Supremes set to strike down Roe vs Wade

..3 min breach report.

Abortion ATTACKED, but Canada has no reason to be SMUG

This week we learned Roe v. Wade is set to be overturned in the U.S. Our analysts Pam Palmater and El Jones discuss the troubling decision, the problem with relying on courts, and why Canadians shouldn’t be too quick to celebrate abortion policy north of the border.

epaulo13 wrote:

1) it implies that it's the voters fault because they didn't vote more democrats last election. and that if they don't next time it will be their fault. 2) it implies that democrats will protect women around abortion. this is an outright falsehood. they had years and even more years to codify but didn't. now it's going to be their election platform. very cynical. the reality is the party elites continue to support the reactionaries in the party.

Last election voters thought abortion rights were a constitutionally protected right. You’re right, during upcoming elections the Democrats will run on pro-choice platforms and the Republicans will run on anti-choice platforms.

Women’s rights are under attack. But that was already the case for Indigenous women in the U.S. and Canada

Make no mistake: the conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court’s reported decision to overturn the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade is an attack on poor and marginalized women of colour – one that represents another huge blow to the decades-long fight for health care equity.

quote:

With complete justification, women’s rights advocates are on fire, denouncing this latest move – one that former U.S. president Donald Trump had himself promised when he vowed to stack the Supreme Court with anti-abortion judges in the 2016 election. But even in the decades since the country’s highest court ruled that abortion was legal in the U.S., many individual states have created their own laws and barriers, chipping away at this freedom and restricting access.

That right has also long been conditional for Native American women. In 1976, the Hyde Amendment banned the transfer of federal funds for abortion services from Indian Health Services, the provider of Native American health care. While successive amendments over the years have allowed for some abortions under a small number of exceptional circumstances – rape, incest, a mother’s life threatened – Indigenous women in the country have effectively been denied equal abortion rights until just last year, when Joe Biden introduced a 2022 federal budget that omitted the Hyde Amendment.

Indigenous women on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border have long been fighting for truly equal reproductive rights and bodily self-determination. So we should know that even as a woman’s ability to choose what she wants to do with her body threatens to be revoked in the U.S., injustices continue – including in Canada, where a paternalistic health system that has treated Indigenous women as inferior, and commits forced sterilization of them even now, continues apace.

quote:

Today, reproductive rights in Canada are covered under Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which specifies that the security of a person includes the right to have security over your body, preventing the state from imposing unwanted medical treatments.

Yet sterilization without consent continues today, according to a report from the Canadian Senate’s committee on human rights: as of 2018, more than 100 Indigenous women across Canada have alleged that this happened to them, according to lawyer Alisa Lombard, who represents many of the women in a class-action lawsuit. And just this week, Indigenous women bravely told the Senate committee about their sterilization experiences: “I didn’t say anything to anyone because I thought no one would believe me,” one said.

So Canadians rightly disgusted by the Roe v. Wade turnover in the U.S. need to keep Indigenous and racialized women in their minds as they continue to push for health care equity and bodily autonomy. They should remember Joyce Echaquan, the Atikamekw mother who broadcast on Facebook the racist slurs and treatment she received in a Quebec hospital, and died after being neglected and wrongly diagnosed.....

Excellent epaulo13!

epaulo13 wrote:

The exception proves the rule.

Of course there's a difference between the parties.

Louisiana GOP Advances Bill to Criminalize Abortion as Murder

The Louisiana House has advanced a Republican-led bill that would classify abortions as murder, allowing prosecutors to criminally charge people who terminate their pregnancies. Reproductive justice advocates have condemned the measure as “blatantly unconstitutional” and “barbaric.” 

In related news, college and high school students on Thursday held walkouts across the country as protests continue in response to a leaked Supreme Court opinion that revealed the court is preparing to overturn Roe — the landmark 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion nationwide. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts has decried the leak as “absolutely appalling.” 

Death Penalty for Abortions Becomes Pivotal Issue in GOP Runoff in Texas

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A bill that could allow the death penalty for women who receive abortions emerged as a pivotal issue in a state legislative race in Texas.

The legislation, which was filed last year by state Representative Bryan Slaton, would allow women who receive an abortion to be charged with assault or homicide, which carries the state's death sentence.

Texas already has one of the country's most restrictive abortion laws, but some Republicans have sought to add further limitations to the practice—while Democrats and some moderates have strongly opposed the laws.

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“I Was Raped by My Father. Abortion Saved My Life”: Prof. Michele Goodwin on SCOTUS & the New Jane Crow

quote:

MICHELE GOODWIN: Amy, it’s important that we all understand that the new aspect of anti-abortion provisions includes an aspect that we would not have seen even five years ago. And that is that they make no exceptions for cases of rape or incest.

