USA – Why Smashing the Administrative State Is a Disaster for Reproductive Rights

The latest Supreme Court rulings are already being weaponized against gender identity. Abortion and birth control are next.

NINA MARTIN, Mother Jones
July 10, 2024

It turns out the most consequential reproductive rights case before the Supreme Court this past term—arguably, the most significant since the overturn of Roe v. Wade—wasn’t the religious right’s attack on the abortion drug mifepristone, or the battle over whether the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requires hospitals to provide emergency abortions in states with strict bans. It was a fight over who should pay to monitor commercial fishing boats so they don’t deplete the herring population off the Atlantic coast.

Reproductive health and gender equality advocates are just beginning to digest the sweeping implications of the ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, in which the court’s conservative supermajority overturned a 40-year-old cornerstone of US administrative law known as “Chevron deference.” In doing so, the justices vastly limited the power of federal agencies to issue regulations on everything from financial markets to industrial pollution to drug pricing to workplace safety.

And abortion. And birth control. And trans equality. And pregnant workers’ rights. 

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/why-smashing-the-administrative-state-is-a-disaster-for-reproductive-rights/


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


Trump’s Judges Are Playing A Huge Role In Upholding Anti-Abortion Laws Across The Country

Judges nominated by Donald Trump have staked out strong anti-abortion stances in their short time on the bench.

Zoe Tillman, BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on September 12, 2021

WASHINGTON — In 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump pitched to Republican voters that even if they didn’t like him, they needed him for one big reason: the US Supreme Court. Not just to nominate conservative justices, but specifically to appoint anti-abortion justices who would roll back the protections of Roe v. Wade. When the Supreme Court allowed Texas’s 6-week abortion ban to take effect on Sept. 1 — with three of Trump’s nominees in the five-justice majority — it was widely seen as the latest example of that bargain paying off for anti-abortion advocates.

Continued: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zoetillman/trump-judges-abortion-access-legal-challenge


Supreme Court says employers may opt out of Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate over religious, moral objections

Supreme Court ruling may cause tens of thousands to lose birth control coverage

By Robert Barnes

July 8, 2020

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration may allow employers and universities to opt out of the Affordable Care Act requirement to provide contraceptive care because of religious or moral objections.

The issue has been at the heart of an intense legal
battle for nine years — first with the Obama administration sparring with
religious organizations who said offering contraceptive care to their employees
violated their beliefs, and then with the Trump administration broadening an
exemption, angering women’s groups, health organizations and Democratic-led
states.