I just turned down a high risk OB position in Alabama and sent the link about their anti- physician law which criminalizes health care to the recruiter to explain my choice.
the free speech stuff - in some states, aren't doctors forced to tell women things like "abortion can be bad for your mental health" and they have to do ultrasounds? Why don't they get freedom of speech but anti-abortion centers can lie freely?
I hear you about not saying it, but people think it — they fall for it. There’s a case here in MA where a woman is suing a CPC after being told her ultrasound was fine and then suffering from a burst fallopian tube from ectopic pregnancy she actually had. If she wins, it should help orhers.🤞🏻
News Alert: FDA approves first postpartum depression pill in the US
Don't get too excited..It seems to have lots of nasty side effects and complications. As they say, I'm not a doctor, but I also question the drug vs. Placebo study..
It isn't just the steep falloff of progesterone and estrogen after birth that leads to emotional challenges. The brain's dopamine system must be suppressed to support prolactin and lactation capability in new mothers. Add to that the birth trauma experienced by so many women, which is worsened by the contempt they often experience from medical providers, and it is a wonder anyone escapes without mental health difficulties. From drugs.com, "Zuranolone is a neuroactive steroid that acts on the GABA-A receptors as a positive allosteric modulator."
It would be great if they could find help for this. I watched my sister go through it over fifty years ago, before most people had heard of it. There was no help of any kind available to her. She’d had two babies in 13 months, the second one had severe colic, and she was 17 years old. It was really, really brutal. Her mother in law threatened to take her children away from her because the house was a mess.
I’ll have to go find the article. IMO, most anti-depressants come with some unpleasant side effects, and for a large group of people, they are entirely useless because of how their body processes the medication.
Not a lawyer, and I'm wondering how the Planned Parenthood case in Amarillo will go down. When he rules against them, they appeal, but don't appeals have to be over an issue of interpretation of a law? What if the judge just issues false findings of facts in the case to get his desired outcome? I guess I'm not sure what tools the system has to thwart this one man terrorist crew.
We don't necessarily though. Most of the time it's up to Kavanaugh, and as bad as he is, he hasn't yet demonstrated that he wants to be Clarence Thomas or Son of Sam either. Anyway I just hope Planned Parenthood has a sound legal strategy. Legal abortion doesn't matter if there is no one available to provide it, which the enemy is well aware of.
Remember, all these rulings on “free speech” apply to pro-choicers too. If they can approach and annoy complete strangers in public, we can approach and annoy them.
“Oh, you want to convince these women they’re making a mistake and shouldn’t have come here? By a strange coincidence, that’s exactly what we want to do to YOU. Isn’t free speech great?”
I’d like to invite anyone local to Kansas City to join us tomorrow morning at Planned Parenthood in Overland Park to see this principle in action. We’re usually there between eight and noon.
Planned Parenthood
4401 West 109th (I-435 and Roe)
Overland Park, KS 66211
Park in the lot across from the main entrance, not in Planned Parenthood. I’m the old hippie-looking guy with shoulder-length gray hair who walks with a cane.
It’s a great way to get involved and works wonders for getting rid of some of that rage you’ve been suppressing. Hope to see you there.
I'm confused by the "Freedom of Speech" argument used to protect pregnancy centers lying about services and pregnancy facts (what fetuses look like, pseudo-science, etc.). "Anti-abortion activists are using ‘free speech’ quite a lot these days—not just in terms of defending anti-abortion centers’ ability to lie to women..." There are very clear exceptions to free speech for fraud, in some instances extending to factual falsehoods and even negligent factual errors.
According to Britannica, "fraud, in law, is the deliberate misrepresentation of fact for the purpose of depriving someone of a valuable possession. Although fraud is sometimes a crime in itself, more often it is an element of crimes such as obtaining money by false pretense or by impersonation." I understand that most of these maternity centers provide free services, so they are not fraudulently taking money, but they ARE taking information (which in today's world is money!), preventing women from getting desired healthcare and, in many cases, causing long-term financial harm to clients.
In European legal codes fraud includes "misunderstandings arising out of normal business transactions". (Again, according to Brittanica,...) "Any omission or concealment that is injurious to another or that allows a person to take unconscionable advantage of another may constitute criminal fraud. In Anglo-American legal systems, this latter type of fraud may be treated as deceit, subject to action in civil rather than criminal law."
Additionally, US Consumer Protection Laws clearly prohibit claims that are outright misleading or false, especially those that could harm consumers or other businesses. Lying to women about their health and life options clearly breaches such laws. Moreover, consumer protection laws prohibit false advertising and deceptive descriptions.
