Thoughts on Supreme Court decision on abortion

 Recently had a lengthy discussion on Twitter about pregnancy choice. The initial entry was all about how much a pregnancy costs. Nothing went particularly wrong with the pregnancy, the baby s fine and the mother is happy. A fellow who claimed to be a neutral centrist but who kept making clearly anti-choice comments, asked a question. I responded. During the course of the conversation, we focused on a particular page taken from Supreme Court Justice Alito's anti-Roe decision. Here are what I regard as the two most critical sentences:

These legitimate interests include respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development. … The protection of maternal health and safety.

To me, these describe the priorities of the Supreme Court majority in this opinion.

As to the 10-year old girl in Ohio who was raped and found herself very close to the mark of when Ohio did not permit abortions, there's no question that Ohio was seeing to it that they were showing “respect for and preservation of prenatal life”. Would her giving birth have proven fatal or very unhealthy? Doubtful.

The "bodily harm" doesnt even apply because a 10 year old can give birth safely to a child. So the answer to my original question is no there is not an exception that would allow this abortion to take place in Ohio.

So this was not a case of unintended consequences or of things going sideways into unforeseen circumstances. Alito and the rest of the Supreme Court majority had only seen ft to account for the girl's “health and safety.” Once that was satisfied, they had no problem with seeing to it that she would be required to give birth. In fact, the National Right to Life organization made it quite clear that:

“She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child,” Bopp said in a phone interview on Thursday.

Is Alito himself troubled at all by the obvious problems with the decision as it's currently formulated? Not so you'd know it. He appeared for a speech and didn't appear to be even slightly troubled by problems with the decision.

So when anti-choicers ask you “Why do people hate us?” Well, there's a good reason for that.

Update: The Biden Administration has put out an instruction that women who are suffering complications and might die without an abortion, must receive abortions, regardless of what local and state laws may say. Texas Republicans object to this. They argue that saving the life of a woman via an abortion might put her at risk of being found guilty under Texas law. 

Political quotes that really shouldn’t be made public

 

Political quotes that really shouldn’t be made public

awful @MeetThePress premise this morning: we're "divided" over Covid and masks! we're not: 70% have a shot. 70% support masks.

Eric Boehlert

The problem with the crush of COVID-19 patients using up most of the available ICU beds* and crowding out emergency facilities is that it’s all so unnecessary.

*Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Florida and Arkansas are nearly out of ICU beds as Covid-19 cases surge across the US — particularly among unvaccinated Americans.

CNN

Here are the ICU beds that are occupied just by Covid patients in each of 14 states. Now, if you’re vaccinated and catch even the dreaded Delta Variant of the coronavirus, it might still result in some unpleasantness, but you’re unlikely even to have to go to the hospital.

To say that Americans are “divided” is to suggest that both sides have good reason to feel the way they do. That, for instance, taking Ivermectin, a cow de-wormer that yes, people can safely take under some very specific circumstances, but that the FDA says please don’t use it for Covid, is a reasonable and rational choice. It isn’t. It’ completely insane to think that the vaccines that the US went to great length to produce and to safety-test and to test for efficacy is less safe or effective than a quack cure pushed by Fox News and other conservative commenters.

There’s also a problem with a claim that anti-choicers/forced birthers make, that the new Texas “snitch” law “...bans abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which is usually after about six weeks of pregnancy, before many women are even aware they are pregnant."

As the C&L piece points out, a six week-old embryo (It won’t become a fetus for another month) doesn’t actually have a heart!

The rhythmic sound that can be heard is "a group of cells with electrical activity. That's what the heartbeat is at that stage of gestation … We are in no way talking about any kind of cardiovascular system." That's all from Jennifer Kerns, an ob-gyn at University of California, San Francisco and director of research in obstetrics and gynecology

There’s absolutely no question that the people who came up with the term did so consciously and deliberately, with malice and forethought. But why mainstream news reporters keep mindlessly repeating that “fetuses” have a heartbeat after six weeks is a real puzzle. This is a claim that fails a very simple true/false test.

Another recent problem is that the Texas “snitch” law didn’t just suddenly pop up out of the blue. The law was passed back in May. The course it took to the Supreme Court was publicly documented. Yet, the Supreme Court decision landed like a bombshell because, apparently, the press was so wholly and completely absorbed in the withdrawal from Afghanistan (a legitimate and worthwhile story) that it just didn’t have any time or attention to spare for the gutting of a Supreme Court ruling that’s been in effect since 1973. The press played catch-up with a number of pieces after the ruling was made, but there was absolutely no need for it to have been such a surprise.

