Abortion

A Georgia judge on Monday struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban, ruling that the ban is unconstitutional and blocking it from being enforced.

In a 26-page opinion, the Fulton county superior judge Robert McBurney ruled that the state’s abortion laws must revert to what they were before the six-week ban – known as the Life Act – was passed in 2019. The ban was blocked as long as Roe v Wade was the law of the land, but went into effect after the US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022.

“When a fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life, then – and only then – may society intervene,” McBurney wrote.

Effectively, around and about, the State court judge is insisting upon the Roe argument – privacy. This could also be true under the Georgia state cnostitution. We know from Dobbs that it’s not under the US federal one. But it could be true more locally.

Have to wait and see really.

McBurney’s ruling arrives weeks after ProPublica reported that two Georgia women, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, died after being unable to access legal abortions in the months after Roe was overturned. In statements after McBurney’s ruling, abortion rights supporters highlighted Thurman and Miller’s deaths.

“We are encouraged that a Georgia court has ruled for bodily autonomy,” said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, a plaintiff in the case that led to Monday’s ruling. “At the same time, we can’t forget that every day the ban has been in place has been a day too long – and we have felt the dire consequences with the devastating and preventable deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller.”

What excellent Newspeak that is. Both women died after actually having medical abortions – you know, those pills that are so safe people are prescribing them over the internet? At least one of them then got truly loousy, no good, treatment for the partial failure of the pills but it’s wasn’t the absence of an abortion that killed her.

“The United States is, and has been for quite some time, in the midst of a maternal and infant mortality crisis,” said Dr Jamila Perritt, a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist and president of Physicians for Reproductive Health.

Banning access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion care, is “directly causing an increase in morbidity and mortality in our community”, she said. “We have really robust evidence that shows us that when people have sought abortion care and are unable to obtain it, their psychological, social, physical and emotional health is harmed.”

Maternal and infant mortality will probably increase because of the restrictions – especially if national limitations, like enforcement of the Comstock Act, are put into place.

A few bits – the US has recently changed the way it measures maternal mortality which is a part of the explanation. The two cases in Georgia everyone is making so much of were women who *did* have abortions and got those complications that never happen from taking the pills.

But, as ever, it’s the whole thing that needs to be looked at. How many are not aborted – if we’re to weigh the bodies – as a result of the changes? Perhaps that should be used as an offset against those who die because no abortion?

OK, OK, yes. I’m an extremist and all that.

However, something that would be really interesting to find out. Has the birth rate risen? These same changes – has the birth rate risen or not? And even that will be complex. The pregnancy to birth rate will, presumably, have risen. But if the pregnancy rate has fallen – more people take more care – then the effect on births in total could go either way.

Given the toxicity of the underlying subject I’m not sure we’ll ever see any proper papers on this. But perhaps we should?

The Government is enacting new legislation from Oct 31 that would bar protests, including silent prayer, within a buffer zone of 150 metres of a clinic or hospital providing abortion services.

Labour has ditched draft guidance by the last Conservative government that told police silent prayer should be allowed inside the new “safe access zones”.

It has also scrapped exemptions allowing “consensual” communication within the zones, which has been interpreted as permitting the handing out of leaflets or activists engaging people in conversation.

The changes mean that silent prayer will be banned in the zones, although it will be at the discretion of the police to determine whether it meets the threshold for prosecution.

Some 20 to 25% of abortion are in main hospitals.

This makes it illegal to pray silently within 150 metres of a main hospital.

Rilly?

The Home Office is to consider banning silent prayer outside abortion clinics, The Telegraph understands.

Just to be objectionable, does this include anyone who gets out a prayer mat for one of the five a day within 150 metres of a hospital?

‘I felt entirely alone’: comedian Grace Campbell on the aftermath of her abortion

Well, there was one less around.

When Grace Campbell decided to terminate her pregnancy, she felt relief at being able to exercise a right so many women had fought for. But nothing prepared her for the depression that came after. Here, the comedian reflects on the physical and emotional toll

Ho Hum.

An excellent exampole of a male and female difference. She’s looking for confirmation, assurance, empathy. Men are saying, well, don’t do that then. Not all men, obviously, but that’s a v male response to this all the same.

‘This is life and death’: inside a Florida clinic after the six-week abortion ban

That’s, umm, what the whole discussion is about, no?

The risk of stating plainly what Idaho argued at the US supreme court on Wednesday morning is that it is so sadistic and extreme that people might not believe you. Idaho has one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country. Prohibiting all abortions at any stage of gestation, with no exceptions for rape or incest, the Idaho law allows doctors to perform abortions in cases where the life – but not “merely” the health – of the pregnant woman is at risk.