Now, these laws, on their own, are really quite chilling and horrific when we understand, just as a baseline, the importance of reproductive liberty and freedom and when we understand that a woman or girl is 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by an abortion in the United States. So, that’s just a baseline anyway. But then, when we add onto it that these laws have this kind of punitive aspect, as well, such that if you have been raped or that you have somehow survived incest, that you, too, may no longer have an exception that would provide for the ability to terminate a pregnancy, then we really understand that these laws have nothing to do, and they never have had anything to do, with protecting, respecting the autonomy, the dignity, the privacy of women or girls. In fact, they’re just simply cruel types of laws that are power plays that fit into a history of controlling women’s bodies and a history, quite specifically, of controlling the bodies of Black and Brown women. I mean, it’s been all women who have been subjected to the cruelties of such laws, but they have a particularly pernicious effect when we actually understand the historical implications, too.

As to rape and incest, I thought it was really important to legitimize that conversation and move us away from the taboo where we’re not supposed to talk about those things and where, clearly, the Supreme Court is not talking about that at all, as it was not raised in oral arguments. And in the leaked draft opinion that was circulated this week, Justice Alito does not even bother to actually mention rape or incest in any part of the nearly 100-page draft opinion.

quote:

MICHELE GOODWIN: Well, this is where we’re in a space that I call the New Jane Crow, these laws that are not rational, they’re quite logical, and, even more, they’re punitive, they’re cruel, they’re absolutely excessive. You know, if you think about the work of Pauli Murray, she was in many ways the godmother of the civil rights movement. Thurgood Marshall said that the book that she wrote on race laws was the Bible of the civil rights movement. And it’s about 800 pages, single-spaced, all of these crazy, really crazy Jim Crow laws, such as, you know, Black people can’t play checkers in the park — that ridiculous, that you think, “Who in the world thought of that?” — and would connect a fine and also criminal punishment if Black people are caught playing checkers in the park.

Well, in the New Jane Crow, we see laws such as and propositions such as what you’ve just described. They make absolutely no sense, but they’re absolutely cruel. And they’re meant to cause fear and to chill behavior. And their reach is beyond what we could grasp or even imagine. And that’s also really what Policing the Womb is about. It is a warning call, because we’ve already seen, again, as Black women in the canaries — canaries in the coal mine, we’ve seen that kind of punitive punishment, with Black women being dragged out of hospitals in shackles and chains in the late 1980s and '90s because they were imperfect in how they carried their pregnancies — no exact law saying that they could or should be dragged out of hospitals in such punitive ways — or giving birth in prison and on toilets and concrete floors. But the specter of policing their pregnancies, this kind of specter that the state owns everything with regard to your reproductive capacities, leads us into a space where there's dramatic surveillance. And it’s frightening for people. And that’s what these laws are meant to do. Yes, they’ll criminally punish, and possibly even death sentence, but they’re meant to instill fear in people.

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MICHELE GOODWIN: Yes. Well, what we’ll see is just like in Jim Crow times or antebellum times. There are places where women can be free and girls can be free and may not have to worry. And even there, I would put some caution around it, because in California just a couple years ago, in the valley, there was a prosecutor who attempted to prosecute — in fact, was prosecuting — a woman for murder in the case of her stillbirth.

But, yes, what we will begin to see is that there will be states where people will not be free, where they will in fact be policed. And that kind of policing will also be connected to sex profiling, just like racial profiling — right? — this hyper-intensive look at what are girls and women doing with their bodies. There will be a turn to and pressure on nurses, on doctors, on medical staff to breach millennia-old practices of confidentiality between themselves and their patients. And they will breach that and will share that information, just as we saw in that case, with law enforcement. And then the next step will be arrest.

And this is not just simply anecdotal. As I record in my book, in the state of Alabama, already there have been hundreds of women who have come under the inspection of the state, charged and arrested under fetal endangerment — or child endangerment, in that case — laws, laws that would extend child, the definition of a child, to a fetus. And in Alabama, as I’ve mentioned, Black women, the canaries in the coal mine there, the majority of those women happen to be white. But they all are poor, or the vast majority of them are poor or working-class women, who have already come under the attention of the state in this prurient kind of way.

So what we have to understand is just what we’ve seen at the Supreme Court level, this attack that’s finally reached its pinnacle up to the Supreme Court to dismantle Roe v. Wade, this work has had tentacles. And it’s been working to criminalize women and also to impose civil punishments associated with pregnancy.....

