USA – The Satanic Temple is taking on the Christian right. It’s fun to watch

Recognized as a religion by the IRS, the group uses the religious right’s tactics, and their victories, against them

Arwa Mahdawi
Sat 19 Oct 2024

Satan is a feminist now
The devil works hard, but the Republican party works harder. Not a day seems to go by without anti-abortion zealots on the right advancing some cunning new plan to strip women of their bodily autonomy. As well as shutting down abortion clinics, Republican states are trying to essentially outlaw abortion pills: on Friday, Missouri, Kansas and Idaho renewed a legal push to drastically reduce access to mifepristone.

Amid this hellscape, help may be at hand from a somewhat unlikely source: Satan. Or, to be more accurate – and since the devil is in the details – the Satanic Temple.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/19/satanic-temple-fight-against-religious-right

19.10.2024

Commentary

Arwa Mahdawi

Christian Research Institute

Flying Spaghetti Monster

Lucien Greaves

Malcolm Jarry

Right to Your Life Satanic Abortion Clinic

Samuel Alito

Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic

Inside the Supreme Court’s negotiations and compromise on Idaho’s abortion ban

By Joan Biskupic, CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst
Mon July 29, 2024

The Supreme Court began the year poised to build on its 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade and to deliver a new blow to abortion access.

In January, the court took the extraordinary step of letting Idaho enforce its ban on abortion with an exception only to prevent the death of a pregnant woman, despite an ongoing challenge from the Biden administration arguing that it intruded on federal protections for emergency room care.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/29/politics/supreme-court-idaho-abortion-emtala-biskupic/index.html

The supreme court abortion ruling hides conservative justices’ partisan agenda

One day soon, this case will come back, and the supreme court will allow states to ban emergency abortions

Moira Donegan
Fri 28 Jun 2024

The supreme court is a messy institution. Its six conservative justices are mired in infighting over both the pace of their shared ideological project of remaking American law and life according to rightwing preferences, and over their preferred methodological course for doing so. Their squabbling is not helped by the fact that two of them, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, keep embarrassing the court with gauche public scandals, which draw attention to the court’s legitimacy crises like a vulgar flag waving above One First Street. For their part, the liberals are exhausted, impotent and at times apparently publicly despairing. Their dissents have sometimes taken on tones of exasperation and peeved sarcasm, as if they’re turning to the country and asking: “Can you believe this?” Their most senior member, Sonia Sotomayor, recently told an interviewer that over the past several terms, since the court’s conservative supermajority was sealed under the Trump administration, she has sometimes gone into her chambers after the announcement of major decisions and wept. She says she anticipates having to do so again: in one recent dissent, she warned ominously about the future of gay marriage rights.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/28/supreme-court-abortion-ruling-conservative-justices

28.06.2024

Opinion

Burwell v Hobby Lobby

Clarence Thomas

emergency abortions

EMTALA

Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Moira Donegan

Moyle v United States

Will SCOTUS Allow Pregnant Women to Die?

6/24/2024
by CARRIE N. BAKER, Ms. Magazine

A decision from the U.S. Supreme Court will be coming any day now in two cases, Idaho v. United States and Moyle v. United States, about whether states can prohibit doctors from treating women with life-threatening pregnancies until a patient’s condition deteriorates to the point where they are about to die.

The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) filed an amicus brief in these cases describing several of the more than 70 documented cases of women almost dying—and at least one who did die—when they were denied emergency medical care because of abortion bans enacted across the country after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. And “the true number of cases is likely significantly higher,” according the NWLC brief.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2024/06/24/emtala-supreme-court-women-die-abortion-bans-pregnant/

USA – Abortion Ballot Measures Aren’t Safe From the Courts

People are understandably excited about statewide votes on abortion, but they could be gutted by a future Trump administration or by conservative judges.

By Susan Rinkunas
June 6, 2024

There could be nearly a dozen constitutional amendments codifying the right to abortion on the ballot this fall—and some could even overturn active abortion bans, like in Florida, Missouri, and South Dakota.

But abortion ballot measures are not a magic fix: They don’t immediately undo bad laws, as evidenced by Ohio advocates having to file multiple lawsuits to challenge past restrictions, and they can’t bring back clinics that closed. And there’s one more vulnerability we’re not talking about: Pro-choice ballot measures aren’t safe from a future Trump administration, or the conservatives on the Supreme Court.

