The War On Abortion And Women's Rights

[GreyhoundFan]

"Court case seeking to overturn abortion restrictions opens in Virginia"

Spoiler

RICHMOND — A federal trial opened Monday with activists challenging four state laws that restrict abortion, including requirements that clinics meet stringent licensing standards, that patients get an ultrasound at least 24 hours before an abortion and that only doctors perform the procedure in the first trimester.

Abortion is a relatively safe procedure for the woman, carrying less risk than a colonoscopy, plastic surgery or tonsillectomy, an expert witness testified for activists bringing the suit. Even some dental procedures pose greater danger.

“It is one of the safest medical procedures that exists,” Mark David Nichols, who performs abortions in Oregon, testified in a bench trial before U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson.

But under cross-examination, Nichols acknowledged there is no formal program to train midwives, nurse practitioners or physician assistants to perform abortions. In other states, they get what the state’s lawyer called “on-the-job” training, learning informally from a doctor but then going off to work unsupervised — and perhaps train others.

That seemed to catch Hudson by surprise. Isn’t there a “prepared curriculum” and an established “standard of competency?” the judge asked. Nichols said there was not.

While a spate of states have recently made access to abortion more difficult, advocates in Virginia are trying to make it easier. The case is being heard in an election year when Republicans are trying to hold onto their razor-thin control of the legislature and when abortion politics — dormant for the past few cycles — probably will be prominent.

Earlier this year, Del. Kathy Tran (D-Fairfax) caused an uproar when she filed a bill seeking to loosen restrictions on late-term abortion. During a hearing, she said the measure would allow abortion up to the moment of birth. Tran later said she misspoke, but Republicans attacked her failed bill as extreme.

Gov. Ralph Northam (D) added to the furor with comments on a radio show that Republicans, including President Trump, said was an endorsement of infanticide. A pediatric neurologist, Northam called the infanticide charge “disgusting.” He appeared to be talking about end-of-life care for a baby that is “not viable,” but he has never clarified his remarks.

Trump’s reelection campaign invoked Northam’s comments as recently as last week on Twitter: “Democrat Ralph Northam on late-term abortion: ‘The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.’”

The case in federal court in Richmond comes after Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi and Ohio banned abortions after doctors can detect a fetal heartbeat, about six weeks — before many women realize they are pregnant. And Alabama has made performing abortions a felony unless a pregnancy seriously risks a woman’s health, with no exceptions for rape or incest.

In Virginia, Del. Bob Thomas (R-Stafford), facing a primary challenger from the right, said last week that he would like the General Assembly to follow Alabama’s lead if Republicans can maintain control of the legislature.

Northam responded swiftly. “My veto pen is ready and full of ink,” the governor tweeted.

Despite the political drama swirling around the issue, the lawsuit unfolded as a staid affair, without a single protester in sight. Lawyers skipped opening statements and jumped right into questioning Nichols.

The doctor acknowledged under cross-examination that he typically orders an ultrasound before abortions even though the test is not mandated in Oregon. He also said some of his patients have backed out of planned abortions after seeing an ultrasound image of the fetus.

Hudson seemed intent on moving things along.

Hudson, appointed by President George W. Bush, agreed with plaintiffs two weeks ago that first-trimester abortions are simple and safe enough to be performed without a physician. It was the first time a federal judge in the country had come to that conclusion.

But a week later, he vacated his own order to allow non-doctors to perform most abortions in Virginia, saying the issue should be decided in the trial, which is scheduled to last through June 6.

The lawsuit was brought by a coalition of abortion rights groups, including the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Virginia League for Planned Parenthood and several abortion clinics across the state.

The state Department of Health and the office of Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D) are defending the rules. The case has put Herring in an awkward position as both an advocate for abortion rights and the state official tasked with defending Virginia law. He did not formally recuse his office from the case but hired a private firm, Hirschler Law, saying he did not have enough staff to handle it.

Representing the plaintiffs, D. Sean Trainor of the Washington firm O’Melveny spent the trial’s opening hours questioning Nichols about the safety of abortion.

Under cross-examination by Hirschler President Courtney Paulk, Nichols said 16 states allow non-doctors to dispense medications used to induce abortions in the earliest stages of pregnancy, up to 10 weeks. Just five allow non-doctors to perform a procedure based on suction, which is typically used up to 16 weeks. No state allows non-doctors to perform the procedure known as dilation and extraction, which can be used up to the point of viability.

