29 Comments

. All those majority men who make these rulings on abortion bans are not doing so on accurate data. It is so obvious. I don’t believe they are that dumb. Majority went to law school and they are smart people. They have an agenda. The ends justify the means. I also believe they are operating on their personal emotional opinions and biases.

Not a professional character of judges. 😡

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The Dems have to keep up the "TRUMP DID THIS" campaign. Just hammer it everywhere. Show ads: Closing maternity wards: TRUMP DID THIS.

Women sick and denied care: TRUMP DID THIS.

IVF restricted in Alabama: TRUMP DID THIS.

Teens before judges being told they're too young to get an abortion: TRUMP DID THIS.

Rape and incest victims forced to carry their attacker's baby: TRUMP DID THIS.

And then I would fade out the orange face to the faces of many republicans and type:

"THEY'LL ALL DO THIS."

Because they will.

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Addendum: I'd plaster TRUMP DID THIS over the scene of the cop wielding the pregnancy test to the woman in the car in Newsom's ad.

I've long abandoned any sense of reason and wouldn't be surprised if a scenario like that really did occur sometime soon in one of these states.

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I read the Healy piece. Wow. It's not like she went into the Catholic school and talked about reproductive healthcare. How they demonized her in that article.

She's awesome so far. She was one of the first to stockpile mifepristone.

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I live in Idaho and we are in crisis mode here. St.Lukes CEO urging attention to the alarming increasing rate of life flight transport due to female health care.

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Re: the Arizona repeal vote: The Republicans have been saying the whole time that they have the votes to repeal. This issue is that they refuse to break with their party in the procedural vote required to put the actual law up for a repeal vote. I don't think Rep. Cook's statement means that there are any breakthroughs on that first step, unfortunately.

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Republican politicians are adamant about banning abortion regardless of what the population wants. I wonder what they're so scared of. I think they fear the authors of Project 2025. I would like a list of everyone who participated in the writing of this evil document. People need to know so we can react!! We can follow them around and SCREAM!!!

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I heard a Princeton professor on Deadline Whitehouse (Nicolle Wallace's MSNBC show) say that members of Orban's government helped Heritage Foundation write the document. Imagine that. ..

Here are some of the smiling white male faces overseeing the writing of this gloriously oppressive document in case you haven't seen them yet:

https://www.project2025.org/about/about-project-2025/

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Very interesting!! I will start writing their names in my responses!! Everyone should know the names of these weasels who are doing harm to women and girls

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And as a bonus, you can download Spencer's headshot! :-0

https://www.heritage.org/staff/spencer-chretien

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Tommy Tuberville: "abortion - sometimes past the birth of the baby". WTF.... that's not even a real thing, he might as well say the Tooth Fairy is real then.

Women: " welcome my new 6 pound baby boy into the world..... that I've been waiting 9 months for... ....psych.... sorry everyone I changed my mind, even though I already birthed him out I would like an abortion now"

That redneck is such an idiot, he should just go back to football.

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I don't think football wants him back.

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Another STAT article, this time from last month: Saima May Sidik, "Amid the Battle Over Abortion Rights, A Failure to Agree on How to Define Abortion" (Mar. 11, 2024), https://www.statnews.com/2024/03/11/how-to-define-abortion/. For example, is refusing a C-section to improve the chances of survival of a 37-week-old fetus that is at risk because of the mother's high blood pressure? Utah OB-GYN Dr. Cara Heuser says you have a medical definition and 50-plus legal definitions of abortion and "a bazillion public perceptions of abortion". Legal scholars Greer Donley and Caroline Kelly found that 20 states changed their definition of abortion since Dobbs. Many states provide that removing a dead fetus or tissue from an ectopic pregnancy is not abortion. Some states don't count pregnancies that the treating doctor does not know about. Dr. Rachel Flink, a New York OB-GYN, points out that a pregnancy can be terminated both because of health complications and because the person does not want to be pregnant. It is often unclear whether a miscarriage was induced or occurred spontaneously. Surveys often find that people define abortion based on their opinion of the conduct of the pregnant person--e.g., whether the pregnant person could care for a child but is "selfish." Many people--including 38% of residents and 39% of physicians surveyed by KFF,believe that emergency contraception causes abortion.

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The Mike Pence Op-Ed was an excrescence.

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James M. Beck of the law firm Reed Smith LLP published an article, "A Couple of Thoughts About the Comstock Act" (Apr. 19, 2024). Best way to find it is to Google Lexology.com and search there--the URLs are a real dog's breakfast. Beck describes the Hippocratic Medicine decisions as resting on "laughably relaxed standing" and "judicial disrespect for the FDA's scientific expertise and judgment". Beck considered how the Comstock Act could affect mifepristone availability, and concluded (by analyzing decisions from other areas of law about zombie or obsolete statutes) that "the Comstock Act simply hasn't applied to FDA-regulated products." Beck said that neither private litigants nor Congress tried to bring back the Comstock Act in any area regulated by the FDA until this case. He argues that when the FDA Act was passed in 1938, it removed the Comstock Act from regulation of drugs. He also looked at a trademark case (about a juice product for which unsubstantiated health claims were made) and concluded that if the FDA approves a product, that should prevent the Comstock Act from banning the product for the use for which the FDA approved it.

