abortion classic or dud?

overturning Roe isn't really on their dance card at all because they're having incredible success at the state and county level. the current state-and-county attacks disperse what little resistance there is; you might mobilize some national pro-choice support around defending Roe, but it's hard to rally enough people to stop this stuff from happening. Post on Facebook & try to get people to call governors of states they don't even live in to veto legislation like this...in NC, the (Democratic) governor's probably going to veto the 24-hour-waiting-period/mandatory ultrasound with description/mandatory "counseling/handmaid's tale bill that just passed, but it's thought that there are enough Republicans & anti-choice Democrats to override the veto.

I've given my schtick before about how I don't think they'd actually overturn Roe even if it was a lead pipe cinch - that'd be like throwing political capital away. as long as they can shame, humiliate, frustrate and hopefully force poor and middle-income women to carry pregnancies to term, they're happy.

"Post on Facebook & try to get people to call governors of states they don't even live in to veto legislation like this" sc. "and see where it gets you"

Has there been much stealth radical tightening and rewriting of rules in blue states, or is this mostly a red state phenomenon right now? I remember when they tried to pull a fast one in ... South Dakota, right? And there was a voter revolt once people realized how far the legislation went. I wonder if something like that would/could ever be in the cards for a traditional conservative state like Texas.

NC's governor is a Democrat who plans to veto the bill (and will be overridden). When the state senate is too blue to play along, they do it at the county level (cutting off insurance funding for county workers if the health care plan offers reproductive services of any kind) until they can get their act together at the state level. NY & California aren't really on the table but there's stuff in something like 14 states at this point, success in South Dakota & Nebraska really got them motivated as does the weakness of the national party on the right to abortion.

Voter revolt is hard to imagine because Democrats conceded the ideological ground on this years ago & focus on fetal defects, health of the mother, etc., instead of on a woman's right to an abortion, guaranteed by Roe. Winning back that ground would involve a pretty unimaginable combo of dedicated charismatic leadership & a well-orchestrated rhetorical shift.

Voter revolt is hard to imagine because Democrats conceded the ideological ground on this years ago & focus on fetal defects, health of the mother, etc., instead of on a woman's right to an abortion, guaranteed by Roe.

this is the bit that makes me see red

trying to get data on which states have anti-choice bills passed or in play right now - first three months of 2011 saw 512 anti-choice bills introduced at the state level, according to some of the pro-choice blogs

Voter revolt is hard to imagine because Democrats conceded the ideological ground on this years ago & focus on fetal defects, health of the mother, etc., instead of on a woman's right to an abortion, guaranteed by Roe.

I was like this once -- had a debate on a message board where some guy (teh actual guy who ran the board) kept using 'retarded' and 'mongoloid' and other variances as insults, and I and others finally called him out on it, and he backpedaled by saying he thought mothers should just get abortions when their kid was determined to be at risk for retardation.

and even though I was kinda revolted at the thought of someone merely terminating a pregnancy for that reason, y'know, that IS what pro-choice means...being able to abort your pregnancy for whatever reason.

if there is anything growing in my gut, I'm gonna be damned if I'm gonna let a buncha elder wrinkly white dudes tell me I'm not allowed to do anything about it if I decide I don't want it. REGARDLESS of why.

at which point conservatives want to paint you as "Pro-Death".

hell not even just conservatives

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/25/us/25indiana.html

A federal judge ruled Friday that the State of Indiana could not cut off money for Planned Parenthood clinics providing health care to low-income women on Medicaid.

fuck.

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/06/kansas-shut-down-all-abortion-clinics-friday

well, the planned parenthood is gonna remain open now apparently, but this still means there is exactly one place for women in kansas to get an abortion

This week has kinda been zero hour for a lot of this shit but there is great news out of South Dakota. A federal district court judge has blocked South Dakota's completely batshit 72-hour-waiting period PLUS you have to talk to a pro-life counselor (yes, really) law. Check out the judge kicking ass and taking names:

In finding that the “pregnancy help center” requirement is likely unconstitutional, the Court said: “Forcing a woman to divulge to a stranger at a pregnancy help center the fact that she has chosen to undergo an abortion humiliates and degrades her as a human being. The woman will feel degraded by the compulsive nature of the Pregnancy Help Center requirements, which suggest that she has made the ‘wrong’ decision, has not really ‘thought’ about her decision to undergo an abortion, or is ‘not intelligent enough’ to make the decision with the advice of a physician. Furthermore, these women are forced into a hostile environment.”

it's hard to feel great about shit like this, because it isn't necessarily progressing anything. everything that's happening with gay marriage laws is exciting because we're going from point A (injustice) to point B (slightly less injustice) while with abortion, everything was ALREADY FINE and the whole fucking deal is just defending the institution against assholes trying to take it back a few centuries.