We can only kill this one person if by not doing so we kill this other person.

A singular version of the trolley problem.

And?

‘How sick do they have to get?’ Doctors brace for US supreme court hearing on emergency abortions

The piece opens standard American journalism school style. Personal story from a participant.

Personally I absolutely hate this style but that’s what they’re taught, that’s what wins prizes.

Still, the background, sure. We’re back in this battleground of competing rights. That of the child/baby/foetus/blastocyst to not be killed and that of the mother to not be mother/not die herself. As we’ve got laws – and always have had too – about where those two sets of rights switch from the babbie must be born to switch on that vacuum cleaner then we’ve got to have legal judgements about where that switch is.

Pretty much everyone – even The Pope – will agree that treating the ectopic pregnancy to save the mother’s life, even if that does mean the death of the embryo (note the very precise formulation the Catholic Church uses there, treat and if as a byproduct is OK, directly not) is moral if regrettable.

Defining “emergency” as “the bird’s feeling a bit peaky” would lead us to where we are in Britain today, effectively on demand even as that’s not, at all, what the law says.

So, yes, there are going to mneed to be lgeal rulings.

The Arizona supreme court ruled Tuesday to let a law banning almost all abortions in the state go into effect, a decision that could curtail abortion access in the US south-west and could make Arizona one of the biggest battlefields in the 2024 electoral fight over abortion rights.

The justices said Arizona could enforce a 1864 near-total abortion ban, first passed before Arizona became a state, that went unenforced for decades after the US supreme court legalized abortion nationwide in the 1973 decision Roe v Wade. However, the justices also ruled to hold off on requiring the state to enforce the ban for 14 days, in order to allow advocates to ask a lower court to pause it again.

Precisely, and exactly, because abortion became a constitutional right – and then didn’t – the 50 year process of working through the debate on the subject, the revision of all those old laws, didn’t happen.

Therefore the US is going to go through all of that 50 years later than everyone else.

Shrug.

What horrifies me is that any parliamentarian should want to decriminalise the fatal poisoning or dismemberment of unborn babies that are so well developed that they could survive outside the womb. No amount of sugar coating this can remove the repellent reality of what – if the law is changed in the way certain MPs want – could end up happening.

Ms. Creasy, for example.

Donald Trump backs abortion ban in ‘later months’ — but says states can decide
Former president rejects nationwide ban and supports exceptions for rape and incest.

For vicious ideologues like me this is far too weak tea. But it’s around and about what the general population thinks is the right apprpach. It’s also what the law is. Abortion is not a right in the Constitution, nor is it one of the reserved powers of the Federal Government. It is, therefore, a matter for the States.

The Donald is the reasonable and sensible one here. Who saw that one coming?

No watering-down, no new red tape: it’s time to fully decriminalise abortion in England and Wales
Stella Creasy

So any bird should be allowed to kill any kid – right up to the point of birth itself – for any reason or none?

Might that not be considered something of an extreme position?

Also, fuck off.

A rightwing Christian lobby group that wants abortion to be banned has forged ties with an adviser to the prime minister and is drawing up ­policy briefings for politicians.

The UK branch of the US-based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has more than doubled its spending since 2020 and been appointed a stakeholder in a parliamentary group on religious freedoms in a role that grants it direct access to MPs.

The ADF’s efforts to boost its UK influence are revealed as part of an Observer analysis that shows a surge in activity within the wider anti-­abortion movement.

Ahead of a historic vote on abortion later this spring, in which MPs will vote on a law that would abolish the criminal offence associated with a woman ending her own pregnancy in England and Wales, several anti-abortion campaign groups have expanded their teams, ramped up advertising and coordinated mass letter-writing campaigns targeting MPs.

People campaign about upcoming change in the law. Where would democracy be if this sort of thing catches on?

How do you grieve for a child who barely lived? A new book has some profound answers
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

I thought abortion was empowering?

While Republicans are split on the decision about embryos after a number of hospitals have ended their popular IVF programs out of fear of prosecution, others, like Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley agreed that “embryos, to me, are babies.”

This, apparently, is theocracy.

Hmm, might be something that folk aren’t going to put up with and all that. Could be something you agree with, something you don’t.

It’s also straight down the line, middle of the road, opinion of the world’s largest centrally organised religion – The Catholic Church.

As I say, agree with or not, it’s not actually an extreme position at all.

In a world that simply trusted women, abortion itself would be less common, I think, because more trust equals more empowerment and therefore fewer limitations: women would be free to obtain birth control at low cost and without a prescription, a key issue that has been somewhat overlooked amid the heated battles over abortion. Add some straightforward sex education that teaches women from an early age how fertility works — as opposed to the fearmongering version in which pregnancy can happen anytime, anywhere, just from being in the same room as a sperm — and you would get an informed, empowered population capable of avoiding unintended pregnancies.

