USA – A 150-Year-Old Law Could Ban Abortion Nationwide

The legal zombie may be unconstitutional, but that didn’t stop conservative judges from citing it in their recent mifepristone decisions.

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK
APRIL 15, 2023

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s blockbuster opinion last week ordered the suspension of the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of mifepristone, the first pill used in a medication abortion. In the text, the judge invoked a bizarre bit of legal reasoning: the Comstock Act, a law that Congress passed in 1873 to ban sending pornographic literature, contraceptives, and early abortion-inducing substances through the mail. The law has been criticized as overly broad, even unconstitutional, and archaic for much of its 150-year history. But on Thursday, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed much of Kacsmaryk’s ruling, including his invocation of Comstock.

On Slate’s legal and courts podcast Amicus, host Dahlia Lithwick discussed the far-reaching implications of the Comstock Act’s dubious resurrection and rehabilitation by these conservative judges with Mary Ziegler, an expert on the law, history, and politics of reproductive health care and conservatism in the U.S. from 1945 to the present. Ziegler is a professor at the University of California–Davis School of Law, and the author of Roe: The History of a National Obsession. A transcript of their conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Continued : https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/04/abortion-pill-ban-comstock-act-history-mifepristone-kacsmaryk.html

USA – The Lawless Ruling Against the Abortion Pill Has Already Prompted a Constitutional Crisis

This unprecedented abuse of judicial power with no basis in law or fact will soon force the Supreme Court’s hand.

BY MARK JOSEPH STERN
APRIL 07, 2023

On Friday evening, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas issued an unprecedented decision withdrawing the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, the first drug used in medication abortion, 23 years after it was first approved. His order, which applies nationwide, marks the first time in history that a court has claimed the authority to single-handedly pull a drug from the market, a power that courts do not, in fact, have. Kacsmaryk’s ruling is indefensible from top to bottom and will go down in history as one of the judiciary’s most shocking and lawless moments.

It goes even further than expected, raising the possibility that he will impose “fetal personhood,” which holds that every state must ban abortion because it murders a human. Within an hour of its release, the decision also spurred the start of a constitutional crisis: A federal judge in Washington swiftly issued a dueling injunction compelling the FDA to continue allowing mifepristone in 17 states and District of Columbia, which brought a separate suit in Washington.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/04/matthew-kacsmaryk-mifepristone-medication-abortion-supreme-court.html

07.04.2023

Commentary

5th Circuit Court of Appeals

anti-choice cruelty

anti-choice misogyny

anti-choice overreach

USA – How Abortion Bans Are Impacting Pregnant Patients Across the Country

Leading legal scholar Mary Ziegler and Tennessee OB-GYN Dr. Nikki Zite talk to ProPublica about ominous trends and threats to patients’ lives posed by increasingly strict abortion bans.

by Ziva Branstetter
March 29, 2023

Nine months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending nearly 50 years of federal protection of abortion rights, the impact of the landmark ruling known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization continues to ripple across the nation.

In Dobbs, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 that the U.S. Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. The ruling essentially divided the nation into two territories: states where people have access to abortion care and states where most or all people are unable to obtain an abortion, even if their lives are at risk.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/legal-medical-impact-abortion-legislation-qa

29.03.2023

Interviews/Podcasts

criminalizing women for abortion

The Real End Goal of the Anti-Choice Texas Abortion Lawsuit

BY MARY ZIEGLER, Slate
MARCH 28, 2023

Earlier this month, Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general and the architect of S.B. 8, Texas’s six-week abortion ban, filed what seems like a long-shot lawsuit. Mitchell is representing a Texas man in a wrongful-death suit against two of his ex-wife’s friends and the person who provided them with an abortion pill.

This suit may never go anywhere, even in a state as hostile to abortion as Texas. State law requires that a death be “wrongful,” but the abortion in this case took place before Texas’ trigger ban took effect. Mitchell and his colleagues are relying on a pre-Roe criminal ban to try the case, and its legal status remains contested. As important, Texas law makes clear that pregnant people themselves can’t be sued or prosecuted for having abortions, so it’s not clear that aiding a woman in doing so would be considered wrongful either.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/03/personhood-laws-anti-choice-texas-abortion-lawsuit.html

28.03.2023

Punishable by death—how the US anti-abortion movement ended up proposing the death penalty

These proposals are unlikely to succeed but remind Americans what is at stake, writes Rebecca Kluchin

BMJ 2023; 380 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p711
Published 24 March 2023
Rebecca Kluchin, professor

In January 2023, 24 Republican legislators in the US state of South Carolina sponsored the South Carolina Equal Protection Act of 2023, a bill designed to extend constitutional rights to embryos and fetuses at all stages of development, granting them equality with women already born.1 The bill makes women and pregnant people who undergo abortion subject to the state’s homicide laws and punishments, including the death penalty. It allows exceptions if they face “imminent death or great bodily injury,” as well as to save the life of the mother, but not for rape or incest.