JKR wrote:

Tennessee GOP Governor signs bill criminalizing mail-in abortion drugs

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(CNN)Tennessee GOP Governor Bill Lee signed a bill Thursday criminalizing abortion-inducing drugs that are provided via mail.

The measure, known as HB2416, establishes criminal penalties for offenders, but would not apply to the patient who was provided the abortion drugs.
The legislation sets strict parameters around abortion-inducing drugs. The drugs "may be provided only by a qualified physician," the bill says, stipulating also that a "manufacturer, supplier, pharmacy, physician, qualified physician, or other person may not provide an abortion-inducing drug via courier, delivery, or mail service."

If it’s mailed from out of state and the recipient is not punished, then no one gets punished. Unless the state has a reciprocal agreement with Tennessee. Which wouldn’t be the case with any state in the northeast or far west.

Feels like this has been largely overlooked, but Alito's draft Supreme Court opinion on abortion uses the phrase "domestic supply of infants." It's real, on page 34. DOMESTIC SUPPLY OF INFANTS.

laine lowe wrote:

WOW, infants as a commodity. 

Infants are props for social media as well. Considering people use it to make money I'd say they're being treated as a commodity by parents as well.

Codifying Abortion Rights In A Federal Law Is Not A Silver Bullet

 

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/supreme-court-roe-abortion-law

NorthReport wrote:

Codifying Abortion Rights In A Federal Law Is Not A Silver Bullet

 

Of course. The law could just be repealed when Republicans get control of both houses of congress and the White House.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/supreme-court-roe-abortion-law

epaulo13 wrote:

Paladin1 wrote:

As champions of women and women's rights, including a women's right to choose, maybe it's time Trudeau and the Liberal party make abortions more accessible.

The Liberals were elected in 2015. It's almost like they don't care about accessibility outside of major cities aka their voting base.

..austerity is an anti abortion policy.

Neo-liberalism as practiced by both the US Democrats and our Liberals is an anti-abortion policy. Internationally the IMF enforces the same kind of regimes on sovereign nations that need development aid.

Women who fought for US abortion rights in the 70s call for mass global protests

It was over the Thanksgiving holiday, catching up with old high school friends, that Frances Beal heard that Cordelia had died. Like the now 82-year-old Black feminist and activist, her friend had left home to go to college, but she didn’t make it through her first year because, like anybody who wanted to terminate a pregnancy in America in 1958, she had been forced to undergo a backstreet abortion.

“She was dead because she’d had an illegal abortion. And it had gone bad. And if you take a look at the statistics, the number of woman that died from illegal abortions was tremendous,” Beal, who later joined the movement to legalise abortion, told the Observer.

Now, more than 60 years after Cordelia’s death and nearly half a century since Roe v Wade legalised abortion, she fears many more women could die after a leaked draft document revealed that the supreme court looks like it is preparing to overturn the landmark ruling.

“The overthrow of Roe v Wade equals the murder and assassination of women and that’s something that I feel in my heart will happen again,” said the author of the pioneering 1969 pamphlet Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.

What happened last week should send an urgent warning signal not only to Americans but the world, she said, calling on people to take to the streets in their millions worldwide as they did following the police murder of George Floyd.

“Unfortunately, America often acts as a precursor of things to happen in other countries. And if they can attack and destroy a woman’s right to choose an abortion in the United States it won’t be too far before the right will be destroyed in other countries around the world.”

She said women around the world needed to return to the attitude of women in the 60s to protect the lives of thousands whose lives would be put under threat. It’s a basic human right for a woman to control her own body,” she said......

..from above

quote:

Justin Trudeau recently said that “every woman in Canada has a right to safe and legal abortion.” What’s your assessment of how we’re doing on that front?

He’s correct, we have a right. We have an inherent human right to safe and legal abortion. The question is whether we can access that right. 

One of the broadest misunderstandings of rights is the idea that once they’re legislated, people have them. But in fact, governments have a proactive obligation to ensure those rights. For 30 years since the Morgentaler decision was passed down, Canada has been falling down on ensuring women—and pregnant people—have access to their legal rights. 

Canada is a vast country, with extremely few abortion providers that are located within cities for the most part, and certainly not every city. Crisis pregnancy centers—which are these abhorrent fake abortion clinics that basically lure pregnant people and give them terrifyingly false information to try to prevent them from having abortions—outnumber actual abortion clinics by a lot. It’s almost double, if not triple. 

