28 Comments

So what, exactly, is being done at the ballot box to make it perfectly clear what they are voting for. This creates tremendous confusion!

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What do these fake referendums actually say that is confusing voters??? Show us what it actually looks and reads like please?

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I know it's been a few months, but I'll try to cover it. To take Nebraska as the example, the Repubs have already passed a 12 week abortion ban. There's now a measure on the ballot to overturn it, and the Repubs don't want that, so they added a measure of their own; one that reads "Will protect the right to an abortion for the first trimester into the State Constitution, protecting abortion rights". The TRICK is that if you read the full measure, it's identical to the 12 week ban; the only thing the measure actually does is enshrine the abortion ban into the State Constitution, making it harder to overturn. They know saying "Vote for a 12 week ban" won't work, so instead they're saying "Vote to protect abortions for the first 12 weeks".

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The Republican trickery is exactly on par for everything else that they do and touch , like what the crisis pregnancy centers do. A few weeks ago I saw a mobile unit that said Birth Choice. The mobile RV looked pretty cool and specifically the word " confidential". At first I was happy to see it, but I decided to google it to double-check.... I saw they were tied to a church and very much NO choice.

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Always read the fine print when it comes to Republican bills, ballots, amendments!!

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And this type of duplicitousness is one MORE indication of how the forced birth movement isn't at all about "protecting babies" but about controlling women. If it was really about protecting women and saving babies, they wouldn't feel the need to lie to the public so much.

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Not surprised at all that they think women are dumb enough to fall for this.

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Jessica did you see Mike Pence’s call in The NY Times (WTF NYT?) for a national 15 week ban? That seems to fit this strategy

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IKR? I get that they want to "tell both sides" and allow for a wide range of opinions in the Op-Ed pages. But the Paper Of Record should not allow opinions to masquerade as facts. The comment section was shut down early. Can't imagine why ...

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trump brought the devil out into the open. I never knew this level of cruelty existed in this wealthiest country going after the poor and the vulnerable. The same SCOTUS that gutted R v. W to unleash so much harm. When you have nothing of yours, it is not easy to pull yourself out of that void (the one video that made a tremendous impression on me about Black people's plight in this country was MLK's NBC interview talking about bootstrapping when there are no boots.)

Anthony Michael Kreis

@AnthonyMKreis

Chief Justice Roberts seems to think that homelessness has an instantaneous cure-- as if someone can voluntarily pull themselves out of poverty and into shelter if they simply will themselves sufficiently.

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If they can't beat us, pretend to BE us started long before Roe. Robert Pearson started the first so-called Crisis Pregnancy Center in Hawaii in 1967. That movement has spawned thousands of fake clinics, many of them actually funded by Republicrats at all levels of government. Charlotte Taft

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The GOP is nothing if not deceptive. They have perverted most laws and why would they not do this here? They turned the religious freedom concept upside down by making it a protection for one group presumably small as in indecent cake makers who refuse to behave like compassionate humans. They are doing the same here (as was revealed in the mifeprestone argument) accommodating and protecting the one group presumably small but not an oppressed minority, while the rest suffer. Regulations (or lack thereof) protecting the small coterie of billionaires while the rest suffer... the rest may go to hell, that is their battle cry.

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Writing in the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie nails it; someone in the mainstream media is doing their job:

"In many states where abortion bans and restrictions have undermined maternal care, the laws have exceptions for rape, incest, certain fetal abnormalities and the life of the mother. In theory, those exceptions are supposed to give medical providers the leeway to end pregnancies when necessary. In practice, they aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. When you’ve created a punitive legal environment for a medical procedure, it does not matter how many exceptions you write into the law. You’ve created a world in which doctors will hesitate or refuse to perform that procedure, no matter what."

"Republican lawmakers do not seem too concerned with the fact that there are no real exceptions to their abortion laws. The laws, it seems, are working as intended."

