The US supreme court heard one of the most sadistic, extreme anti-abortion cases yet

Idaho’s law requires doctors to treat pregnant women’s health as disposable – and the loss of their lives as an acceptable risk

Moira Donegan
Thu 25 Apr 2024

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.

In practice, this has wound up being a ban on abortions needed to save women’s lives: according to Idaho hospitals, six pregnant women experiencing medical emergencies have had to be airlifted across state lines to hospitals in states with life and health exemptions in the months since Idaho began enforcing its abortion ban. One way to describe this state of affairs is to say that Idaho’s abortion law has come into conflict with medical best practice. Another way to describe it is to say that the law has forced pregnant women to flee the state for their lives.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/25/supreme-court-idaho-anti-abortion-case

25.04.2024

Opinion

Anya Cook

Elizabeth Prelogar

Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act

Alabama is using the notion that embryos are people to surveil and harass women

Even before the court ruled in favor of this vulgar fiction, state authorities relied on the concept to intimidate and jail women

Moira Donegan
Mon 26 Feb 2024

Something that’s important to remember about last week’s ruling by the Alabama supreme court, which held that frozen embryos were persons under state law, is that the very absurdity of the claim is itself a demonstration of power. That a frozen embryo – a microscopic bit of biological information that can’t even be called tissue, a flick laden with the hopes of aspiring parents but fulfilling none of them – is equivalent in any way to a child is the sort of thing you can only say if no one has the power to laugh at you. The Alabama supreme court is the final court of review in that state. It cannot be appealed. For the foreseeable future, frozen cells in Alabama have the same legal status there as you or I do. Is this an absurd elevation of the status of an embryo, or an obscene degradation of human beings? The answer, of course, is both.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/26/alabama-ivf-frozen-embryos-surveillance

Abortion rights are Biden’s most powerful re-election issue. He should act like it

Abortion is a crucial issue in this election – and a powerful motivator for voters. Yet the president is still tiptoeing around it

Moira Donegan
Mon 29 Jan 2024

For years, the beltway set had a standard line of advice for Democratic candidates: stick to the economy. The idea was that white, male, blue-collar voters – those magical creatures, somewhere out there in the windswept lands of the upper midwest, who always qualify in the pundit imagination as “real Americans” – would be turned off by so-called culture-war issues.

These guys, we were told, didn’t want to hear about civil rights or social equality: they wanted to hear about economic growth. According to this advice, Democrats could be pro-choice, pro-racial justice, or pro-LGBTQ+ rights, but not openly, avowedly so. They had to play their progressive social positions in a minor key.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/29/why-is-the-biden-administration-still-afraid-to-talk-about-abortion

29.01.2024

Joe Biden

Kamala Harris

Moira Donegan

Do pregnant women have a right to urgent medical care? No, according to a US court

Federal judges sided with a Texas law that allows the state to push pregnant patients to the brink of death before allowing medically necessary abortion

Moira Donegan
Wed 10 Jan 2024

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.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/10/pregnant-women-urgent-medical-care-us-court-texas

Kate Cox begged Texas to let her end a dangerous pregnancy. She won’t be the last

Two years ago, a woman like Cox was able to control her body on her own terms. Now, she has to go before a court and beg

Moira Donegan
Tue 12 Dec 2023

In most cases, we would never have learned her name. Kate Cox, a Texas woman, is in a sadly common set of circumstances: a 31-year-old mother of two, Cox was pregnant with her third child when doctors informed her that something was wrong. Pregnancy complications are common, but in a state like Texas, they have become newly dangerous, threatening women with potentially disfiguring health complications, along with unimaginable heartbreak, as the state’s multiple bans have mandated grotesque and inhumane treatment of doomed pregnancies.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/12/kate-cox-emergency-abortion-texas

12.12.2023

Anti-choice states aren’t satisfied. Now they want to punish traveling for abortions

A husband who doesn’t want his wife to get an abortion could sue the friend who offered to drive her, according to this legislation’s own architect

Moira Donegan
Tue 12 Sep 2023

How free can any woman be in a country where her right to control her body and family depends on the jurisdiction where she happens to live? Republicans are looking to find out. Over the past few weeks, as Republican officials in anti-choice states seek to make their abortion bans enforceable and compel women into childbirth, a new front has opened up in the abortion wars: roads. The anti-choice movement, through a series of inventive legal theories and cynical legislative maneuvers, is now attacking women’s right to travel.