In some cities you have something like seven crisis pregnancy centers, and one beleaguered abortion clinic where you’ll have maybe one provider who’s working part time, maybe two doctors who are working part time. It’s a mess. And often this will be in a province that only legally provides abortions up to a certain week limit—around 21 to 23 weeks. This lack of access leads to huge inequities in terms of who can access abortion and who can’t—with poorer, Indigenous and racialized people having the most difficulty. 

I can sketch some of the history. In 1969, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, with the full support of the bishops of Canada, decided to enact therapeutic abortion committees, which were basically panels of three doctors who would decide whether the health and life of a woman was at risk before allowing her to receive an safe and legal abortion in a hospital. This was actually a new obstacle because previously, a lot of provincial legislation said that if a woman got just a single signature from any doctor, the decision could be made between her and her doctor.

There are problems with therapeutic abortion in general because it doesn’t support choice, it only supports this idea that women needed to save their life or health. Until the Morgentaler decision in 1988, women were coming before these panels of three patronizing doctors and basically saying, “my life is at risk because I’m going to kill myself.” That’s basically what you had to do to get an abortion...... 

..more #85 post.

quote:

In real terms, what are the difficulties of getting a pill prescribed or getting a surgical abortion —and what do people do when they come up against those restrictions?

You’re only able to prescribe the pill up to 10 weeks right now in Canada. It is safe to prescribe it later, but Canada put a more conservative restriction on it. So basically, you have the option of medical or surgical abortion until a certain week of gestation. And then after that, you only can have a surgical abortion. 

Canada, unlike the United States, has almost no providers who will provide an abortion over the limit—like a later term abortion. At Action Canada, we would routinely send women down to the States in order to get abortion were in fact, actually there are more providers and providers who will provide a wider range of services. 

So the notion that the U.S. is legally restricted in many ways—which they are—is also balanced by the practical fact that they have more providers, and in some states they have higher term limits for a lot of providers. And so we’ve often when it comes to abortion tourism, we’ve had to send people down to the U.S. on a regular basis. 

According to health rights in Canada, if you cannot access a necessary medical service and essential health service in Canada, then your health care coverage should be paying for you to get it somewhere else. Unfortunately, that has not happened for the vast majority who don’t have access to abortions. Again, it comes down to a matter of resources and money.....

Pondering wrote:

Uneven access to abortion services isn't important on a federal level as it has little impact on votes which is all that matters to political parties. 

Areas where abortion access is limited are populated by Conservatives or are low population so there is no need for the Liberals to worry about it. People in Toronto are not going to vote based on abortion access in PEI or even northern Ontario. 

It is a very useful cudgel with which to beat the Conservatives. It's not because people are afraid the Conservatives will move on abortion. That's why it doesn't matter that Conservatives didn't move on it under Harper. It's besides the point. The point is to underscore that the Conservative party is full of weirdo social conservative dinosaurs that are against lbgtq+ and sex education. It's about branding not abortion rights. 

Abortion rights activists in Canada are making it about access but the NDP won't get much traction on it. Anyone voting on that issue is likely already voting NDP. 

All the political parties only care about their voters or potential voters. 

Really insightful post and points.

..i've posted this brilliant video in another thread. it is important to understand the role our economic system plays in the reproductive rights/abortion issue. not only the austerity aspect but where it places/treats women in that system. it's a very patriarchal system.  

..it's almost 2 hrs long and i've watched it in bits..i'm almost done. it has helped to educate me in my understanding that abortion is part of a larger issue. 

Tithi Bhattacharya: Gender, Sexual and Economic Violence in Neoliberalism

The Supreme Court as an Instrument of Oppression; NYT; May 8, 2022

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The court is not bound by public opinion, the will of the voters or changing mores.

The court is a permanent council that answers to no one. It can behave as it chooses. The robes can go rogue.

This is the power Republicans want — the power to overrule the will of the majority — and the courts are one of the only areas where that power can be guaranteed. Conservative activists have fought for decades for this moment. Two Republican presidents, George W. Bush and Donald Trump (neither of whom won the popular vote when he was first elected), appointed five of the nine justices on the current court.

The average age of those five justices is 61 years old. And, as Forbes noted last year, the average age of a justice leaving the court, by death or retirement, has increased to roughly 81.

Republicans and their judges may well have just ushered in a new age of oppression.

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..as i said in another post. the current struggle in the us is a backlash against women and their larger struggles.

..lots more analysis for you to read if you go to the link.

The Fight to Defend Abortion Rights

In many countries around the world, winning or defending the right to abortion access has been a key feature of women’s movements in recent years. From the historic repeal of the constitutional ban on abortion in Ireland in 2018 to the Green Wave movement which won legal abortion last year in Argentina, millions across the world have mobilized to fight for new reproductive rights gains, and to defend abortion rights from right-wing attacks. But these are part of a longer trend: since 2000, 31 countries have expanded access to abortion.