I hope the court overturns the restrictions.

[milkteeth]

 

I'm glad to hear that this fundraiser was canceled, but it's disappointing that it took such an out cry from within the party for it to happen in the first place. I'm happy to hear that his primary opponent Marie Newman lost to him last election by only two points and he is running against her again 2020.

[Ozlsn]

What happened when Romania banned abortion.

Spoiler

As lawmakers in Alabama this week passed a bill that would outlaw abortion in the U.S. state entirely, protesters outside the statehouse wore blood-red robes, a nod to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which childbearing is entirely controlled by the state. Hours later, the book was trending on Twitter.

But opponents of the restrictive abortion laws currently being considered in the United States don’t need to look to fiction for admonitory examples of where these types of laws can lead. For decades, communist Romania was a real-life test case of what can happen when a country outlaws abortion entirely, and the results were devastating.

In 1966, the leader of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, outlawed access to abortion and contraception in a bid to boost the country’s population. In the short term, it worked, and the year after it was enacted the average number of children born to Romanian women jumped from 1.9 to 3.7. But birthrates quickly fell again as women found ways around the ban. Wealthy, urban women were sometimes able to bribe doctors to perform abortions, or they had contraceptive IUDs smuggled in from Germany.

Yet Romania’s prohibition of the procedure was disproportionately felt by low-income women and disadvantaged groups, which abortion-rights advocates in the United States fear would happen if the Alabama law came into force. As a last resort, many Romanian women turned to home and back-alley abortions, and by 1989, an estimated 10,000 women had died as a result of unsafe procedures. The real number of deaths might have been much higher, as women who sought abortions and those who helped them faced years of imprisonment if caught. Maternal mortality skyrocketed, doubling between 1965 and 1989.

“Sometimes a woman couldn’t even tell her husband or best friend that she wanted to have an abortion as it would put them at risk as well,” said Irina Ilisei, an academic researcher and co-founder of the Front Association, a Romanian feminist group, and the Feminist Romania website.

“For many women, sexuality represented a fear and not a part of life that can be enjoyed,” Ilisei said.

Another consequence of Romania’s abortion ban was that hundreds of thousands of children were turned over to state orphanages. When communism collapsed in Romania in 1989, an estimated 170,000 children were found warehoused in filthy orphanages. Having previously been hidden from the world, images emerged of stick-thin children, many of whom had been beaten and abused. Some were left shackled to metal bed frames.

Nor did the Romanian law do much to achieve Ceausescu’s goal of dramatically increasing the population. “Making abortion illegal will not lead to women having more babies. So if the goal is to bring about more lives and to protect more lives, this is not the instrument to use,” said Maria Bucur, a professor of history and gender studies at Indiana University.

Born and raised in Romania, Bucur describes herself as a product of the abortion ban, after her mother twice failed to have an abortion.

On Wednesday, a day after it was passed by the legislature, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law the country’s strictest abortion law, which bans the procedure at every stage of pregnancy and could send doctors who carry out the procedure to prison for life.

Alabama’s law goes even further than Romania’s, which in principle at least allowed for exceptions in cases of rape, incest, or congenital defect. The new law allows for abortions only when there is a serious threat to the mother’s health.

Romania’s abortion ban was compounded by a ban on contraception, which was not mentioned in the Alabama bill. But the Trump administration took a swipe at birth control in 2017 when it allowed employers to opt out of providing it as part of employee insurance plans on the grounds of religious belief. This decision was halted by a federal judge in January of this year.

The legal tussle between the courts over abortion looks set to continue as anti-abortion groups seek to push through laws they hope will be upheld by a newly conservative Supreme Court, to which U.S. President Donald Trump has appointed two new members. So far this year, over a dozen other states have attempted to outlaw abortions after six weeks of gestation—before many people even realize they are pregnant. Last week, Georgia became the sixth state to successfully pass such a bill. Already, six states in the United States have only one abortion clinic left.

Although the laws may be struck down by the courts, anti-abortion advocates hope that they will eventually reach the Supreme Court to challenge the precedent set by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which enshrined the right to seek an abortion.

Alabama State Rep. Terri Collins, a co-sponsor of the bill, which is now the most restrictive in the country, told the news site AL.com, “My goal with this bill, and I think all of our goal, is to have Roe vs. Wade turned over.”