Why does this happen? Why does the press constantly use right-wing talking points that are completely bonkers or ignore a clearly important issue that will obviously have a great impact? My own personal theory is that media people like to run stories through people they feel are outside experts, who are always free to chat and who provide authoritative-sounding quotes. In other words, reporters have right-wing “friends” who have cultivated close relationships with them and who assure them that a fetal heartbeat at six weeks is a real thing and who discourage putting out pieces on something like the Texas “snitch” law that will make right-wingers look bad (Fox News apparently realized how unpopular the new law was as they didn’t mention it for quite awhile). Reporters don’t need to stop talking with right-wing “friends.” What reporters need to do is to get friends on the “other side of the aisle” who can provide corrections and equally authoritative-sounding quotes.

The President's real problem

The NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd put out a piece called "For whom the Trump trolls" yesterday (No link because the NY Times charges if I read more than five pieces a month). Dowd is a columnist that bloggers have refused to review since, back in 2013, she blamed President Obama for what was certainly a crappy situation, but one that had nothing to do with his skills as president.

The fact that Ms. Dowd conveniently overlooks when comparing Obama's performance to that of past presidents is that he is the only one who has ever had to deal with an out-of-control abuse of the filibuster process. It's a lot easier to get a majority of your party's senators onboard in support of controversial bills when all you need is a majority, not a super-majority.

As of 2013, Obama had been in office long enough, Dowd really had no excuse not to know this, but she played the "mean girl" anyway.

Now she's saying that President Trump has a "Twitter addiction." I told my younger brother that, who lives in New York City and he replied "She didn't figure that out five years ago?"

Here's a good discussion of behavioral problems and "addiction" that makes it clear that addiction really isn't the right word in a lot of cases, nor should we blame the actual video games. The piece reminds me of when I read a Dear Abby letter a few decades ago. A woman complained of having an "Internet addiction" and by her description, it was clear that yes indeed, she had many problems, but like the gamers in the Kotaku piece, if the internet hadn't been her undoing, something else would have.

In the case of the President and Twitter, he clearly has a lot of problems, but Twitter is merely a tool and isn't responsible for anything. As someone pointed out, he made a comment concerning Senator Elizabeth Warren that started off as a rape “joke,” then turned into an ethnic insult and then just trailed off, the audience laughing uproariously the whole time. He also insulted Congresswoman Maxine Waters, saying she was at an IQ level that amounted to mental retardation. No, Dowd is wrong. The real problem with the President is that he’s just a complete asshole.

Are federally-funded pregnancy health centers the answer?

Of course, it's entirely possible for anti-choicers to construct centers that provide medical services for women. Obviously, if Planned Parenthood was serving a wealthy population with cash to spare, Planned Parenthood might never have come into being. Any pregnancy health centers needs to be funded either by voluntary contributions with no expectation of financial returns or they'd need government funding.  But with a little over a million abortions in 2011, is it at all likely that voluntary contributions will be forthcoming on the necessary scale? A major point that anti-choicers made was that they don't need to as there are  federal community health centers.

But Abby Johnson, a Catholic and former Planned Parenthood facility director, told the Register that the nation’s approximately 10,000 federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) could absorb clients from any Planned Parenthood closures. However, she said these health centers are “not the whole package” women need, because they have material, physical and emotional needs that only pro-life medical centers can provide comprehensively. 

Also,

House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan succinctly and calmly laid out the case for redirecting taxpayer dollars from abortion goliath Planned Parenthood to federal community health centers at a CNN townhall Thursday night.  

So hey, not a problem, right? Instead of having women depending on that icky Planned Parenthood for needed pregnancy-related medical health services, just refer them to the federal community health centers. Simple, right? Well, those same centers, while serving around 27 million people at 10,000 centers, are under serious financial pressure and are having to impose hiring freezes and a little over half of them may have to lay off staff.

Planned Parenthood depends on Medicaid reimbursements, but they're not the government and therefore aren't quite as vulnerable to political pressure as the federally-funded health centers are. So no, the anti-choice movement really doesn't have an adequate answer to the pregnancy-related health care services that Planned Parenthood provides.

The Rosen-Romney spat and other campaign issues

Mitt Romney awarded his wife Ann the sorta, kinda official-like position of the representative of America's women to the Romney campaign/future administration. Was Ann qualified to hold such a position? According to CNN contributor Hilary Rosen:

What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues. And when I listen to my wife, that's what I'm hearing.

Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we -- why do we worry about their future?

