How Hobby Lobby Could Be Trump’s Reproductive Rights Wrecking Ball

The 2014 Supreme Court ruling is even more consequential as we stare down the possibility of Trump’s reelection—and a revival of the Comstock Act.

Susan Rinkunas
March 25, 2024

When Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion in Hobby Lobby v. Burwell 10 years ago, he provided answers to questions that no one had asked—at least, officially. The plaintiffs, two businesses owned by Christians, objected to a mandate in the Affordable Care Act requiring health insurance providers to cover types of birth control known as emergency contraception, or E.C. Colloquially known as the “morning-after pill,” E.C. works after sex to prevent pregnancy by blocking sperm from fertilizing an egg or by preventing the release of an egg in the first place. But anti-abortion activists believe that morning-after pills and IUDs prevent implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus, which they say is tantamount to an abortion.

Continued: https://newrepublic.com/article/179622/hobby-lobby-comstock-alito-contraception


USA – The Pseudoscience That Could Kill Women

MAR. 15, 2022
By Sarah Jones, New York Magazine

Here is a scientific fact: Ectopic pregnancies are not viable. They occur when a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, which dooms the pregnancy and, without treatment, can doom a woman, too. Ectopic pregnancies can lead to hemorrhage and are the leading cause of death for women in the first trimester of pregnancy. Here’s another fact: There is one way to save a woman from an ectopic pregnancy, and that is through termination — an abortion.

A proposed Missouri bill ignores these facts outright. H.B. 2810 would make it a felony, punishable by ten-years-to-life in prison, to perform an abortion after ten weeks of pregnancy, including in cases of ectopic pregnancy, the Springfield News-Leader reports. The bill’s architect, state representative Brian Seitz, offered a familiar justification for his work. “This bill is about protecting life,” he told the newspaper. In a confusing email to Bloomberg News, Seitz claimed that his bill had been misrepresented by critics and that it would do nothing “to curtail that LEGAL activity, as it can present a clear and present danger to the mother.”

Continued: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/the-anti-abortion-movements-deadly-pseudoscience.html


The Anti–Birth Control Movement Is the New Anti-Abortion Movement

BY MOLLY JONG-FAST
July 1, 2021

Republicans have started to blur the lines between birth control and abortion in the hopes of making it harder for American women to get both birth control and abortions. And nowhere is this clearer than in the Missouri statehouse, where lawmakers debated whether they needed to restrict Medicaid coverage of birth control and limit payments to Planned Parenthood. Yes, as the Kansas City Star reported, lawmakers there spent hours last week in a discussion that “resembled a remedial sex-education course.” It was a tricky play, attacking birth control as a way to attack abortion, and it didn’t work…this time.

“What’s been happening in Missouri last week should serve as a warning sign for what’s to come,” says Alexis McGill Johnson, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. “We’re already hearing members of the U.S. Congress spread the same falsehoods we’ve seen in Missouri, conflating medications that prevent pregnancy—birth control and emergency contraception—with medications that end pregnancy.”

Continued: https://www.vogue.com/article/anti-birth-control-movement


How An Abortion Fight In Supreme Court Could Threaten Birth Control, Too

November 3, 2020
JULIE ROVNER

Abortion opponents were among those most excited by the addition of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court in October. And they had good reason to be.

As a law professor and circuit court judge, Barrett made it clear she is no fan of abortion rights. She is considered likely to vote not only to uphold restrictions on the procedure, but also, possibly, even to overturn the existing national right to abortion under the Supreme Court's landmark rulings in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/03/930533103/how-an-abortion-fight-in-supreme-court-could-threaten-birth-control-too


USA – How the Satanic Temple Could Bring Abortion Rights to the Supreme Court

By using the same religious liberty argument as Hobby Lobby, The Satanic Temple is trying to have its members exempted from state abortion laws

By DAVID S. COHEN
August 24, 2020

One of the overarching themes of the Supreme Court’s recent term was that it was surprisingly liberal on several major issues: upholding gay rights, striking down an abortion restriction, and rejecting the President’s request to be immune from having to turn over his financial records. All of this is true, but that doesn’t make this Court liberal. Rather, despite these rulings, this is still a very conservative court. And one area this has been evident is religious freedom.

In a series of three cases, the Court ruled that religion has a particularly special place in American law. So special, in fact, that religious entities can be exempt from generally applicable anti-discrimination laws, can refuse to follow Obamacare mandates about coverage of preventive medical care, and can force the state to send them public funds for students at their religious schools. This has been a trend for the John Roberts Supreme Court — religious entities have won claims of religious liberty in 12 of the 13 cases to come before the Court since 2012.

Continued: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/satanic-temple-abortion-rights-supreme-court-1048833/


Stuart Kyle Duncan: the Trump-appointed judge working to ban Louisiana abortions

Stuart Kyle Duncan: the Trump-appointed judge working to ban Louisiana abortions
The ultra-conservative fifth circuit court judge repeatedly upheld the ban in Texas and could result in clinic closures across Louisiana

Rosemary Westwood in New Orleans
Sun 14 Jun 2020

A landmark US Supreme Court ruling expected before the end of June could shutter most of Louisiana’s abortion clinics and precipitate clinic closures in more than a dozen other states.

The case, June Medical Services v Russo, is one of the most high-profile supreme court cases of the year, after Donald Trump appointed two justices who tipped the balance of the court to a conservative majority. And it might never have reached the supreme court without the aid of another Trump-appointed judge, Stuart Kyle Duncan.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2020/jun/14/stuart-kyle-duncan-the-trump-appointed-judge-working-to-ban-louisiana-abortions


USA – Can Anti-Abortion ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centers’ Snag Federal Family-Planning Funds?

Can Anti-Abortion ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centers’ Snag Federal Family-Planning Funds?

By Ed Kilgore
Nov 8, 2019

Like nature, federal funding streams abhor a vacuum. So when the Trump administration pushed Planned Parenthood out of women’s family-planning programs by stipulating that recipients could not refer patients to (or have an organization connection with) abortion providers, a pot of about $60 million a year suddenly became available to anyone who could supply the stipulated services without running afoul of the new regs.

For the most part, the anti-abortion movement’s favorite alternative to Planned Parenthood clinics, its huge (an estimated 2,750 of them) network of so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” don’t really pretend to offer “family planning” or women’s health services. They mostly exist to talk or coerce pregnant women into carrying pregnancies to term, providing (at most) limited services (ultrasounds, of course, and perhaps neonatal health advice and adoption referrals) to make that choice seem morally or religiously obligatory.

Continued: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/can-crisis-pregnancy-centers-snag-federal-funds.html