USA – ‘Plain historical falsehoods’: How amicus briefs bolstered Supreme Court conservatives

A POLITICO review indicates most conservative briefs in high-profile cases have links to a small cadre of activists aligned with Leonard Leo.

By HEIDI PRZYBYLA
Dec 3, 2023

Princeton Professor Robert P. George, a leader of the conservative legal movement and confidant of the judicial activist and Donald Trump ally Leonard Leo, made the case for overturning Roe v. Wade in an amicus brief a year before the Supreme Court issued its watershed ruling.

Roe, George claimed, had been decided based on “plain historical falsehoods.” For instance, for centuries dating to English common law, he asserted, abortion has been considered a crime or “a kind of inchoate felony for felony-murder purposes.”

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/03/supreme-court-amicus-briefs-leonard-leo-00127497

03.12.2023

Alliance Defending Freedom

Allison Orr Larsen

American Historical Association

amicus briefs

Amy Coney Barrett

anti-choice cruelty

anti-choice deception

anti-choice hatred

anti-choice lies

anti-choice misinformation

anti-choice misogyny

Becket Fund for Religious Liberty

Center for Reproductive Rights

Concord Fund

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

DonorsTrust

Ethics and Public Policy Center

Judicial Crisis Network

Judicial Education Project

Organization of American Historians

USA – Judge James Ho’s Connections to the Anti-Abortion Movement

An extreme right-wing judge and former clerk for Clarence Thomas, James Ho has close ties to anti-abortion and dark money groups.

10/5/2023
by ANSEV DEMIRHAN and EVAN VORPAHL

In August, three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (which covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi) ruled that mifepristone—the most widely used abortifacient, and more commonly known as the abortion pill—could no longer be provided by mail. They imposed a new requirement that the medicine only be administered in the presence of a physician. They also limited the use of this drug to the first seven weeks of pregnancy, even though it is safe to use at least throughout the first 10 weeks.

The ruling did overturn a lower federal court edict from Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk—a Trump-appointed judge who failed to disclose to the U.S. Senate and the American people his recent anti-abortion writings—to revoke the FDA’s 23-year old approval of mifepristone as a safe drug for Americans seeking abortions.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2023/10/05/judge-james-ho-abortion/

Anti-Abortion Groups Are Coming for Birth Control—Just as Reproductive Rights Activists Warned

Dark money anti-abortion and pay-to-play groups are predictably responding to the FDA’s over-the-counter birth control pill decision with disinformation.

8/17/2023
by ANSEV DEMIRHAN

In July, the FDA approved the first over-the-counter contraceptive pill, Opill (norgestrel). Opill is expected to be available for purchase online, in pharmacies, and convenience and grocery stores, without a prescription in early 2024.

With barriers to reproductive healthcare increasing—especially for Black, Latino and poor people—and more than 19 million women in the U.S. living in “contraceptive deserts” without easy access to reproductive health clinics, Opill will be a vital tool in the fight for reproductive justice.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2023/08/17/anti-abortion-pro-life-over-the-counter-birth-control-women/

USA – The next abortion fight could be over wastewater regulation

Abortion opponents plan to use environmental laws to curb access to pills used to terminate an early pregnancy

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
11/23/2022

Abortion opponents and their allies in elected office are seizing on an unusual strategy after suffering a wave of election defeats — using environmental laws to try to block the distribution of abortion pills.

The new approach comes as the pills mifepristone and misoprostol, which people can take at home during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, have become the most common method of abortion in the U.S. and virtually the only option for millions of people in states with laws that have forced clinics to close since the fall of Roe v. Wade.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/23/abortion-pills-opponents-environmental-laws-00070603

Revealed: Ginni Thomas’s links to anti-abortion groups who lobbied to overturn Roe

Analysis of ‘amicus briefs’ shows how closely Clarence Thomas’s wife was entwined with rightwing effort to reverse 1973 ruling

Ed Pilkington in New York
Fri 9 Sep 2022

Ginni Thomas, the self-styled “culture warrior” and extreme rightwing activist, has links to more than half of the anti-abortion groups and individuals who lobbied her husband Clarence Thomas and his fellow US supreme court justices ahead of their historic decision to eradicate a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.