The federal Lanham Act allows civil lawsuits for false advertising that “misrepresents the nature, characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin” of goods or services. 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a). The FTC also enforces false advertising laws on behalf of consumers. States have their own laws regulating false advertising and other deceptive trade practices. California, for example, prohibits dissemination of information about products or services that is “untrue or misleading,” with both civil and criminal enforcement. CA Bus. & Prof. Code § 17500.
And what about the breach of free speech by States preventing discussion of abortion care, or social media platforms filtering/removing content about abortion? How are gag laws not breaches of free speech, and how is criminalizing "facilitation" of abortion when "facilitation" could be interpreted to mean "sharing information about how to obtain one" not a breach of constitutionally protected free speech?
Why are we not seeing more suits from the pro-choice movement???
Thank you for your deep dive on this. I too was shaking my head in disbelief. I was watching a discussion on MSNBC about indicting the false electors for fraudulent actions against the United States. The argument on behalf of the electors claimed free speech but the fraud charges apparently nullify free speech claims. This is my interpretation of the explanation and not a lawyer. However, the false electors and fake crisis centres situations are oddly comparable. I wondered if taking govt money to provide medical info becomes fraud if the info is unsubstantiated and the providers unqualified.Taking state govt funding under false claims. Might at least work to shut down operations in blue states.
I think where the phony clinics are concerned, it’s because the laws you cite are regulating for profit businesses, and the clinics are non-profit organizations. I think the laws that apply to them are different. What they’re taking from women isn’t considered money, regardless of the financial impact on those women’s lives. The clinics are not profiting from their behavior.
The facilitation laws are new, and I don’t think many people have been charged under them. You have to have standing to sue - you have to prove harm. There’s the case in Texas of the husband suing his wife’s friends, but that’s still in the courts.
I think that the issue with suing social media platforms is two-fold. One is money - it’s really expensive to sue companies with endless resources. Then, too, they are private companies, who can make their own TOS rules.
Not being an attorney, I don’t know the answer to this - I believe there’s a listing online somewhere of all cases filed in the federal courts. I’m wondering if each state has something similar, both for criminal and civil cases. Right now, until these things turn up somewhere in the media, most people don’t hear about them. It would be a lot of work, but if the states do have a database like that, and we could get access to them, we’d have a better understanding of what kind of suits are being filed, where, and by whom.
Also, it’s a crime in every state to pretend to be a nurse or doctor. I have to believe that saying you’re a nurse giving ultrasounds and having them looked at by CPC doctors is illegal if in fact you are not licensed as a nurse or doctor. This seems like a slam dunk to me!
The problem with the CPCs is that they don’t say they’re medical personnel outright. They just wear white coats. Most of those places have a doctor nominally listed as a medical director, even if s/he never shows up, they just claim the doctor reviews the ultrasounds.
I expect, since so many of them are now getting taxpayer funding, one of the things they’ll do is get licensed ultrasound techs on staff.
From Jessica’s post: “Republicans are pushing Issue 1, which would require 60% of the vote to pass a measure, and signatures from every single county in order to get an issue on the ballot to begin with.”
Deeper understanding: even more insidious in the OH attack on democracy than require 60% passage to pass a measure is the doubling of counties (44 now to 88) required to submit signatures for a successful ballot petition AND eliminating a 10-day cure period for campaigns to check those signatures.
It shows how the Republican Party apparatchiks surgically inked a law to remove any possible future challenge to their power. Can’t cloak their message of “power at any cost to democracy” any other way.
I just read in Marc Elias’ newsletter that 23 of the 50 counties in Ohio, don’t have enough poll workers for the Aug 8 election. Dems better rally to fix this….
Messing up polling stations is part of Republicans' strategy. That's why it's so important for 2024 that Democrats won the key offices in all of the swing states last year. Unfortunately Ohio being Republican run will pull out all of the stops, before, during, and after the elections to try to stop the voters from having a say in their laws.
They take every advantage of being the party of rural (white) voters that they can. It's bad enough that our federal system puts states on an equal footing in the Senate. Any measures that put tiny counties on equal footing with large urban ones are grossly undemocratic. Which is the point.