On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump promised to appoint conservative justices with a view to overturning Roe v. Wade. The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh in October 2018 gave conservative justices a solid majority on the bench, raising the hopes of anti-abortion advocates.

If the Supreme Court were to change its mind on abortion, it would become the prerogative of individual states to decide how to regulate the procedure.

“We need to take into consideration the long-term consequences of legislation like this,” said Charles Nelson, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the author of Romania’s Abandoned Children.

Starting in 2000, Nelson examined the impact that Romania’s orphanages had on children in post-communist Romania and found that many were left with severe developmental impairment and mental health issues. For some, their confinement in orphanages even had a physical impact on the size of their brains.

Nelson said that Romania offers a cautionary tale of what happens when a state tries to control reproductive rights. The new Alabama law raises questions about what kind of support the state would provide if someone doesn’t have the option of ending a pregnancy when the fetus is found to have profound birth defects.

“Does the state have the bandwidth to take care of those kids and support the families?” he said in an interview.

When communism collapsed in Romania in December 1989, one of the first acts of the transitional government was to overturn the ban on abortion. Romania remains a highly conservative country, and in recent years there have been renewed calls to outlaw abortion, spearheaded by the influential Orthodox Church and other religious groups.

Bucur, the author of Birth of Democratic Citizenship: Women and Power in Modern Romania, is skeptical that the new movement will gain any political momentum.

“I think the real, raw firsthand memory is still too present in still too many voters. I don’t think there’s any intelligent politicians who would make it happen,” she said.

Ilisei, the Romanian activist, said that she was worried to see parts of the United States—a country that Romania had once looked to as an example—now pursuing new restrictions on abortion. “In 1989, we aspired to build a stable democracy, a pluralistic society, with equality between men and women, and the United States was the main source of inspiration,” she said. “Now that is not the case any more."

Alabama currently has around 6000 children in foster care. 551 were adopted from foster care in 2012; 398 aged out in that year. In 2017 26.6% of Alabama's children were living under the poverty line - for the under 5 age group that was 29.8% of them.

So Terri Collins, as you gird up your armor and charge off on your white horse to tilt at Roe vs Wade, what are you doing to assist the over a quarter of children in your state who are living in poverty? What are you doing to assist the living, breathing children in foster care who are waiting on adoption? What are you doing to provide support to the families who are struggling to keep their family together and fed? When are you passing the Medicaid expansion, subsidizing contraception, providing state paid parental leave, investing in social housing, etc, etc.

Show us you're pro-actual born life. Dare ya.

[laPapessaGiovanna]

On 5/24/2019 at 12:44 AM, Ozlsn said:

What happened when Romania banned abortion.

  Hide contents

As lawmakers in Alabama this week passed a bill that would outlaw abortion in the U.S. state entirely, protesters outside the statehouse wore blood-red robes, a nod to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which childbearing is entirely controlled by the state. Hours later, the book was trending on Twitter.

But opponents of the restrictive abortion laws currently being considered in the United States don’t need to look to fiction for admonitory examples of where these types of laws can lead. For decades, communist Romania was a real-life test case of what can happen when a country outlaws abortion entirely, and the results were devastating.

In 1966, the leader of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, outlawed access to abortion and contraception in a bid to boost the country’s population. In the short term, it worked, and the year after it was enacted the average number of children born to Romanian women jumped from 1.9 to 3.7. But birthrates quickly fell again as women found ways around the ban. Wealthy, urban women were sometimes able to bribe doctors to perform abortions, or they had contraceptive IUDs smuggled in from Germany.

Yet Romania’s prohibition of the procedure was disproportionately felt by low-income women and disadvantaged groups, which abortion-rights advocates in the United States fear would happen if the Alabama law came into force. As a last resort, many Romanian women turned to home and back-alley abortions, and by 1989, an estimated 10,000 women had died as a result of unsafe procedures. The real number of deaths might have been much higher, as women who sought abortions and those who helped them faced years of imprisonment if caught. Maternal mortality skyrocketed, doubling between 1965 and 1989.

“Sometimes a woman couldn’t even tell her husband or best friend that she wanted to have an abortion as it would put them at risk as well,” said Irina Ilisei, an academic researcher and co-founder of the Front Association, a Romanian feminist group, and the Feminist Romania website.

“For many women, sexuality represented a fear and not a part of life that can be enjoyed,” Ilisei said.