He also links to an AP report about failures to treat pregnant women at emergency medical facilities. No paywall:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/opinion/abortion-ban-pregnancy-emergency.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mU0.5vTw.y2V0bBNF9FUj&smid=url-share

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How much hatred for these people am I allowed to have? The rage I feel is so pervasive.

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Lots. Me too.

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The lengths Republicans will go to force something that kills people, something that even many of their own voters don't want, should terrify every American. Because the ONLY way it makes any sense is if this is a movement hellbent on ending democracy and installing an authoritarian regime. Which of course it is. The proof is right here. Far too many Americans still haven't come around to understanding this.

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Exactly, totally agree - the only way this makes sense is if they're moving to a fascist dictatorship where democracy ends..... and it won't just end for women, it will end for everyone.

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Living here in Kansas, where keeping abortion legal is enshrined in our state constitution won by THIRTY POINTS, the state legislature keeps trying to pass anti-abortion measures.

Like a bill where women who were getting an abortion had to give a reason for getting the abortion. Which violates all kinds of health privacy laws, but do they care? No.

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One problem is there's a difference between reproductive rights being in a state constitution because the actual text is there, which is why states are trying to pass referenda, and reproductive rights being in a state constitution because the state supreme court has said so. The second situation is much more tenuous, because the makeup of the court can change, just as it did for the U.S. supreme court, and that's what their long term plan is. Even the first situation is hardly safe, because you can always have judges who rule that words don't mean what they mean. So long as a political party intent on taking away human rights remains a powerful force - and it's the dominant force in half the states - those it targets will remain in danger.

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Yes, our state Supremes did take a case in 2015, which is when they decided that abortion is enshrined in the Constitution (and it was a more liberal leaning court at that time).

So it is quite tenuous, as you said, but it's the best we can hope for right now, considering the make up of the legislature.

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And that's why Republicans think, at least in a world in which there's no federal protection for reproductive rights, that they'll win in the end. Kansas is a very Republican state. In their view the Democratic supreme court and the Democratic governors who appointed those justices are anomalies. Montana Republicans think the same way, although the justices are elected there. One thing Republicans have figured out to do where possible is to make judicial elections run on partisan lines, which gives a much better chance of getting away with electing anti-abortion justices in red leaning states, even though we know the populations are pro-choice.

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The Republicans learned long ago that the judicial system is where the real power lies. Liberals have been late to the party, and here we are.

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When it comes to hatred, trumpublicans are its freedumb fighters. It seems to come so easily to this group of slow-thinkers, doesn’t it? The vast majority of them, politicians included, hate that they are not the majority population in this country, so the desire for power is intense.

Without a second thought (or a well-reasoned first thought), they jump at the chance to prove their bona fides. In the case of abortion, trumpublican legislators got their marching orders from the head hate machine that intends to strip this country of its democracy — The Heritage Foundation, and its Project 2025 directives. All good trumpublicans will drop to their knees in service to it.

trump’s machine grows perilously more hateful as time goes on. The women of America must unify as if our lives depend upon it, as surely that has become a unifying truth. We must choke out the language of hate and the purveyors of pain.

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I wish I could agree they are slow-thinkers. They have outfoxed us at many turns. Our insistence on privacy turned into a society of secrecy. We, sadly, have contributed to the stigma around abortion.

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They only plan for the realizations of short-term realities. They never take the time to project for the long-term. Slow-thinking, knee-jerk policies that fail shortly after they succeed. Outfoxing is their modus operandi, but if they fail to be re-elected as the electorate realizes it’s been duped, their objectives fail as well. Let’s hope the electorate discards the cancer that’s been metastasizing for the last fifty years.

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The right wing, cristo-fascists are the enemy of women and girls. Some of the biggest haters are Kacsmaryk, Clarence Thomas, Alito, Amy Barrett, Kavanaugh, and republican legislators. They have all unleashed these harsh abortion bans, not giving a damn about the lives they are destroying. The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed evil to invade our country. May the harshest KARMA descend on them.

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it's like you're in my brain!

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