lol i guess this is how tea partiers feel about gay marriage and abortion, just opposite day

it is actually doing a lot of good. right now, at the state level, shit's going down that's terrible. twice this week Federal courts have sided with the right to choose, in essence saying to the states "you don't get to do that." that's extremely valuable both practically & for purposes of precedent. the bad laws being passed by weaselly state legislatures are allowing higher courts to affirm the that the shit being passed is unconstitutional, that's some long-term good.

yeah, true, but i feel like the weaselly bullshit wasn't happening before the tea partiers came about and this shit wasn't even a concern back then. maybe that's selective memory, it just feels like we could be spending our time on other things.

Oh, Polandpaws. Not cool. Not cool at all.

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-poland-to-vote-on-historic-bill-banning-all-abortions-after-massiv

“This project is a chance to finally reject the heritage of Nazism and Communism which brought ‘legal abortion’ to Poland in the first place,” Jacek Sapa of the PRO Foundation told LifeSiteNews. “It was Hitler and Stalin who imposed it on Poles and it’s high time we clearly disassociate ourselves from those deadly ideologies.”

*(^*&%^&^%$

"it was mussolini who brought efficient train service to this country and it's high time we clearly disassociate ourselves from such a punctual, sustainable method of transport"

that site is v peculiar btw. we should all write a letter a day picking the weird sorta could-be-having-a-more-fun-teenage-life kid-who-writes-pro-life-letters-to-the-white-house's termination-maths apart.

Yeah such a wtf line of argument, I have to say it also made me sick because now I can see US rightwingers going "LOOK SEE, THE COMMIES FORCED ABORTION ON THE POLISH therefore = EVIL".

http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/151508/15_year-old-girl_faces_life_in_prison_for_a_miscarriage_why_conservatives_are_criminalizing_pregnant_women

WTF? i had no idea some states had those laws on the books...you can be charged with murder for taking drugs while pregnant?? how to i contribute to her defense fund

south dakota & nebraska too - there are a lot of these cases, which anti-choicers have been pursuing in order to get precedent on fetal personhood.

if this is an issue you care about in any way it is pretty vital that you get involved this year on a stay-informed-and-donate-like-crazy basis, 2012 is going to be a hard year for the right to choose if we don't all work together & demand that the people who we voted for & donated to stand up for reproductive rights.

This is fucking batshit, do these cases get anywhere in court??

from the linked story:

Amanda Kimbrough is one of the women who have been ensnared as a result of the law being applied in a wholly different way. During her pregnancy her fetus was diagnosed with possible Down's syndrome and doctors suggested she consider a termination, which Kimbrough declined as she is not in favour of abortion.

The baby was delivered by caesarean section prematurely in April 2008 and died 19 minutes after birth.

Six months later Kimbrough was arrested at home and charged with "chemical endangerment" of her unborn child on the grounds that she had taken drugs during the pregnancy – a claim she has denied.

"That shocked me, it really did," Kimbrough said. "I had lost a child, that was enough."

She now awaits an appeal ruling from the higher courts in Alabama, which if she loses will see her begin a 10-year sentence behind bars. "I'm just living one day at a time, looking after my three other kids," she said. "They say I'm a criminal, how do I answer that? I'm a good mother."

I repeat, if this is an issue you care about, all hands on deck. The other side has been working hard in the courts while prochoice voters have been pretty complacent about it & have allowed leaders to concede (important!) rhetorical/legislative ground.

i'm not sure what apoplexy is really supposed to look like, but this story (and others i've heard) are just the thing to trigger it

i want to spit

what the

I mean really

what the

seriously almost all my focus on this is "what good can we do, now?" (A: only support candidates who are unapologetically prochoice; donate all you can to NNAF & similar organizations) but just to say what's in my heart, this is exactly the stuff that tiresome guys like yrs truly were hollering about when all the ground was being conceded on abortion rights in re: the health care bill. the pro-choice party made it abundantly clear, at the local & national levels, that it wasn't willing to spend any political capital defending the right to choose as a basic health care right. more shame on the people directly attacking the right, but great shame on those who didn't stand up for it when this season might have been prevented imo

WTF? i had no idea some states had those laws on the books...you can be charged with murder for taking drugs while pregnant?? how to i contribute to her defense fund

Incidentally, the only people I've ever heard of that were in favor of those laws were men's rights groups.