The anti-abortion movement celebrated a huge victory last summer when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. With the ruling for Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court threw abortion policy back to the judgment of individual states, making access to abortion care contingent on where one lives. Since then, 14 states have criminalised abortion.2 South Carolina legislators attempted to ban the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy, but the state supreme court ruled that effort unconstitutional in January. The Equal Protection Act is one of several legislative efforts to ban the procedure again.

Continued: https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p711

In Texas, where abortion is already a crime, more roadblocks to access could be coming

Anti-abortion lawmakers eye new restrictions as court case on mifepristone access looms

Mia Sheldon, Ellen Mauro · CBC News
Posted: Feb 16, 2023

Look closely and a faint outline of the "Whole Women's Health" sign is all that remains of the only abortion clinic in McAllen, Texas. It was forced to close last summer. The building is now owned by a group of anti-abortion supporters — a literal symbol of the end of Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to choose in the state.

"I'm numb," said Cathy Torres from Frontera Fund, an organization that used to help 30 to 40 people a month travel within Texas or to nearby states to get abortions.

Continued: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/texas-abortion-access-1.5957451

Opinion: This law from the 1870s could imperil abortion in blue states

Opinion by Mary Ziegler
Fri January 27, 2023

Since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in June, promising strategies have emerged to protect abortion rights in individual states. Some have begun to pass ballot initiatives to preserve or create state constitutional protection. Others have looked to legislatures to shield doctors and those who help people seeking abortion from potential consequences in conservative states.

These wins are hardly a silver bullet: not all states allow ballot initiatives and there are any number of states where majorities of voters seem to support abortion rights but are governed by legislators who want to ban the procedure—a result of deep partisan divides, gerrymandering and limits on access to the vote.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/27/opinions/abortion-at-risk-in-blue-states-ziegler-ctrp/index.html

27.01.2023

Featured

Opinion

abortion pills

Alliance Defending Freedom

Italian senator renews anti-abortion foetus rights proposal

Maurizio Gasparri has higher chance of success this time after rightwing coalition’s election victory

Angela Giuffrida in Rome
Wed 19 Oct 2022

An Italian senator has submitted a proposal for an amendment to Italy’s civil code that would recognise a foetus as a human being, which if passed into law could enable pregnancy terminations to be classified as murder.

Maurizio Gasparri, a politician with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, which is part of the government led by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy – a party with neofascist origins – expected to be sworn in next week, unleashed a barrage of criticism from members of the opposition when he presented his “rights of the unborn child” proposal to the senate.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/19/italian-senator-renews-anti-abortion-foetus-rights-proposal

US anti-abortion extremists are already waging war on IVF

Republicans have made it very clear that they aren’t going to stop at abortion: they’re coming for birth control and fertility treatments

Arwa Mahdawi
Sat 24 Sep 2022

Going through fertility treatment isn’t fun at the best of times: it’s expensive, invasive and emotionally exhausting. Ever since Roe v Wade was overturned earlier this year, however, getting fertility treatments in the US has become exponentially more stressful; the end of Roe triggered a spate of new personhood bills in Republican states which define a fertilized egg or embryo as a legal human entity. If you know anything about in vitro fertilization (IVF), which I’m not sure any of the men drafting these personhood bills do, you’ll immediately know that makes IVF hugely complex. Numerous embryos are usually created during the IVF process as not all will be genetically viable. Unviable embryos, along with embryos that aren’t donated or frozen for later use, will be disposed. If these collections of cells are considered people then, according to the personhood laws, you’ve committed a crime by disposing of them.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/24/republicans-ivf-abortion-week-in-patriarchy

24.09.2022

Human Life Protection Act

in-vitro fertilization

USA – Anti-Abortion Activists Formally Ask Supreme Court to Consider Fetal Personhood

So much for "just sending abortion back to the states"--they wanna keep going!

By Caitlin Cruz
Sept 7, 2022

It’s been two-and-a-half months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade—sending the issue of abortion back to the states, as Republicans claimed was their end goal—and the anti-abortion activists are, of course, now trying to push it further. Catholics for Life, along with two pregnant people on behalf of their fetuses, formally asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to consider the legality of fetal personhood.

The filing comes out of a Rhode Island Supreme Court case in which the state’s highest court held that fetuses are not people and therefore are not entitled to constitutional protections. (The law originally being challenged was the state’s Reproductive Privacy Act, which codified Roe v. Wade into state law.) Because fetuses are not people, the Rhode Island Supreme Court said the original lawsuit lacked standing to be filed. In short: A fetus (known in the filing as Baby Roe) cannot file a lawsuit because it doesn’t have any rights. I’d make the obvious chicken-egg joke if I didn’t have to be so fucking serious about this shit all the time.

continued: https://jezebel.com/anti-abortion-activists-formally-ask-supreme-court-to-c-1849505290

07.09.2022