A new analysis of the written legal arguments, or “amicus briefs”, used to lobby the justices as they deliberated over abortion underlines the extent to which Clarence Thomas’s wife was intertwined with this vast pressure campaign.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/09/ginni-thomas-abortion-roe-v-wade-supreme-court

A 49-year crusade: Inside the movement to overturn Roe v. Wade

Antiabortion activists and their Republican allies are on the cusp of reaching a goal they have sought for decades in tossing out the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion.

By Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey, Caroline Kitchener and Rachel Roubein, Washington Post
May 7, 2022

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell still remembers the shock he felt when Donald Trump won the 2016 election. He also recalls what happened next.

“The first thing that came to my mind was the Supreme Court,” McConnell said in an interview this past week, remembering his reaction that night as he watched results from a basement office at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. He soon called Donald McGahn, campaign counsel to the president-elect, who was slated to become the top White House lawyer.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/07/abortion-movement-roe-wade/

USA – Is This Really the End of Abortion?

Democrats might crush Republicans in November. With a 6–3 conservative Supreme Court majority, abortion rights could still be decimated.

EMMA GREEN
SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

Friday was a perfect early-autumn evening in Washington, D.C., less than 50 days away from the election. Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of the Susan B. Anthony List, arguably the most powerful anti-abortion group in Washington, had wrapped up her day on Capitol Hill. She and her kids packed cheese and crackers and headed to the lawn outside the Supreme Court building, a majestic spot for a picnic. Dannenfelser’s phone rang—it was one of her staffers calling strangely late for a Friday. He had news.

Call it coincidence. Call it fate. “I’ve literally never sat on the lawn at the Supreme Court,” Dannenfelser told me. But in the moment when she found out that the pro-life movement may be about to achieve everything activists have been working toward since 1973, when Roe v. Wade made abortion legal across the United States, Dannenfelser was literally gazing upon the institution she has worked so hard to influence. The thought of victory so close at hand “makes my heart race and my spirit soar,” she said.

Continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/abortion-supreme-court-vacancy/616430/

USA – Trump Goes Global With His Absurd Anti-Abortion Agenda

Trump Goes Global With His Absurd Anti-Abortion Agenda

Feb 19, 2020
Sonali Kolhatkar

Rolanda Hollis, a state representative from Alabama, has introduced a bill in her state’s legislature that has gotten a lot of attention. After Alabama banned nearly all abortions last year, Hollis introduced a bill that would require all men over the age of 50, or those who have fathered three children — whichever comes first — to undergo a mandatory vasectomy. She made it clear the bill was meant to “send a message that men should not be legislating what women do with their bodies.” Replying to a question on Twitter, she explained, “The Vasectomy bill is to help with the reproductive system. This is to neutralize the abortion ban bill.

The responsibility is not always on the women. It takes 2 to tangle [sic]. This will help prevent pregnancy as well as abortion of unwanted children.” Hollis added the bill would “help men become more accountable as well as women.”

Continued: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/trump-goes-global-with-his-absurd-anti-abortion-agenda/

USA – We don’t have to wonder how Brett Kavanaugh will rule on abortion, or almost anything else

We don’t have to wonder how Brett Kavanaugh will rule on abortion, or almost anything else
by Paul Waldman
July 12

Abortion and the fate of Roe v. Wade are always near the center of the debate on any Supreme Court nomination. The controversy over nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh’s views on Roe offers a window into a system conservatives established a few decades ago to produce the kind of justices who would be fervent advocates for their cause, while also being just restrained enough in their beliefs to be confirmed. As a piece of political strategy, it’s absolutely brilliant, and it could hardly be working any better.

Among other things, it allows Republicans to finesse issues such as abortion on which their goals are terribly unpopular; only a third of the public believes Roe should be overturned. So Republicans rather shamelessly make self-contradictory arguments.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/07/12/we-dont-have-to-wonder-how-brett-kavanaugh-will-rule-on-abortion-or-almost-anything-else/?utm_term=.f60b802de42b

Roe Isn’t Going Down Without a Fight

Roe Isn’t Going Down Without a Fight

By Katha Pollitt
July 10, 2018

President Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court is bad news for reproductive rights.

That Judge Kavanaugh’s record on abortion and contraception is slim will be used by his supporters to paint his views as moderate, but let’s get real: The president promised to nominate only justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and his potential nominees were vetted by a committed abortion opponent, Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society. There is no reason not to take Mr. Trump at his word.

What should the pro-choice movement be doing — right now and in the months and years to come?

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/opinion/abortion-roe-kavanaugh-supreme-court.html