Re: Abortion

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K9s wrote: Thu Aug 29, 2019 5:49 pm If a woman has to ask the man (or government) to sign off on an abortion, the man (and the legislators who espouse this view) should provide for that child and woman if the man declines permission. Not bare necessities... actually provide decent food, housing, and care. The man would have to stay home with the child if the woman wants to work, for example.

In many states, a poor woman can be provided health insurance if she is pregnant. Not before or after. The child might be provided healthcare and, maybe, some food and diapers. Childcare? Housing? Good luck with that!
Agreed.

Re: Abortion

127
The US government has accused a hospital in Vermont of violating the civil rights of a nurse by forcing her to help carry out an abortion.The nurse, who has not been named, said she told the hospital that she could not take part in pregnancy terminations because of her religious beliefs. Health workers are protected under federal law from discrimination based on their religious or moral beliefs. The University of Vermont Medical Center (UVMC) denies the allegations.

According to a complaint filed by the nurse's lawyers, she was at first misled about the nature of the procedure to believe it was related to a miscarriage. When she was told it was an abortion, she asked if another member of staff could assist but her request was refused. She reluctantly took part in the procedure and "has been haunted by nightmares ever since", the complaint says. The incident took place in 2017 and the nurse, who is a Catholic, no longer works at the hospital.

On Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services warned UVMC that it had 30 days to comply with civil rights law or it could face funding cuts. "This should never happen in America," the director of the department's civil rights office, Roger Severino, told reporters.

The US government agency issued a notice of violation against the hospital for "discriminating against healthcare personnel who have religious or moral objections to abortion". This is the first action of its kind since the department created a conscience and religious freedom division last year. The Trump administration has supported religious freedom measures. In a statement, the hospital said the allegations "were not supported by the facts". "We do not discriminate against any employees for exercising their rights to opt out of procedures to which they object," it said.

It added: "The University of Vermont Medical Center has robust, formal protections that safeguard both our employees' religious, ethical and cultural beliefs, and our patients' rights to access safe and legal abortion."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49515372
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Abortion

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Is the 9th Circuit changing?
A federal appeals court appeared divided along party lines Monday on whether to uphold a new Trump administration rule that denies federal family planning money to clinics that refer patients for abortions. During a hearing in San Francisco, an 11-judge panel [en banc] of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals considered whether to reinstate preliminary injunctions issued by three district judges against the new rule.

Seven of the judges chosen randomly for the panel are Republican appointees, including two new judges Trump placed on the court. Four of the judges were appointed by Democrats. Judges appointed by Democrats appeared skeptical of the government’s arguments. Judges appointed by Republicans asked questions that helped the government’s case. Family planning organizations, the American Medical Assn., 22 states including California, and the District of Columbia, have challenged the rule.

It established new requirements for funds distributed under Title X, a 1970 federal law intended to help poor women and those in isolated, rural settings obtain family planning services. In addition to banning abortion referrals, the administration’s rule requires recipients of the funds to refer pregnant women for prenatal care, even if the patients want abortions. Recipients also must encourage patients to discuss their situations with their families and to tell single women about the benefits of abstinence.
Opponents of the rule told the 9th Circuit that it violates a congressional rider that says all counseling must be neutral. Requiring referrals for prenatal care but banning them for abortion favors one option over the other, the challengers argued.

Since the rule went into effect this summer, 20% of 80 organizations have left the program, saying they could not comply. More than 500 Title X service sites no longer are in the program, and Planned Parenthood, which served 40% of the Title X patients in 2017, has stopped participating, Ruth Harlow, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, told the court. She said several states have dropped out of the program, and there are now gaps in services in 28 states. Brinton Lucas, arguing for the Trump administration, insisted “the concerns about harm have been somewhat overblown.”

He said states and private donations are going to make up the shortfall in many cases, and he characterized the 20% dropout rate as relatively small. The dropout rate doesn’t mean all “the doors will be shuttered,” he said. Judge Consuelo M. Callahan, appointed by President George W. Bush, said that if the court ruled against the administration, it would suffer a hardship too. “Isn’t it a hardship to the government if they can’t implement a program that is constitutional?” she asked. She added that new administrations often change policies from those held by their predecessors and that the new rule has an exception on abortion referrals when the life of the mother is clearly at risk.

Judge Richard Paez, a Clinton appointee, said it just makes “common sense” that if a doctor counsels a patient about an option, he or she should be able to refer the patient to someone who can help the patient obtain the chosen care. More than 4 million people in the U.S., 1 million of them in California, rely on Title X funding to obtain contraception, cervical and breast cancer screenings and testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. The program received about $286.5 million this year, including about $60 million slated for Planned Parenthood.

