There Is Only One Way for Biden to Fulfill His Promise to “Restore Roe”

If the president truly wants to protect reproductive rights, he’s going to have to do what he’s so far refused even to consider: expand the Supreme Court.

ELIE MYSTAL
Feb 20, 2024

At a campaign rally in Manassas, Va., on the night that Donald Trump effectively locked up the Republican Party’s nomination by winning the New Hampshire primary, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris kicked off their reelection campaign. They focused on a single issue: abortion rights. The two incumbents, and their spouses, gave speeches about the need to “restore Roe” and put the blame for its revocation squarely at Trump’s feet. “Let there be no mistake,” Biden said. “The person most responsible for taking away this freedom in America is Donald Trump. The reason women are being forced to travel across state lines for healthcare is Donald Trump…. The reason their fundamental right has been stripped away is Donald Trump.”

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/to-preserve-abortion-rights-biden-must-expand-court/


A Zealot Judge Has Ordered a Nationwide Abortion Pill Ban

Texas Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling threw the fate of mifepristone into question. The case is likely headed to the Supreme Court within days.
By Elie Mysta
APRIL 7, 2023

United States District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk outlawed distribution of the abortion drug mifepristone in a 67-page ruling Friday evening. The order revokes the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of one of the most commonly used methods to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, and his order could end access to the drug nationwide.

Kacsmaryk, who was a noted anti-abortion lawyer before Donald Trump elevated him to the federal bench, argued that the FDA didn’t properly consider the safety of mifepristone when it approved the drug back in 2000.

To get to this ruling, Kacsmaryk didn’t just have to agree with the fake science cooked up by forced-birth activists against the drug; he also had to invent a bunch of legal gobbledygook to find a reason for the activists to challenge the FDA process in the first place.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/a-zealot-judge-has-ordered-a-nationwide-abortion-bill-ban/


Democrats Must Become As Brave and Righteous as Abortion-Clinic Escorts

To win back abortion rights, Democrats need to learn how to fight the moral battle being waged by anti-abortion theocrats—something clinic escorts do every day.

By Elie Mystal, The Nation
May 16, 2022

We now live in a country where the government cannot force you to wear a mask on a plane during a pandemic but can force you to carry a pregnancy to term against your will. It is a country where the government won’t ban certain kinds of assault rifles but will ban certain kinds of medical care. We live in this country because five justices in thrall to a fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy have taken control of the Supreme Court—and because the majority of Americans who reject that orthodoxy have too often ceded the moral ground to the monsters who claim to have legitimate, enforceable interests over women’s bodies.

Women’s rights organizations and advocates have been in the trenches, fighting this fundamentalist sect, at literal physical risk to their lives, for decades. They’ve been fighting in the streets and fighting in the courtroom, but their alleged allies in Congress, in the media, and in the boardroom have rarely had their back.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/abortion-moral-fight/


Send in the Abortion Boats!

Or try something else, but you gotta do something for Texans, Joe Biden.

By Susan Rinkunas
Dec 15, 2021

After Texas’ six-week abortion ban took effect in September, President Joe Biden promised a “whole of government effort” to fight the law. That response so far appears to include more money for birth control (not a solution!) and a Department of Justice lawsuit against the state.

On Friday, the Supreme Court dismissed the DOJ’s lawsuit, and while it said that a challenge by abortion providers could move forward, they can only do so on very narrow grounds, and the court let the law stay in effect. There is another challenge to the law in state court, but there is no relief in sight for pregnant people in the second biggest state in the country.

Continued: https://jezebel.com/send-in-the-abortion-boats-1848212765


The Supreme Court’s Texas Abortion Ruling Isn’t the Victory Many Want It to Be

Sonia Sotomayor said it best: “The Court should have put an end to this madness months ago.… It failed to do so [earlier], and it fails again today.”

By Elie Mystal
December 10, 2021

The Supreme Court today allowed some lawsuits to go forward against Texas’s six-week abortion ban, commonly known as Senate Bill 8. The majority opinion, written by Neil Gorsuch, allows abortion providers to sue a limited number of state officials and argue that the ban is unconstitutional. The decision means that lower courts will now be allowed to rule on the merits of the ban, and those lower court decisions will eventually be appealed back to the Supreme Court. The law will remain in place while that litigation plays out.

Meanwhile, in a separate, unsigned opinion, the Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice against SB 8.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/texas-abortion-ruling-supreme-court/


The Supreme Court Might Save Us From the Texas Abortion Ban After All

Yesterday’s hearing on Texas’s SB8 did not go well for the Lone Star State, but Roe v. Wade still faces dire threats.

By Elie Mystal
Nov 2, 2021

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases involving the Texas law banning abortions, Senate Bill 8. The first was a challenge by abortion provider Whole Woman’s Health. The second was an argument by the Department of Justice. Despite the intense media attention on these cases, neither argument was actually about abortion, the rights of pregnant people to access health care, or the constitutionality of the Texas abortion ban.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/texas-abortion-ban-hearing/


This Is How You Smack Down Texas’s Abortion Ban

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Texas suspended SB 8. His ruling offers a step-by-step legal guide to striking down the law for good.

By Elie Mystal Oct 8, 2021

It is difficult to explain the extent to which Texas’s Senate Bill 8—which bans abortions after six weeks of gestation and empowers private bounty hunters to sue anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion—is unconstitutional and lawless. Even calling the law “unconstitutional” is like calling the Marianas Trench “deep”: It’s true, but it fails to capture the abysmal quality of the thing. I feel I lack the vocabulary to describe how bad SB 8 is, but US District Judge Robert Pitman gave it a try. On Wednesday, he ordered a temporary injunction suspending enforcement of SB 8 and dedicated 113 pages to explaining why.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/texas-abortion-ban-block/


Republicans Are Using the Covid-19 Crisis to Kill Abortion Rights

Republicans Are Using the Covid-19 Crisis to Kill Abortion Rights
GOP governors have begun banning abortion during the Covid-19 crisis, creating a precedent that might be too cruel for conservative judges to pass up.

By Elie Mystal
Apr 2, 2020

Conservative judges, at least the kind of devoted anti-choice activists Donald Trump has nominated, would outlaw abortion rights outright, if they could. They’re waiting for the right case, and maybe the right death on the Supreme Court, in order to do just that. But in the meantime, the goal of these judges is to restrict access to abortion services to the point where women cannot practice their constitutional rights to control their own bodies, even as those rights still theoretically exist.

And these judges, and their Republican confederates, are certainly not about to let a good crisis go to waste.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/republicans-are-using-the-coronavirus-to-kill-off-abortion-rights/