In the STAT newsletter, Olivia Goldhill's article "Hospitals Largely Keep Quiet on Maternal Care Since Dobbs, STAT Survey Finds," appeared on April 22: https://www.statnews.com/2024/04/22/dobbs-decision-hospital-policy-changes-abortion-services/. Goldhill says that Dobbs has impaired treatment of conditions such as miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy in states with restrictive laws. STAT contacted two hospitals in each state and asked to talk to doctors about the effect of Dobbs on maternal health care. Only six hospitals agreed--and they are all in states that protect abortion access. Usually hospital PR teams are glad to be interviewed by reporters, but that was not true in this case--STAT contacted all kinds of hospitals, but nearly all of them refused to be interviewed. Doctors in six hospitals, all in states where abortions are available, agreed to be interviewed. They said they did not personally change their care post-Dobbs. But it has been reported that Louisiana doctors perform C-sections instead of a safer abortion when a pregnancy becomes unviable because of premature rupture of membranes. Care has also been denied for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. Sometimes, when membranes rupture very early, there is still a fetal heartbeat, so the restrictive abortion law conflicts with the standard of medical care. A Wisconsin doctor said that, before the state's zombie ban was struck down by a court, providers were uncertain if they could provide care according to the standard of care. Doctors are afraid of losing their jobs, or other repercussions, just for talking to reporters. Hospital systems that are afraid of losing funding or political retaliation can order their doctors not to speak to reporters. Aileen Gariepy, director of complex family planning at Weill Cornell Medicine (in New York) said that the hospital is glad to publicize its achievements in other disciplines--but "there are no billboards about how we were able to provide abortion care for PPROM [membrane rupture] at 19 weeks and now the mom has healthy kids."

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OMG! tfg on trial AND the 1864 abortion law possibly being repealed—all in the same week?

when your policies are too toxic for your own voters, that’s quite an achievement.

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"I can’t believe it made it past the fact-checker" in the NYT? Surely you jest...

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The NYT is a piece of work. To be blunt they stink

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20 years ago, when I was a newspaper reporter, all op ed pieces were fact checked, and rejected if the piece was mostly lies. No more.

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Yes, I experienced the same thing back in the late 70s, at a weekly student/community newspaper. In fact, that was my primary job--that and copy-editing. I spent hours at it for every issue. I even remember going to the library and following up by finding government docs that a writer had used. I was a volunteer, but I really cared about the paper's credibility (not to mention my own.) Interpretation was one thing, and writers could and did do that. Lying was something else entirely!

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Yeah, I think they think because it's "opinion" they can allow the writer to say false things because it's not the paper saying it.

But they're wrong. Letting Pence spew his lies was a tacit agreement with them and gave them legitimacy. I'm so upset with the NY Times.

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Yes, they need a fact checker rebutting the lies, and a disclaimers written at the bottom of the page.

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I definitely remember having to confront writers who wrote things that were demonstrably untrue. I specifically recall a three-article section that included one by a full professor at the university. I'd taken some of his classes and was the one who convinced him to write the article. (Yes, it was about a controversial topic, thus the three varying articles.) He seemed to think that, because we got along with each other, I didn't have a responsibility to fact-check what he'd written. And, yes, we had a knock-down, drag-out fight about that. Thank goodness he didn't have any political power! But he did the 70s equivalent of talking smack about me and the other staff at the paper. It's really important to put such people on official notice: they don't get to tell lies, not on my watch. (Pence, as everyone knows, has a long history of spewing lies.) I'd had it with the NYT decades ago, don't trust a word that they print til I fact check it for myself. All the news that fits their biases, you know? My guess is that most papers, book publishers, etc don't employ fact-checkers any more; they certainly laid off or fired all their copy editors.

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Mike Pence’s op-ed (autocorrect tried to change op to poop and I’m here for it) is another example of pro-lifers writing pieces that barely use the word “woman” at all. I think they are running away from the bodily reality of pregnancy because they do not know what to do - their only hope is to pull it back to the theoretical. So we have to keep bringing it back to reality - lived experiences. Re: emtala - if the court starts arguing the wrong way on that, I am literally going to lose my mind/hope/everything. Grateful as always for your coverage on all of this, Jessica.

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Do the new HIPPA rules also apply to gender affirming care?

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Good question, I would hope so!

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Great job on the additional healthcare protections, Biden Administration.

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The Biden administration has been trying really hard to issue worthwhile regulations, but it's like playing Whack-a-Mole, as soon as they publish a regulation some reactionary in a judicial robe (usually in Texas) issues an injunction against it.

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I know. I hope they make campaign issues out of this kind of thing, too.

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