Birth control is more widely available than it used to be. Vastly cheaper. Technically very much more effective too. Sex education is very much more widely available and so on.

The abortion rate has leapt over the past century that this has all happened too.

I very strongly suspect that there’s a Jevon’s Paradox here. The elasticity of demand for sex with respect to its price – the potential pregnancy thing – is such that reduce the odds of the pregnancy per unit of sex and you’ll increase the units of sex by so much more that total conception rates rise.

Well, maybe, anyway.

It’s certainly not obvious that more birth control and more sex education has correlated with fewer abortions now, is it?

Women in England and Wales accused of having illegal abortions have been held in custody after pregnancy loss, had their children taken into care and been saddled with debt, an expert has said.

Dr Jonathan Lord, a co-chair of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) abortion taskforce, said he was aware of up to 30 “deeply traumatic” cases where women had been investigated by the police, with some suffering “life-changing harm”.

He said: “We’ve had patients lose everything – lose their home, lose their children, lose their relationship with their partner – purely as a consequence of the investigation.”

This happens to all sorts of people accused of murder.

His warning comes after the RCOG issued new guidance on Monday saying doctors and other healthcare staff should not report suspected illegal abortions to the police as prosecutions were never in the public interest.

Gosh, that’s fun. So the abortionists are now determining the public interest are they? Isn;t that a bit of aggrandisement?

Now, it is possible to have different views on abortion, obviously. But the way the law works having an abortion outside the current law is an unlawful killing. Like that recent incident where the bird took the pills at what was it, 32 weeks? Which, you know, most of us would consider infanticide, not abortion.

But the folks who plug in the vacuum pumps for a living decide it’s not in the public interest to investigate?

Oh, right.

Do doctors have an obligation under federal law to keep their patients alive, even if their patients happen to be pregnant women? Do doctors have an obligation to prevent maiming – or irreversible organ damage, or other kinds of serious bodily harm – and if so, does that obligation extend even to women? Do women have a right to access medically necessary care even if they are pregnant? No, according to the US fifth circuit court.

That’s the conclusion reached by a three-judge panel recently in Texas v Becerra, a case in which Texas sued the Biden administration over guidance that directed all hospitals receiving federal funds to perform “necessary stabilizing treatment” on patients – including abortions on pregnant patients undergoing medical emergencies.

The case was about whether Federal rule making outweighs State law. As medical care – let alone abortion – is not one of the enumerated powers then no.

Shrug.

Texas can ban emergency abortions despite federal guidance, court rules
The ruling by a unanimous panel of fifth US circuit court of appeals comes amid a wave of lawsuits focusing on abortion exceptions

The entire point of Dobbs was that abortion is not a Federal matter.

The Constitution says that some things are a Federal matter. International trade, say. It also says that those things which are not listed as being Federal belong to the States or the people. Roe said that abortion came under privacy, a Federal right. Dobbs said it didn’t. Therefore the States – and the voters – can do pretty much what they want about abortion because it’s simply not a Federal matter.

This is absolutely nothing about what hte restrictions should or should not be on abortion. It’s about whether the Feds have any rights here – No.

The Supreme Court of Texas has overturned a ruling that would have allowed a woman to terminate her pregnancy under the medical exception to the state’s near-total abortion ban.

The unanimous ruling came hours after lawyers for Kate Cox, who was 20 weeks pregnant, revealed that she had left the state to obtain an abortion.

Ms Cox, 31, turned to the legal system after being told if she continued with her current pregnancy, her baby would likely be stillborn as it has a condition called Trisomy 18 and has no chance of survival.

No, not forced birth, rather this:

Nine Republican lawmakers ruled on Monday that a “good faith belief” by Damla Karsan, a doctor who sought to perform the abortion on the grounds it was medically necessary, was not enough to qualify for the state’s exception.

Instead, the court said, Dr Karsan would need to determine in her “reasonable medical judgment” that Ms Cox had a “life-threatening condition” and that an abortion was necessary to prevent her death or impairment of a major bodily function.

“A woman who meets the medical-necessity exception need not seek a court order to obtain an abortion,” the court wrote.

“The law leaves to physicians – not judges – both the discretion and the responsibility to exercise their reasonable medical judgment, given the unique facts and circumstances of each patient.’’

They’ve changed the law. As ususal, the law is slightly vague. Therefore greater clrification of what the law actually says is necessary – it being the US, through the court system.

Think it’s a bit odd to call the Supreme Court of TX 9 lawmakers but still. Such running of the first few cases up and down the legal system is normal when the law is changed. Any law in any direction. Just the way the system works.