I sometimes feel a little bit alarmed at the way this newsletter jumps to defend doctors. Even personally, every member of my immediate family (4 people in total) could probably do our own daily newsletter of all of the medical malpractices and slights and abuses we've been subject to in our lives, and that could go on for years. Not personally, the doctors might not be the ones who pass these laws, but they are the ones on the front lines enforcing them. Many doctors have chosen to opt out of this by leaving for bluer pastures, and that's certainly something. But when we're talking about a lot of these chemical endangerment cases, we're talking about doctors sharing medical information with police who do not have warrants, often before they ever share that information with the patient, if they ever do. When we're talking about patients being denied care, we are also talking about doctors and nurses threatening patients with police enforcement if they do not comply, or if they decide to get a second opinion. When multiplied with what we already know about how doctors and nurses view and treat Black and Native women, let alone Black and Native trans people, this is a tangible amount of harm that legislators are definitely making worse, but they didn't invent, and they aren't doling out.
Sometimes it feels like the rhetoric around a lot of these tragedies is that this is somehow a natural force. Maternal mortality is something that happens, randomly, something inherent in the body that means you can't survive giving birth, and is exacerbated by doctors not being able to provide certain care, but is primarily something totally independent that doctors and nurses can't control. I think we all know that's not true, but I'm also starting to get a little worried that maybe some people don't know that. And I'm starting to get VERY worried that people are starting to forget that in civil and criminal cases, evidence has to be turned over to the police from somewhere. And while social media and communication companies have been rightfully called out, doctors and nurses are often given MUCH softer treatment, even though we know it happens much more readily that they're the ones giving this information to police. Fetal mandated reporting isn't a new conservative lawmaker suggestion, it's been a doctor policy for as long as I've been alive, and I live in one of the most liberal places in the nation (at least, a place that considers itself as such and demands the press treat it as such).
There can be multiple groups at fault in these situations, and I feel like doctors and nurses are getting a lot of a pass that they are not entitled to.
Very good points. We all want to defend the doctors and nurses who are doing their best to provide care to patients in this crisis, especially considering what is often at risk for them. However, there are plenty of doctors and nurses who are not meeting that standard, oftentimes deliberately. They shouldn't get a pass because of the work their honorable colleagues do, any more than bad cops should get a pass because there are good cops too.
I just turned down a high risk OB position in Alabama and sent the link about their anti- physician law which criminalizes health care to the recruiter to explain my choice.
the free speech stuff - in some states, aren't doctors forced to tell women things like "abortion can be bad for your mental health" and they have to do ultrasounds? Why don't they get freedom of speech but anti-abortion centers can lie freely?
This!!
I hear you about not saying it, but people think it — they fall for it. There’s a case here in MA where a woman is suing a CPC after being told her ultrasound was fine and then suffering from a burst fallopian tube from ectopic pregnancy she actually had. If she wins, it should help orhers.🤞🏻
Hi peeps. From CNN today ...
News Alert: FDA approves first postpartum depression pill in the US
Don't get too excited..It seems to have lots of nasty side effects and complications. As they say, I'm not a doctor, but I also question the drug vs. Placebo study..
It isn't just the steep falloff of progesterone and estrogen after birth that leads to emotional challenges. The brain's dopamine system must be suppressed to support prolactin and lactation capability in new mothers. Add to that the birth trauma experienced by so many women, which is worsened by the contempt they often experience from medical providers, and it is a wonder anyone escapes without mental health difficulties. From drugs.com, "Zuranolone is a neuroactive steroid that acts on the GABA-A receptors as a positive allosteric modulator."
Joe,
It would be great if they could find help for this. I watched my sister go through it over fifty years ago, before most people had heard of it. There was no help of any kind available to her. She’d had two babies in 13 months, the second one had severe colic, and she was 17 years old. It was really, really brutal. Her mother in law threatened to take her children away from her because the house was a mess.
I’ll have to go find the article. IMO, most anti-depressants come with some unpleasant side effects, and for a large group of people, they are entirely useless because of how their body processes the medication.
https://www.media.pa.gov/pages/dhs_details.aspx?newsid=941&fbclid=IwAR0GOxU2UTYA4OhtlLASq3N14Jthi3GbjDB2NEIlfbpKLXKhCmYqq3tXjA4
Check out win in PA today!
Ooh, you support science. Excellent. Solid proof that you are not a stupid Republican.
Not a lawyer, and I'm wondering how the Planned Parenthood case in Amarillo will go down. When he rules against them, they appeal, but don't appeals have to be over an issue of interpretation of a law? What if the judge just issues false findings of facts in the case to get his desired outcome? I guess I'm not sure what tools the system has to thwart this one man terrorist crew.
Not many. Unfortunately, all courtly roads lead to SCOTUS. And we already know how they’ll decree.