In a court filing last month, the Alabama attorney general, Steve Marshall, wrote that he believed his office had a right to prosecute those who help women travel across state lines in search of an abortion. The filing comes in a lawsuit from two women’s health clinics and an abortion fund, which sued Marshall after he publicly stated his intention to criminally investigate organizations like theirs, which provide financial and logistical help to pregnant patients seeking to leave the state. In his response, Marshall unequivocally stated that Alabama, which bans all abortions with no rape or incest exemption, views any effort to help women cross state lines as a “criminal conspiracy”.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/12/anti-choice-states-arent-satisfied-now-they-want-to-punish-traveling-for-abortions

12.09.2023

traveling for abortion

Biden has reminded us yet again that he’s a weak and lukewarm ally of abortion rights

At a recent fundraiser he said he’s ‘not big on’ abortion. It’s not pro-choice activists who are out of step with the mainstream; it’s Joe Biden

Moira Donegan
Thu 29 Jun 2023

A closed-door fundraiser for the very wealthy is a place where a lot of politicians really shine. Among their fellow elites, surrounded by people like them who like them – and are giving them money – Democrats and Republicans alike often become their truest selves. They drop the flesh-pressing affectations, the focused-group soundbites, the stiff smiles. They become something they’re usually not: honest.

Honest is what Biden was at a similar fundraiser in tony Chevy Chase, Maryland, this past Tuesday, when he told a crowd of his wealthy supporters that he was personally ambivalent about abortion rights. “I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion,” the president said. Nevertheless, he claimed that the compromise Roe v Wade decision on abortion “got it right”.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/29/biden-abortion-rights-dobbs-roe-v-wade

29.06.2023

A year ago Roe v Wade was overturned. Grieve for the new America

The supreme court’s decision has created a two-tiered class of US citizenship: one for men and one for women. It is a generational tragedy

Moira Donegan
Fri 23 Jun 2023

That it has only been a year since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and ended the federal right to an abortion feels absurd, almost impossible. How horribly and dramatically our country has changed since then. In a span of just 12 months, thousands of lives have been permanently changed – dreams dashed, intentions scuttled, childhoods abruptly ended, talents and potential suppressed, health risked, and the self-determination of pregnant women snatched from them by a body of unelected jurists who believe that their own sentiments are more important than those women’s dignity.

The decision unleashed atrocities and morbid perversions of medical ethics that have rapidly become routine. Women experiencing miscarriages now wait around in emergency rooms and parking lots, unable to receive treatment until they sicken to the point where sufficiently brutal health outcomes (life-ending or life-altering, depending on the state) become a certainty. Other women, and no small number of girls, now gestate and give birth to infants conceived by their rapists – their coaches, abusive boyfriends, acquaintances, priests, fathers. Still others are forced into torturously monstrous exercises in medical futility, their bodies commandeered and used by the state to birth babies without lungs or heads.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/23/roe-v-wade-overturned-abortion

Conservative attacks on US abortion and trans healthcare come from the same place

Both are part of a project to roll back the victories of the feminist and gay rights movements and inscribe in law a firm definition and hierarchy of gender

Moira Donegan
Wed 24 May 2023

On Monday, Jim Pillen, the Republican governor of Nebraska, signed a law that bans abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy and restricts gender-affirming care for anyone under 19. The ban on trans medical care takes effect in October and the abortion ban goes into effect immediately. And so Nebraska has become the latest state to determine through law what might have once been determined by the more pliable tools of custom or imagination: the way that the sexed body a person is born with shapes the kind of life they can live.

Be it through forced pregnancy or prohibited transition, the state of Nebraska now claims the right to determine what its citizens will do with their sexed bodies – what those bodies will look like, how they will function and what they will mean. It is a part of the right’s ongoing project to roll back the victories of the feminist and gay rights movements, to re-establish the dominance of men in public life, to narrow possibilities for difference and expression and to inscribe in law a firm definition and hierarchy of gender: that people are either men or women and that men are better.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/24/rightwing-abortion-transgender-care-gender-hierarchy

24.05.2023

Opinion

abortion bans

anti-transgender laws

They helped their friend get an abortion. Now a bitter ex-husband is suing them

Marcus Silva’s lawsuit is a metaphor for the creepy, stupid and cruel nature of the anti-choice movement

Moira Donegan
Sat 15 Apr 2023

It wasn’t initially clear how Marcus Silva, a Texas man, even knew about his ex-wife’s abortion. Last month, just weeks after the divorce his wife had filed for was finalized, Silva filed a “wrongful death” lawsuit against three of her closest friends, seeking $1m from each. He claims that the women helped his wife obtain abortion medication in July 2022 – two months after she had filed for divorce from him, and just a few weeks after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v Wade and states like Texas outlawed abortion. And Silva had text messages to prove it.

continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/15/texas-abortion-bounty-hunter-law-friends-sued