Campaigns to win abortion rights are part of a broader global women’s revolt which has exploded on every continent in recent years. Women have stepped forward to lead movements fighting for feminist demands, and have come to play outsize roles in struggles where the primary demands are not around women’s rights, such as in the revolutionary movements in Sudan and Myanmar. In the years just prior to the pandemic, International Women’s Day was revived as a major event with mass rallies and walkouts in many countries. #MeToo has been a truly international phenomenon, and the fight against sexual violence has fueled movements in the streets in countries all across the world, and spurred a recent wave of high school walkouts in the US.

Attacks by the right-wing on abortion have also been a growing feature internationally, including in the United States. In some countries, right-wing parties and governments, often linked to conservative religious forces, are using the issue of abortion to mobilize their bases. The 2016 Polish “Black Monday” protest saw over 100,000 workers, mainly women, walk off the job to defeat the right-wing Law and Justice party’s attempt to push through a total abortion ban. This protest was a watershed event, inspiring activists and movements around the world to fight for women’s rights in general, and the right to abortion in particular.

Class Society and the Control of Women’s Fertility

With abortion access now under dire threat in the US, and with political polarization increasing generally in many countries, the stage is set for fierce battles against reactionary forces around reproductive rights in the coming year. If the right succeeds in dismantling protection for abortion rights on the national level without an all-out fight to oppose this, it would have significant costs to the credibility of the political establishment. Furthermore, other hard-won social gains such as marriage equality could be the next target of the right-wing agenda.

Women’s oppression has its roots in the origins of class society, when, in order to maintain control of wealth, the male-dominated ruling class needed to ensure a clear line of inheritance. Control of women’s reproduction by the ruling class also has an ideological component. A tiny handful of people cannot expect to maintain control over a brutally exploitative economy if the working class, who represent a majority of society, are united and organized. The ruling capitalist class has always used sexism to divide the working class. Working class men may have no control over their lives while they’re at work, but they are offered instead the domination of their female partner and children according to the ideology of capitalism.

Male domination of the family is now rejected by large sections of working class people in many countries. However, even in countries where women’s mass movements had a transformative impact on women’s roles in society, the idea that men have the right to control women’s sexuality and reproduction persists in different ways, and plays an important role in maintaining divisions in the working class.

As more women go to work outside the home, entrenched views of male domination of women’s sexuality and reproduction tends to weaken as women earn their own wages and have more independence. The monumental women’s movement of the 1960s and 70s in the US occurred as a large influx of women were moving into the workplace. The further globalization of the world economy under neoliberalism led to the growth of industries such as textiles in poor countries and an increase of women in the workforce in many countries. This process is also connected to the increasing urbanization of the population in poor countries.

The increasing presence of women in the workplace worldwide is a key factor in the trend of women demanding freedom from traditional patriarchal control, including on the reproductive front. Social factors, particularly the role in society of organized religion, are also important in influencing abortion restrictions. Positively, internationalism has played a big role in recent years with women’s movements taking inspiration from movements in other countries.

The need for the ruling class to control women’s reproductive capacity continues to be a feature of capitalist society. A number of capitalist regimes today are concerned with the reproduction of the working class and maintaining the population at a level where there will be enough workers to avoid economic stagnation and crisis. In both Iran and China, the regimes are facing long-term trends toward declining population and part of their response has been to strengthen penalties for abortions in Iran, and to begin to restrict abortion access in China.

The Revolt Against Patriarchal Norms

A significant feature of movements for abortion rights in a number of countries, especially in Latin America, in the past period has been women revolting against the social power of the Catholic Church and its highly sexist, even misogynistic policies and practices. The power of the church in many countries has been a form of social control utilized by the ruling class to shore up the capitalist state, and the political elite historically has been tightly linked with the church hierarchy. The legalization of abortion in Ireland and Argentina represents major defeats to the social control of the church. This has been a broad process: pro-abortion protests occurred in several Latin American countries on September 28, International Safe Abortion Day. Significant movements for abortion rights are building particularly in Chile and the Dominican Republic, and in Mexico the decriminalization of abortion was recently won.....

oldgoat wrote:

Just as an aside, I read today that in the 90's, the Supreme court ruled that anti choicers demonstrating in front of the homes of abortion provider staff was free speech protected under the first amendment.  

In BC we created bubble zones to protect patients and workers and had numerous murder attempts made on health car providers.