Another consequence of Romania’s abortion ban was that hundreds of thousands of children were turned over to state orphanages. When communism collapsed in Romania in 1989, an estimated 170,000 children were found warehoused in filthy orphanages. Having previously been hidden from the world, images emerged of stick-thin children, many of whom had been beaten and abused. Some were left shackled to metal bed frames.

Nor did the Romanian law do much to achieve Ceausescu’s goal of dramatically increasing the population. “Making abortion illegal will not lead to women having more babies. So if the goal is to bring about more lives and to protect more lives, this is not the instrument to use,” said Maria Bucur, a professor of history and gender studies at Indiana University.

Born and raised in Romania, Bucur describes herself as a product of the abortion ban, after her mother twice failed to have an abortion.

On Wednesday, a day after it was passed by the legislature, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law the country’s strictest abortion law, which bans the procedure at every stage of pregnancy and could send doctors who carry out the procedure to prison for life.

Alabama’s law goes even further than Romania’s, which in principle at least allowed for exceptions in cases of rape, incest, or congenital defect. The new law allows for abortions only when there is a serious threat to the mother’s health.

Romania’s abortion ban was compounded by a ban on contraception, which was not mentioned in the Alabama bill. But the Trump administration took a swipe at birth control in 2017 when it allowed employers to opt out of providing it as part of employee insurance plans on the grounds of religious belief. This decision was halted by a federal judge in January of this year.

The legal tussle between the courts over abortion looks set to continue as anti-abortion groups seek to push through laws they hope will be upheld by a newly conservative Supreme Court, to which U.S. President Donald Trump has appointed two new members. So far this year, over a dozen other states have attempted to outlaw abortions after six weeks of gestation—before many people even realize they are pregnant. Last week, Georgia became the sixth state to successfully pass such a bill. Already, six states in the United States have only one abortion clinic left.

Although the laws may be struck down by the courts, anti-abortion advocates hope that they will eventually reach the Supreme Court to challenge the precedent set by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which enshrined the right to seek an abortion.

Alabama State Rep. Terri Collins, a co-sponsor of the bill, which is now the most restrictive in the country, told the news site AL.com, “My goal with this bill, and I think all of our goal, is to have Roe vs. Wade turned over.”

On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump promised to appoint conservative justices with a view to overturning Roe v. Wade. The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh in October 2018 gave conservative justices a solid majority on the bench, raising the hopes of anti-abortion advocates.

If the Supreme Court were to change its mind on abortion, it would become the prerogative of individual states to decide how to regulate the procedure.

“We need to take into consideration the long-term consequences of legislation like this,” said Charles Nelson, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the author of Romania’s Abandoned Children.

Starting in 2000, Nelson examined the impact that Romania’s orphanages had on children in post-communist Romania and found that many were left with severe developmental impairment and mental health issues. For some, their confinement in orphanages even had a physical impact on the size of their brains.

Nelson said that Romania offers a cautionary tale of what happens when a state tries to control reproductive rights. The new Alabama law raises questions about what kind of support the state would provide if someone doesn’t have the option of ending a pregnancy when the fetus is found to have profound birth defects.

“Does the state have the bandwidth to take care of those kids and support the families?” he said in an interview.

When communism collapsed in Romania in December 1989, one of the first acts of the transitional government was to overturn the ban on abortion. Romania remains a highly conservative country, and in recent years there have been renewed calls to outlaw abortion, spearheaded by the influential Orthodox Church and other religious groups.

Bucur, the author of Birth of Democratic Citizenship: Women and Power in Modern Romania, is skeptical that the new movement will gain any political momentum.

“I think the real, raw firsthand memory is still too present in still too many voters. I don’t think there’s any intelligent politicians who would make it happen,” she said.

Ilisei, the Romanian activist, said that she was worried to see parts of the United States—a country that Romania had once looked to as an example—now pursuing new restrictions on abortion. “In 1989, we aspired to build a stable democracy, a pluralistic society, with equality between men and women, and the United States was the main source of inspiration,” she said. “Now that is not the case any more."

Alabama currently has around 6000 children in foster care. 551 were adopted from foster care in 2012; 398 aged out in that year. In 2017 26.6% of Alabama's children were living under the poverty line - for the under 5 age group that was 29.8% of them.