Is the claim that Ann Romney "never worked a day in her life" true? Actually, if you want to get all technical about it, yes, that is true. The Federal Government does not classify being a stay-at-home mother and homemaker as "work." Nevertheless, Romney found defenders everywhere who were outraged that her many years of being a mother of five sons and a homemaker were being contemptuously brushed aside. The First Lady promptly tweeted: "Every mother works hard and every woman deserves to be respected."

Of course, nobody has challenged the sentence after that because it's so clearly and obviously true. Romney was a child of wealth and privilege who married into a family of wealth and privilege. Romney has never suffered any kind of economic insecurity and has never had to choose between, say, health insurance and a third meal for the day for her boys. A mother who came to motherhood late in life explains:

But Romney nevertheless had a huge advantage over mothers with less money: She could hire help. She could engage baby sitters, nannies, cooks and housecleaners.

That doesn't mean she didn't find her days filled with managing schedules, overseeing homework, buying new sneakers and, yes, even wiping snotty noses. With five kids, she probably never had enough help around to avoid that duty.

Still, Romney's experience of motherhood is significantly different from that of moms around the country whose family incomes hover at the median of $50,000 a year.

Romney later said:

"Look, I know what it's like to struggle. Maybe I haven't struggled as much financially as some people have, but I can promise you that I've had struggles in my life. And I would love for people to understand that Mitt and I have compassion for people that are struggling, and that's why we're running."

Which us all very fine and well, but her husband has endorsed the "Path to Prosperity" plan put out by Representative Paul Ryan (R-MI) that would cut deeply and savagely into benefits for those who are less wealthy and privileged that the Romney family is. According to the economist Dean Baker, the Ryan budget plan:

...essentially eliminates [by 2050] all spending on items other than Social Security, health care and defense. By the end of the 10-year budget horizon most of the areas that we think of as the domain of the federal government (e.g. federal highways and airports, federal courts and law enforcement, drug research and safety, the State Department and Justice Department) will be cut by around 50 percent under the Ryan plan.

It's all very fine and well for Ann Romney to "have compassion for people," but how does that "compassion" translate into actual policy proposals? Well...it doesn't.

Bottom line is that Mitt Romney doesn't need to fire his wife as the Romney campaign's liaison to American women, but he needs to find other representatives to tell him what American women are feeling and going through. His wife Ann is a good start, but she knows about the economic struggles of American women essentially second-hand, from people she has spoken with on the campaign trail, blog posts,magazine articles, TV shows and probably books. She can't contribute any wisdom on how non-millionaires are dealing with the economy these days through her own personal experience.


Speaking of the Ryan "Path to Prosperity," Roman Catholic theologians, priests, nuns, social workers and others have condemned the Ryan plan:

If Rep. Ryan thinks a budget that takes food and healthcare away from millions of vulnerable people upholds Catholic values, then he also probably believes Jesus was a Tea Partier who lectured the poor to stop being so lazy and work harder,” said John Gehring, Catholic Outreach Coordinator at Faith in Public Life. “This budget turns centuries of Catholic social teaching on its head. These Catholic leaders and many Catholics in the pews are tired of faith being misused to bless an immoral agenda."

Allegedly, Ryan wants to liberate the poor from dependency on the government, but the 59 Catholics say that his plan is "anathema to the Catholic social tradition."


Also, Obama has decided to put his full weight behind getting the "Buffett Rule" put into legislation. Is there any chance that any such legislation will pass? Nah, but it's a good campaign issue as it reveals a stark difference between the two parties.  Right-wing media sources have decided on some pushback. The Washington Beacon has charged that "[Obama] has yet to propose a comprehensive plan to reform the byzantine tax code," but the Obama Administration has begun work on exactly that. Problem is, tax simplification is a good deal harder and more complex and much less likely to produce new revenues than simply raising taxes would. Every provision in the tax code was put in there by majorities of Congress. Nothing is there that hasn't been considered and argued over and voted on. If a provision is in there, it's there for a defensible and probably a justifiable reason.

As far as other campaign issues go, Mitt Romney has come down firmly on the anti-abortion side of the abortion issue. And no, there's no reason to think that the Republican "War on Women" has been halted or that the two sides are now equal because of the outrage concerning Ann Romney and Hillary Rosen.

George Zimmerman appeared in court and invoked the "Stand Your Ground" law as a justification for killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager, that was pressed by ALEC,the American Legislative Exchange Council that writes bills that are later adopted, often wholesale, by right-wing legislatures. The good news is that corporations have been having second thoughts about staying with ALEC and have begun withdrawing their support.