criminalized for their pregnancies, regardless of birth outcome.
From the Roe decision in 1973 until the Dobbs decision in 2022, in more than 1,800 cases across the country, state actors—police, prosecutors, healthcare workers, family regulation workers, and judges—have deprived pregnant people of virtually every constitutional right on the pretext of protecting “unborn life.” The cases show that pregnancy outcomes other than abortion, including birth and pregnancy loss, have been far more likely to result in criminalization, most often under the guise of addressing pregnancy and substance use. Through an alarming combination of carceral approaches to substance use and the legal expansion of the concept of fetal personhood, state actors have increasingly penalized pregnant people for actions that would not have been criminalized but for their pregnancies.
The Dobbs ruling will further accelerate an existing crisis, putting anyone who is pregnant or has the capacity to become pregnant at even greater risk of arrest, prosecution, and conviction. Understanding this phenomenon—including who is most affected, how, and under what pretense— will be essential to fighting for pregnant people’s liberties as we enter the post-Dobbs era.
In 2013, Pregnancy Justice published the first comprehensive national documentation effort capturing pregnancy-related arrests and deprivations of liberty between 1973 and 2005. This report picks up where the previous study left off, identifying cases that occurred between 2006 and the Dobbs ruling in June 2022. We define pregnancy criminalization as an instance in which someone is either arrested for reasons related to their pregnancy, or where the terms of their bail, sentencing, or probation are heightened because they became pregnant after being charged with an unrelated crime.
The rise in pregnancy criminalization is fueled in large part by the rise of the concept of “fetal personhood” in anti-abortion rhetoric and laws. This radical notion, which enshrines the rights of fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses into our legal and political systems, has far-reaching implications. This report found that over three quarters (76.9%) of the cases of pregnancy criminalization occurred in a small number of states that expanded the definitions of child abuse to include fetuses, fertilized eggs, and embryos.
While state actors have used various justifications for criminalizing pregnancy, the overwhelming majority of cases rely on substance use allegations, usually as a basis for charging pregnant people with criminal child neglect or endangerment. With substance use and pregnancy as an entry point, prosecutors have employed fetal personhood to argue that a wide range of criminal laws should be interpreted to reach the context of pregnancy. More than half of states have laws that require reporting to family regulation authorities related to people’s use of alcohol or drugs during pregnancy and/or define alcohol or drug use during pregnancy as civil child abuse or neglect.
Because of this legal apparatus, the healthcare and family regulation systems have come to play a significant role in sustaining efforts to criminalize pregnancy. The focus on criminalizing pregnancy and substance use defies medical consensus that doing so deters pregnant people from seeking healthcare and increases risks to maternal, child, and fetal health,
harming the very interests such criminalization its proponents claim it is protecting.
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Please click the following link to view the viceo
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Only 35% of Americans trust the US judicial system. This is catastrophic | David Daley
American confidence in the courts has hit a record low across party lines. This is worrying – if not surprising
The US supreme court has been hijacked by the extreme right and corrupted to its core.
American oligarchs bestow millions in gifts and largesse on rightwing justices. The court’s conservative supermajority hands down deeply unpopular decisions that take away long-settled rights, concentrate power for themselves and their friends and grease the electoral rails for their party.
Sometimes, an insurrectionist flag waves in front of a justice’s home.
Now a legal system fashioned with Leonard Leo’s dark-money riches and led toward dishonor by John Roberts has received a damning verdict from the American people. According to a new Gallup poll, Americans have a historic lack of trust in the courts. In an era of little faith in institutions, confidence in the judiciary has fallen the fastest and the steepest during the 2020s.
This places America in uncharted territory – alongside dictatorships, banana republics and military juntas. Throughout modern international history, the collapse in judicial faith over the last four years can be compared with the faith lost in Syria between 2009 and 2013, the military takeover of Myanmar between 2018 and 2022 and the tumult in Venezuela from 2012 to 2016.
The numbers are staggering and historic. Only 35% of Americans have faith in the courts. That’s a record low. Numbers this resounding must cross party lines; while Gallup does not measure partisanship here, it is the first time ever that confidence in the judiciary is underwater among those who approve and disapprove of the nation’s leadership.
It’s not surprising that Americans have lost all faith in something as anti-democratic as an unelected body (with a majority appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote) granted lifetime fiefdoms to cast final judgement over acts of the elected branches, without any accountability or ethics code that might, for example, prevent them from taking luxury vacations paid by billionaire benefactors.
What is deeply frustrating is that Democrats refuse to make the case for reforming a captured court even given its widespread unpopularity and even during a close and bitterly contested race for the White House that probably sealed rightwing dominance of the supreme court into the 2060s, if not beyond.
It’s easy, with hindsight, to identify the myriad strategical misfires of the Kamala Harris campaign. Yet despite all the post-election autopsies, none have focused on this: Democrats were gifted an issue on which many Americans agreed, with wildly popular first steps – including term limits for supreme court justices and a binding ethics code – that share support from nearly 70% of all Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike. They squandered it.
Harris endorsed these reforms in July. She campaigned on restoring the reproductive rights curtailed by the court’s reversal of Roe v Wade. But neither the nominee or most anyone else in the party ever prosecuted the larger case that Americans have come to understand: that our courts are no longer truly courts at all. That while the chief justice pretends to be a humble umpire calling balls and strikes, he actually presides over an unelected super-legislature that has become the fount of Republican political power. That it’s the courts that have pushed policy on guns, voting rights, abortion, the environment and the basic safety provided by the regulatory state in rightward directions with which most Americans disagree, that enabled the gerrymandered capture of so many state legislatures now doing the same thing across the country, and that paved Donald Trump’s path back to the White House.
The Democratic party’s failure here goes well beyond this most recent campaign. Democrats had a trifecta in Washington after the 2020 election and made no serious effort on judicial reform. The judiciary committee, under the toothless leadership of Senator Dick Durbin, botched every opportunity to hold hearings and demand accountability after the revelations of vacations and other gifts awarded to the conservative justices. In 2016, Democrats nominated the milquetoast Merrick Garland to fill an opening presented by the death of Antonin Scalia, then barely bothered to fight for their nominee in the face of Mitch McConnell’s unprecedented blockade.
And while conservatives spent five decades building their own alternative legal establishment – complete with the Federalist Society as its credentialing factory, and presidents who agreed to outsource supreme court and other judicial appointments to extreme rightwing activists – Democrats trusted blindly and foolishly in the rule of law and the strength of institutional norms. They built little of their own. They failed to sound the alarm. They never bothered to build a mandate for popular fixes.
Now the bill is due. Leonard Leo, the Koch family, the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society will call the tune. Their front groups will find the litigants and the cases, even when the claims are phony and the harms did not exist. They will judge-shop for the handpicked jurist in a friendly jurisdiction in Texas or elsewhere in the fifth circuit, as they have in cases involving the abortion pill, immigration and fossil fuels. And then it will be launched on a speedway to the US supreme court, where the front groups use amicus briefs that they fund to send signals to the justices whose credentialing and confirmation that they have also bought and paid for.
The Roberts court has granted Trump unprecedented power in his second term thanks to its decision in his immunity case. Those new powers will come with virtually no accountability. But all this focus on Trump has obscured the source of this power. Trump, after all, will have to leave office in four years. What the right’s near-complete capture of the federal judiciary has ensured, however, is that it will remain in charge for decades to come regardless of who sits in the White House.
The new Gallup poll confirms that Americans fully understand that the anti-democratic courts have achieved this unaccountable supremacy. If only Americans also had a political party ready and willing to fight back on their behalf.
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