A federal court blocked the state of Kansas from enacting new temporary regulations for abortion clinics that could have shut down two of the three clinics in the state -- but state officials say they are devising an identical set of permanent regulations.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Carlos Murguia granted a temporary injunction against the law, which requires all of the abortion clinics to be licensed annually under a new set of regulations by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

Robert Moser, secretary of health and environment for the state, said the department will follow the law, but "Judge Murguia's ruling is narrowly tailored and does not prevent KDHE from moving forward to establish permanent licensing regulations."

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/07/court_blocks_kansas_abortion_rules_--_but_state_pl.php#more

/WTF? i had no idea some states had those laws on the books...you can be charged with murder for taking drugs while pregnant?? how to i contribute to her defense fund/

Incidentally, the only people I've ever heard of that were in favor of those laws were men's rights groups.

yeah I think I posted itt about this a couple years ago but there are vehemently pro life women that oppose these laws too

he baby was delivered by caesarean section prematurely in April 2008 and died 19 minutes after birth.

Six months later Kimbrough was arrested at home and charged with "chemical endangerment" of her unborn child on the grounds that she had taken drugs during the pregnancy – a claim she has denied.

I am having a hard time wrapping my head around how these charges came about. how did anybody apart from the mother and the doctor obtain any medical info about the mother's health and the cause of death?

... the father?

what kind of asshole sues a woman that just had a miscarri - oh never mind...

more info: http://www.timesdaily.com/article/20091209/ARTICLES/912095014/1011/NEWS?Title=Mom-on-trial-in-baby-s-death

there's a kind of sub-channel of alterna-depressing logic in the story linked above, in deeming prison totally-the-best-solution-for-the-people-involved, provided you accept the ridiculous logic in the first place. a hypothetical fifteen year old with a coke problem working their way out of a lost pregnancy does not need prison, no matter how much you want to intervene.

Women's Clinic Hit With Molotov Cocktail. (You don't even need to click that link to guess that this took place in Texas, probably.)

The incident is also unique because the McKinney location does not provide surgical procedures or abortions for their approximately 4,000 clients, Morgan said.

"It's an all-preventive care location: well-woman visits, breast and cervical cancer screenings, birth control," she said. "They don't provide legal safe abortions, only preventive care."

Why, it's almost as if the problem were with women's sexuality itself, and not abortion as such!

Texas, by the way, had the third-highest number of abortions of any state in the US as of 2007. They are also tied with DC and Oregon for the 9th-highest rate of abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44.

Texas, by the way, is the second most populous of any state in the US.

Well, sure. But for a bunch of abortion-haters they sure have a lot of them. As many as those godless liberals in DC!

me and the (then) missus got one once. i didn't really realize how traumatizing it was till i apologized years later for not being there for it, and mrs. wannabe was like "what are you talking about, you totally took me, you hung out with me before and after and stuff, thanks for that." and i was like "i did?" and she was like "of course, it was snowing and shit, don't you remember?" and i realized i had totally blocked it out and seriously couldn't remember the whole day at all. anyway it kinda makes me sad even now to think about killin off a lil' messiah, and i still cant even remember anything about that day.

but, i'd do the same again, thank god i the option was there, etc, so... sorta both. i mean i'm firmly in choice camp, but classic seems a little, um, glib?

kinda feeling this is gonna cause a big rift in my family soon. my stepsister who is 18 just got knocked up by a 19 year old guy who she has been dating for a few weeks, who promptly dumped her upon hearing the news. my stepmom is trying to convince her to just "take care of it" as she knows the responsibility for the baby is going to fall on them, as she is in school and not exactly destined to be a doctor. i think she wants to have the baby to "get back" at her mom, as dumb as that sounds. but yeah we have some pro-lifers in my family, including my wife who was always brought up to believe that "it's still a baby". i'm not looking forward to this...

It also sounds like a generation gap thing to me--the stigma against young unmarried women having children is now completely gone, and I haven't met anyone under 21 that's pro-abortion rights for sometime now.

I haven't met anyone under 21 that's pro-abortion rights for sometime now.

that's interesting to me. i wonder whether there's a lot of people w/a kind of vestigial teenage default position that abortion is killing a baby &c, that either comes up for review shortly after this period, or just doesn't. like i can imagine that there's a 'stage' at which you are primed to reconsider that, if you're lucky enough not to have to, but i would've thought it was maybe before 21. obviously ten trillion variables here.

i think the "stigma" is really the least of her worries here

I agree.

i know literally dozens of--probably more than a hundred--people under or around 21 who are pro-choice!

it's new york versus somewhere else though, right; bc i am in the same boat but i feel like it's a 'i don't know anyone who even knows anyone who voted bush!' kinda situation

in NYC, in LA, in NJ, in college w/ people from all over

iirc the numbers on abortion rights hold pretty evenly across age groups, unlike most other so-called "social issues"