A 9th Circuit panel of three Republican appointees decided in June to lift the preliminary injunctions issued by district judges. The challengers asked a larger, en banc panel to overturn that decision. The seven Republican appointees on the panel refused to reinstate the injunction. The four Democrats dissented. In California, many agencies have left the program, resulting in a nearly 40% reduction in patients served by Title X in the state, according to Essential Access Health, which administers the program.
https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... hood-trump
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Abortion

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highdesert wrote: Fri Aug 30, 2019 1:51 am
The US government has accused a hospital in Vermont of violating the civil rights of a nurse by forcing her to help carry out an abortion.The nurse, who has not been named, said she told the hospital that she could not take part in pregnancy terminations because of her religious beliefs. Health workers are protected under federal law from discrimination based on their religious or moral beliefs. The University of Vermont Medical Center (UVMC) denies the allegations.

According to a complaint filed by the nurse's lawyers, she was at first misled about the nature of the procedure to believe it was related to a miscarriage. When she was told it was an abortion, she asked if another member of staff could assist but her request was refused. She reluctantly took part in the procedure and "has been haunted by nightmares ever since", the complaint says. The incident took place in 2017 and the nurse, who is a Catholic, no longer works at the hospital.

On Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services warned UVMC that it had 30 days to comply with civil rights law or it could face funding cuts. "This should never happen in America," the director of the department's civil rights office, Roger Severino, told reporters.

The US government agency issued a notice of violation against the hospital for "discriminating against healthcare personnel who have religious or moral objections to abortion". This is the first action of its kind since the department created a conscience and religious freedom division last year. The Trump administration has supported religious freedom measures. In a statement, the hospital said the allegations "were not supported by the facts". "We do not discriminate against any employees for exercising their rights to opt out of procedures to which they object," it said.

It added: "The University of Vermont Medical Center has robust, formal protections that safeguard both our employees' religious, ethical and cultural beliefs, and our patients' rights to access safe and legal abortion."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49515372
Sounds like BS to me. Was the hospital was so small that they couldn't get another nurse to help out and has never before performed this procedure? Probably not. Was her job as a nurse to help a person in need? Yes. Do I believe that it happened this way? Nope. Will she leave nursing and join Fox and/or the WH? Probably.
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Re: Abortion

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The week the Mississippi abortion case was argued at SCOTUS. I'm not the only one thinking about where this will end up in relation to Roe v Wade. There are a lot of political talking heads giving their opinions, thought this article states the main issues. I don't think they'll overturn Roe but they will modify it like Casey.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the second of two major cases this term involving abortion. Since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, with some modifications in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, the Court has considered abortion a right protected by the Constitution. Following the Court’s decisive rightward shift last year, observers expected it would soon take a swipe at Roe or even overturn it. Wednesday’s oral argument seemed to confirm that expectation.

The term’s first abortion-related case involved consolidated challenges to SB 8, a Texas law enacted earlier this year that bans abortions “after detection of an unborn child’s heartbeat”—around six weeks’ gestation. That threshold ignores the one set forth in Casey for when states can regulate abortion: “viability,” the stage at which a fetus can live outside the womb, approximately 24 weeks.

As a means of avoiding judicial review, SB 8 entices private parties to enforce the law for a monetary reward. Although the procedural peculiarity of that “bounty hunter” provision gives the Court a way to resolve the Texas case without wading into Roe, it’s telling that a majority of justices twice refused to temporarily stall enforcement of the law. Given that at least five members of the Court were content to leave in place a law that undermined its own precedent, it is no surprise that the Court seems poised to move against Roe now that it has that option squarely before it in Dobbs.

The focus of Dobbs is a 2018 Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks. Soon after it was enacted, federal courts enjoined the law. (Another Mississippi law using a fetal heartbeat standard was also subsequently blocked by federal courts.) But in the years during which the matter worked through the appeals process, the makeup of the Supreme Court shifted.

Let’s set aside the ethical and practical implications for women of child-bearing age and the countervailing interests of unborn fetuses, and look at some of the legal and institutional stakes in this case.

One of the arguments against reversing Roe after nearly five decades is that doing so will further delegitimize the Supreme Court as a neutral arbiter of facts and laws, which could come back to bite the country if one day people decide simply to ignore its decisions. After all, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted on Wednesday, the very notion that the Supreme Court gets to definitively decide constitutional issues is a creation of its own precedent dating back to the landmark 1803 ruling in Marbury v. Madison. The Constitution itself is silent on the subject of which branch resolves constitutional questions; one day, a president, or Congress, or a mob of angry citizens could simply decide that the Court no longer gets such deference. Andrew Jackson’s famous line about the Supreme Court—“John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it”—is apocryphal, but the Court’s status in our system of government cannot be taken for granted.

Dobbs also puts the Court in a real bind in that any justice who might dislike Roe but remain willing to preserve the right to abortion can point to no good alternative to the Roe/Casey standard. Critics claim that Roe and Casey (like many other rulings) are built on a shaky legal doctrine known as “substantive due process,” and that Casey’s viability test—which was fashioned in Casey but preceded by a trimester framework in Roe—has no grounding in the Constitution’s language. As Chief Justice John Roberts—who may be seeking a compromise that can preserve some version of Roe and Casey—quipped on Wednesday, “If you think that the issue is one of choice, that women should have a choice to terminate their pregnancy, that supposes that there is a point at which they’ve had the fair choice . . . and why would 15 weeks be an inappropriate line?”