So Terri Collins, as you gird up your armor and charge off on your white horse to tilt at Roe vs Wade, what are you doing to assist the over a quarter of children in your state who are living in poverty? What are you doing to assist the living, breathing children in foster care who are waiting on adoption? What are you doing to provide support to the families who are struggling to keep their family together and fed? When are you passing the Medicaid expansion, subsidizing contraception, providing state paid parental leave, investing in social housing, etc, etc.

Show us you're pro-actual born life. Dare ya.

How dare you to compare a third world, communist, wrong kind of Christian country with Blessed Exceptional America! As laws about guns can't work in the US as they work in the rest of the world, laws about women's right to be subjugated and controlled that are abhorred in most places will work in the US. /s

[47of74]

Fuck you Republicans

Quote

National Republican talking points leaked to Vice News show that lawmakers are preparing to defend Alabama’s draconian abortion ban by arguing that it is better “physically” and “psychologically” to deny abortions to victims of rape and incest.

The document was distributed by the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus that includes about 70 percent of House Republicans. The memo offers “messaging guidance” on “our pro-life platform” and instructs members on how to defend Alabama’s abortion ban, which bars abortion during all stages of pregnancy unless the mother’s life is in danger. The bill makes no exemptions for victims of rape and incest. Under the law, doctors could be sentenced up to 99 years in prison for performing an abortion.

The document praises Alabama’s law as “bold new pro-life legislation” and complains that the media is “attempting to use these new developments to create ‘gotcha moments’ for Republicans and a divide within our party.”

The talking points instruct Republicans to defend the ban in cases of rape and incest by alleging that abortion is akin to “committing a second violent act” on the victim and claims that terminating a pregnancy caused by the act “could physically or psychologically wound her further.”

 

[Vivi_music]

I found the exact quote I was looking for and refering too earlier in this thread. And of course, how could I forget it was from Simone de Beauvoir.
 

Quote

 

Never forget that it would take only one political, economical or religious crisis to cast doubt on women's rights. These rights will never be vested. You'll have to stay vigilant your whole life.

N’oubliez jamais qu’il suffira d’une crise politique, économique ou religieuse pour que les droits des femmes soient remis en question. Ces droits ne sont jamais acquis. Vous devrez rester vigilantes votre vie durant.

 

Simone knew it and warned us.

[Cleopatra7]

19 hours ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

How dare you to compare a third world, communist, wrong kind of Christian country with Blessed Exceptional America! As laws about guns can't work in the US as they work in the rest of the world, laws about women's right to be subjugated and controlled that are abhorred in most places will work in the US. /s

In terms of various health and welfare rankings, the US is in the same place as Romania. The links I really want are behind paywalls, but this study indicates how the US compares unfavorably to almost every other OECD country, which theoretically means that the US shouldn’t even be considered a “developed nation”:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/879092/the-us-doesnt-look-like-a-developed-country/amp/

 I’m looking side eye though at the claim that 100 percent of Americans have electricity, because I know a lot of Native American reservations and Black Belt communities don’t have it.

Edited May 26, 2019 by Cleopatra7

[laPapessaGiovanna]

4 minutes ago, Cleopatra7 said:

In terms of various health and welfare rankings, the US is in the same place as Romania. The links I really want are behind paywalls, but this study indicates how the US compares unfavorably to almost every other OECD country, which theoretically means that the US shouldn’t even be considered a “developed nation”:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/879092/the-us-doesnt-look-like-a-developed-country/amp/

 I’m looking side eye though at the claim that 100 percent of Americans have electricity, because I know a lot of Native American reservations and Black Belt communities don’t have it.

Unfortunately not many people realise it.

[Cartmann99]

Just wanted to post this trailer about a movie set in Romania in the 80s:

Just a heads up that this movie is a dark and disturbing look at what women are willing go through in order to procure an abortion, and is NSFW. The parent's guide at IMDB has details if you need them.

Edited May 26, 2019 by Cartmann99

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an excellent op-ed. "I had an abortion. Why is none of your business

Spoiler

Elly Lonon is the author of the graphic novel “Amongst the Liberal Elite: The Road Trip Exploring Societal Inequities Solidified by Trump.”

Last week, I attended a local Day of Action rally to support abortion rights. Along with pleas for donations and participation on the ground, the organizers asked those who had benefited from having an abortion to share their stories. The organizers theorized that by speaking about our experiences, we could personalize the act, humanize it. That perhaps, like sexuality or gender, we should define ourselves by our abortions.