We don't necessarily though. Most of the time it's up to Kavanaugh, and as bad as he is, he hasn't yet demonstrated that he wants to be Clarence Thomas or Son of Sam either. Anyway I just hope Planned Parenthood has a sound legal strategy. Legal abortion doesn't matter if there is no one available to provide it, which the enemy is well aware of.
Remember, all these rulings on “free speech” apply to pro-choicers too. If they can approach and annoy complete strangers in public, we can approach and annoy them.
“Oh, you want to convince these women they’re making a mistake and shouldn’t have come here? By a strange coincidence, that’s exactly what we want to do to YOU. Isn’t free speech great?”
I’d like to invite anyone local to Kansas City to join us tomorrow morning at Planned Parenthood in Overland Park to see this principle in action. We’re usually there between eight and noon.
Planned Parenthood
4401 West 109th (I-435 and Roe)
Overland Park, KS 66211
Park in the lot across from the main entrance, not in Planned Parenthood. I’m the old hippie-looking guy with shoulder-length gray hair who walks with a cane.
It’s a great way to get involved and works wonders for getting rid of some of that rage you’ve been suppressing. Hope to see you there.
Yes, thank you!
I'm confused by the "Freedom of Speech" argument used to protect pregnancy centers lying about services and pregnancy facts (what fetuses look like, pseudo-science, etc.). "Anti-abortion activists are using ‘free speech’ quite a lot these days—not just in terms of defending anti-abortion centers’ ability to lie to women..." There are very clear exceptions to free speech for fraud, in some instances extending to factual falsehoods and even negligent factual errors.
According to Britannica, "fraud, in law, is the deliberate misrepresentation of fact for the purpose of depriving someone of a valuable possession. Although fraud is sometimes a crime in itself, more often it is an element of crimes such as obtaining money by false pretense or by impersonation." I understand that most of these maternity centers provide free services, so they are not fraudulently taking money, but they ARE taking information (which in today's world is money!), preventing women from getting desired healthcare and, in many cases, causing long-term financial harm to clients.
In European legal codes fraud includes "misunderstandings arising out of normal business transactions". (Again, according to Brittanica,...) "Any omission or concealment that is injurious to another or that allows a person to take unconscionable advantage of another may constitute criminal fraud. In Anglo-American legal systems, this latter type of fraud may be treated as deceit, subject to action in civil rather than criminal law."
Additionally, US Consumer Protection Laws clearly prohibit claims that are outright misleading or false, especially those that could harm consumers or other businesses. Lying to women about their health and life options clearly breaches such laws. Moreover, consumer protection laws prohibit false advertising and deceptive descriptions.
The federal Lanham Act allows civil lawsuits for false advertising that “misrepresents the nature, characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin” of goods or services. 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a). The FTC also enforces false advertising laws on behalf of consumers. States have their own laws regulating false advertising and other deceptive trade practices. California, for example, prohibits dissemination of information about products or services that is “untrue or misleading,” with both civil and criminal enforcement. CA Bus. & Prof. Code § 17500.
And what about the breach of free speech by States preventing discussion of abortion care, or social media platforms filtering/removing content about abortion? How are gag laws not breaches of free speech, and how is criminalizing "facilitation" of abortion when "facilitation" could be interpreted to mean "sharing information about how to obtain one" not a breach of constitutionally protected free speech?
Why are we not seeing more suits from the pro-choice movement???
Thank you for your deep dive on this. I too was shaking my head in disbelief. I was watching a discussion on MSNBC about indicting the false electors for fraudulent actions against the United States. The argument on behalf of the electors claimed free speech but the fraud charges apparently nullify free speech claims. This is my interpretation of the explanation and not a lawyer. However, the false electors and fake crisis centres situations are oddly comparable. I wondered if taking govt money to provide medical info becomes fraud if the info is unsubstantiated and the providers unqualified.Taking state govt funding under false claims. Might at least work to shut down operations in blue states.
I think where the phony clinics are concerned, it’s because the laws you cite are regulating for profit businesses, and the clinics are non-profit organizations. I think the laws that apply to them are different. What they’re taking from women isn’t considered money, regardless of the financial impact on those women’s lives. The clinics are not profiting from their behavior.
The facilitation laws are new, and I don’t think many people have been charged under them. You have to have standing to sue - you have to prove harm. There’s the case in Texas of the husband suing his wife’s friends, but that’s still in the courts.
I think that the issue with suing social media platforms is two-fold. One is money - it’s really expensive to sue companies with endless resources. Then, too, they are private companies, who can make their own TOS rules.