Continued: https://www.jezebel.com/abortion-ballot-measures-arent-safe-from-the-courts

Junk science is cited in abortion ban cases. Researchers are fighting the ‘fatally flawed’ work

Researchers are calling for the retraction of misleading anti-abortion studies that could influence judges in critical cases

Jessica Glenza
Sun 28 Apr 2024

The retraction of three peer-reviewed articles prominently cited in court cases on the so-called abortion pill – mifepristone – has put a group of papers by anti-abortion researchers in the scientific limelight.

Seventeen sexual and reproductive health researchers are calling for four peer-reviewed studies by anti-abortion researchers to be retracted or amended. The papers, critics contend, are “fatally flawed” and muddy the scientific consensus for courts and lawmakers who lack the scientific training to understand their methodological flaws.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/28/junk-science-papers-abortion-cases

USA – The Reactionary Justices Won’t Stop Until Abortions Are Illegal Everywhere

Oral arguments in Idaho case make clear that further, even more radical attacks on reproductive freedom are coming.

JEET HEER
April 26, 2024

The five right-wing Supreme Court justices who overturned the constitutional right to abortion in the 2022 decision Dobbs v. Jackson built their argument on lies, one of which was a promise (pinkie swear!) that, despite the apparent radicalism of extinguishing Roe v. Wade, the court would henceforth respect precedent, leave abortion to the political arena, and not touch other decisions recognizing social and sexual rights. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito told a story that went something like this: Roe was such a bad decision that it was an outlier, a rare precedent that—like the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that enshrined racial segregation—was so egregious the court had to cast it aside. Roe was bad because it took abortion, properly a decision best left to the democratic contestation in the state and federal legislatures, and imposed a national consensus that had no popular legitimacy. According to Scalia, “The Court short-circuited the democratic process by closing to it the large number of Americans who dissented in any respect from Roe.”

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/supreme-court-abortion-idaho/

26.04.2024

Commentary

Clarence Thomas

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act

An 1873 law banned the mailing of boxing photos. Could it block abortion pills, too?

BY: JENNIFER SHUTT
APRIL 5, 2024

WASHINGTON — An anti-obscenity law enacted in 1873 that hasn’t been enforced in decades shot to the forefront of the nation’s abortion debate in the past week thanks to two U.S. Supreme Court justices, amid expectations a future Republican president would use the law to order a nationwide ban on medication abortion.

The Comstock Act, which prohibited the mailing of anatomy textbooks and boxing photographs as well as contraceptives, drew fresh attention after Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas during March 26 oral arguments seemed to suggest the law would block the mailing of mifepristone.

Continued: https://missouriindependent.com/2024/04/05/an-1873-law-banned-the-mailing-of-boxing-photos-could-it-block-abortion-pills-too/

USA – Justices appear skeptical of call to restrict abortion pill

A decision, likely to come in June, would be a major victory for the FDA’s authority to regulate prescription drugs and for abortion-rights advocates who have sought to protect access to mifepristone.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and JOSH GERSTEIN
03/26/2024

The Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared skeptical of an effort to restrict access to a widely used abortion pill — with conservative and liberal justices alike raising questions about whether anti-abortion doctors can prove concrete injuries that give them standing to sue and whether a national judicial ruling rolling back availability of the drug is justified.

During the roughly 90 minutes of oral arguments, two conservative justices likely to be pivotal votes in the case — Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — expressed repeated doubts about harms the anti-abortion physicians claimed they’ve faced in treating patients who’ve taken abortion pills and needed follow-up care. Those two justices also questioned whether curtailing access to the drug would address those alleged harms.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/26/scotus-restrict-abortion-pill-mifepristone-00149039

26.03.2024

News

Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

Amy Coney Barrett

Chief Justice John Roberts

Elizabeth Prelogar

Erin Hawley

Ketanji Brown Jackson

USA – The Current Attack on Abortion Pills Will Fail. The Next One Will Be So Much Worse.

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK AND MARK JOSEPH STERN
MARCH 26, 2024

There are always a couple of tells when the most conservative Supreme Court in more than a century finds itself adjudicating a truly mortifying and meritless case. One is that it’s coming up by way of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, a court that so consistently shovels its worst constitutional garbage upward that the high court conservatives are often forced to reluctantly lob it back. Another tell is when the facts of the case are so laugh-out-loud insane that even conservative justices can’t bring themselves to adopt them or the underpinning legal reasoning with a straight face. There’s yet a third tell: when the conservative justices start injecting a bunch of nonsense and randomized pet peeves into oral argument to distract from how embarrassing it would be to discuss the merits of the actual case.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/mifepristone-supreme-court-alito-national-abortion-ban.html