One answer to Roberts’s question: Prior to viability, the fetus is entirely dependent on the mother, so one could argue that it makes logical and practical sense to keep government out of the abortion decision until the fetus can survive on its own. No such rationale was posited for a 15-week threshold by Mississippi in Dobbs. Instead, Mississippi’s lawyer argued, the Court should gut Roe altogether, leaving the states with unfettered discretion to ban and even penalize abortion, or should apply a “rational basis” standard of review. This rational basis test is what applies to the least objectionable of government regulations: So long as the state can give some rational reason, those laws stand. (Scholars have deemed rational basis “an empty, almost meaningless form of review.”) Laws that impact classifications such as race or religion get the highest level of scrutiny, known as “strict scrutiny,” while gender gets something called “intermediate.”

Casey offered another test that’s unique to abortion—the “undue burden” test, which tolerates government restrictions even prior to fetal viability if they don’t unduly burden the pregnant mother’s constitutional right to access abortion treatment. The Court didn’t define “undue burden,” so the test is messy and subjective, creating loads of litigation, and thus does not point to a workable replacement standard for viability, which seems to be what Roberts is looking for.

If Roberts can get five justices to join him on a watered-down rational basis or undue burden test for more restrictive abortion laws, the result would probably be a 6-3 split that looks like something of a compromise: Roe would live for another day, though in a constrained form. But such a compromise would require Roberts to persuade some of the other conservatives. Which justice might be gettable? Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch seem ready to ditch Roe altogether. So does Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who during Wednesday’s oral argument seemed inclined to punt the question to state legislatures entirely. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who publicly criticized Roe before becoming a federal judge, focused during oral argument on so-called “safe haven laws” offering women places to relinquish their babies to the state without fearing prosecution for abandonment or endangerment, although it is unclear what part that question could play in developing a constitutional standard moving forward.

If Roberts somehow brokers a compromise preserving Roe and Casey with a half-baked “undue burden” standard, one immediate consequence would be a parade of litigation over which novel abortion laws pass muster under the new standard and which do not. Is a 15-week ban okay, but not a 13-week one? How about a law declaring illegal Plan-B—the “morning after pill”—on the theory that regulating a pregnancy at the point of conception has a rational basis given the state’s interest in protecting the fetus? The likelihood of such ongoing chaos would seem to make a compromise less likely. The justices are more likely to be incentivized to resolve Dobbs in a way that puts the abortion fights to rest at the Supreme Court level. The Court knows how to achieve this when it wants to, as it did in 2019, for example, by deeming political gerrymandering completely beyond the purview of judicial review, period.

Which would suggest that the more likely outcome will be a 5-4 ruling killing Roe on the theory that it was an “egregiously wrong” and bad law that America needs to put behind it. A large part of the oral argument on Wednesday involved this point—the question of when the Court should respect its own precedents and when it should overturn them. Along with counsel for Mississippi, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh likened overruling Roe to the fate of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 ruling that deemed racial segregation constitutional under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (the very provision of the Constitution that undergirds abortion rights). The Supreme Court overruled Plessy with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and as Kavanaugh suggested, the latter decision that has stood the test of time as an important turning point in American history.

There is, however, a contextual difference that could prove important. Brown v. Board was a 9-0 decision. The Court understood that it was rendering a historic ruling and overturning longstanding precedent, so it took pains to give its decision maximum legitimacy. If this Court overturns Roe on a 5-4 split—or a 6-3 split, if Roberts decides to throw in with the overturners to try to give the ruling more legitimacy—it will be powered by three justices controversially appointed by a single president who lost the popular vote. And the law which they would be overturning has enjoyed sustained popular support for two generations.

These facts do not make such a decision right or wrong. But to pretend that they do not exist would be either incredibly naïve or shockingly cynical.

Of course it’s impossible to guess how the public would look back decades from now on a 5-4 decision to overturn Roe. But it seems safe to suppose that if the Court charts that path, the immediate effects will add to our current moment of political destabilization.
https://www.thebulwark.com/will-the-sup ... ompromise/

Justices questions in oral arguments don't always foretell how they will eventually rule. Many times they throw out scenarios to test directions they could go. They can chew on this case until June, the Texas case will probably be decided sooner.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Abortion

132
Earl Warren, a Republican who was the US Chief Justice when Brown was decided was a former DA and later governor of California, was a good and progressive politician. Warren understood the political implications of overturning Plessy that was legal precedent since 1896 and that to overturn it in 1954 it was imperative that the court's decision be a 9-0 ruling. He personally lobbied individual SCOTUS justices and tweaked the opinion to get their sign on, so in the end it was a unanimous decision. I think Roberts understands the implications of overturning Roe, but I'm not sure that Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett understand it.

Sotomayor is right, what made the judiciary a third branch of the US government was the Madison vs Marbury decision that was accepted by Jefferson and subsequent politicians. If any president and Congress together refused to recognize that case, courts would no longer be able to declare laws unconstitutional and Roe and Obergefell (same sex marriage) and many other decisions would be null. There is nothing in the US constitution that allows courts to declare laws unconstitutional.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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