Not being an attorney, I don’t know the answer to this - I believe there’s a listing online somewhere of all cases filed in the federal courts. I’m wondering if each state has something similar, both for criminal and civil cases. Right now, until these things turn up somewhere in the media, most people don’t hear about them. It would be a lot of work, but if the states do have a database like that, and we could get access to them, we’d have a better understanding of what kind of suits are being filed, where, and by whom.
Also, it’s a crime in every state to pretend to be a nurse or doctor. I have to believe that saying you’re a nurse giving ultrasounds and having them looked at by CPC doctors is illegal if in fact you are not licensed as a nurse or doctor. This seems like a slam dunk to me!
Lesley,
The problem with the CPCs is that they don’t say they’re medical personnel outright. They just wear white coats. Most of those places have a doctor nominally listed as a medical director, even if s/he never shows up, they just claim the doctor reviews the ultrasounds.
I expect, since so many of them are now getting taxpayer funding, one of the things they’ll do is get licensed ultrasound techs on staff.
Yes, that last sentence. Have we just completely given up on the courts after Dobbs? I'd think that could only make the situation worse?
From Jessica’s post: “Republicans are pushing Issue 1, which would require 60% of the vote to pass a measure, and signatures from every single county in order to get an issue on the ballot to begin with.”
Deeper understanding: even more insidious in the OH attack on democracy than require 60% passage to pass a measure is the doubling of counties (44 now to 88) required to submit signatures for a successful ballot petition AND eliminating a 10-day cure period for campaigns to check those signatures.
It shows how the Republican Party apparatchiks surgically inked a law to remove any possible future challenge to their power. Can’t cloak their message of “power at any cost to democracy” any other way.
I just read in Marc Elias’ newsletter that 23 of the 50 counties in Ohio, don’t have enough poll workers for the Aug 8 election. Dems better rally to fix this….
Messing up polling stations is part of Republicans' strategy. That's why it's so important for 2024 that Democrats won the key offices in all of the swing states last year. Unfortunately Ohio being Republican run will pull out all of the stops, before, during, and after the elections to try to stop the voters from having a say in their laws.
They take every advantage of being the party of rural (white) voters that they can. It's bad enough that our federal system puts states on an equal footing in the Senate. Any measures that put tiny counties on equal footing with large urban ones are grossly undemocratic. Which is the point.
I sometimes feel a little bit alarmed at the way this newsletter jumps to defend doctors. Even personally, every member of my immediate family (4 people in total) could probably do our own daily newsletter of all of the medical malpractices and slights and abuses we've been subject to in our lives, and that could go on for years. Not personally, the doctors might not be the ones who pass these laws, but they are the ones on the front lines enforcing them. Many doctors have chosen to opt out of this by leaving for bluer pastures, and that's certainly something. But when we're talking about a lot of these chemical endangerment cases, we're talking about doctors sharing medical information with police who do not have warrants, often before they ever share that information with the patient, if they ever do. When we're talking about patients being denied care, we are also talking about doctors and nurses threatening patients with police enforcement if they do not comply, or if they decide to get a second opinion. When multiplied with what we already know about how doctors and nurses view and treat Black and Native women, let alone Black and Native trans people, this is a tangible amount of harm that legislators are definitely making worse, but they didn't invent, and they aren't doling out.
Sometimes it feels like the rhetoric around a lot of these tragedies is that this is somehow a natural force. Maternal mortality is something that happens, randomly, something inherent in the body that means you can't survive giving birth, and is exacerbated by doctors not being able to provide certain care, but is primarily something totally independent that doctors and nurses can't control. I think we all know that's not true, but I'm also starting to get a little worried that maybe some people don't know that. And I'm starting to get VERY worried that people are starting to forget that in civil and criminal cases, evidence has to be turned over to the police from somewhere. And while social media and communication companies have been rightfully called out, doctors and nurses are often given MUCH softer treatment, even though we know it happens much more readily that they're the ones giving this information to police. Fetal mandated reporting isn't a new conservative lawmaker suggestion, it's been a doctor policy for as long as I've been alive, and I live in one of the most liberal places in the nation (at least, a place that considers itself as such and demands the press treat it as such).
There can be multiple groups at fault in these situations, and I feel like doctors and nurses are getting a lot of a pass that they are not entitled to.
Very good points. We all want to defend the doctors and nurses who are doing their best to provide care to patients in this crisis, especially considering what is often at risk for them. However, there are plenty of doctors and nurses who are not meeting that standard, oftentimes deliberately. They shouldn't get a pass because of the work their honorable colleagues do, any more than bad cops should get a pass because there are good cops too.