My social media feeds are filled with the stories of brave souls offering their traumas in sacrifice to the justification for abortion. For many, there is a profound emotional element in the decision to abort. They confess every reason for their decision as if begging for forgiveness. Rape victims. Incest victims. Abuse victims. Unviable fetuses. Potentially fatal complications for either mother or child.

My heart aches for them, truly. I believe their motivations are noble. But their stories shift the focus from how this argument should really be framed.

What about those of us who aren’t victims? What about those who simply happened to find ourselves pregnant? Abortion doesn’t have to be motivated by trauma.

I had an abortion. I’m not going to tell you how old I was or what my circumstances were at the time. I won’t mention whether birth control was used or whether it wasn’t. I’m not going to tell you whether the guy is or is not still a part of my life, whether it was a one-night stand or a long-term relationship. I’m not going to discuss the health of either party involved in the consensual or nonconsensual sex, nor the viability of the embryo. None of those details are pertinent. I got pregnant. I didn’t want to be pregnant. I had a medical procedure to remedy the situation. Full stop.

I am not my abortion. Everything I am, however, is because of that abortion.

I won’t tell you whether I’ve gone on to marry and have kids years or decades later. Whether I have regrets or whether I’ve never given it a second thought. The details are for me and me alone. They are not relevant. Knowing them should have absolutely no impact on the validity of my choice. My choice. Mine.

I am an adult of sound mind and body. My government has decreed me capable of voting, of operating motor vehicles, of purchasing firearms, of paying taxes. Why is this irrational line drawn at body autonomy?

A rhetorical question, obviously. Not all body autonomy is created equal.

For example, as a U.S. citizen, I have the right to refuse lifesaving medical treatment. Unless I give express permission, no one can remove an organ from my body — even to save the life of another person. Even after death, no one can perform research upon or remove parts of my body without prior consent. 

Why do my reproductive decisions fall outside of these other condoned health-care choices? Control and subjugation are stories as old as civilization. Exerting authority over what I do or do not house in my body is no less oppressive than restricting what religion I can practice or which consenting adult I can marry.

I had an abortion, and I need no one’s forgiveness. Nor should I need your permission. In defending reproductive rights, we should refrain from framing the argument around the most extreme and saintly of cases in the hope of converting more supporters. When we pander to find circumstances under which abortion becomes palatable, we dilute the simple message that body autonomy should be a right regardless of gender.

So, tell your stories. Share your experiences. Humanize this act. Let’s do what we must to keep the choice available to those who need it. But please, never forget that the right should always be ours, no matter the reason for our choices.

."

[fraurosena]

On 5/26/2019 at 7:43 PM, Cleopatra7 said:

In terms of various health and welfare rankings, the US is in the same place as Romania. The links I really want are behind paywalls, but this study indicates how the US compares unfavorably to almost every other OECD country, which theoretically means that the US shouldn’t even be considered a “developed nation”:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/879092/the-us-doesnt-look-like-a-developed-country/amp/

 I’m looking side eye though at the claim that 100 percent of Americans have electricity, because I know a lot of Native American reservations and Black Belt communities don’t have it.

If I remember correctly, the Nauglers don’t have electricity either. Although Nic has (had? I haven’t been to that shitshow thread in ages) her dog grooming business and therefore access to electricity, the land where she actually lives does not. And sadly, they are not the only people in America living like that. Pieces of land like that, without running water or electricity, are being rented to people (at least in Kentucky) to live on. The extremely poor do so.

If I remember correctly, there was a UN report in 2017 on living conditions in America that records the abject poverty and the appalling conditions some people have to live in. In some places they are on par with the way people in third world countries live. No running water, no electricity, no sewerage. No (real) houses, but cobbled together shelters. People are uneducated, diseased and riddled with parasites. 

It’s mindboggling that this is happening in the so-called richest country in the world.

 

[fraurosena]

I've found this statement relating to the report I mentioned in my post above:

Statement on Visit to the USA, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights

I'm not going to quote the whole thing, as it's quite lengthy, but here are some paragraphs that are quite revealing:

Quote

The United States is one of the world’s richest, most powerful and technologically innovative countries; but neither its wealth nor its power nor its technology is being harnessed to address the situation in which 40 million people continue to live in poverty.

Quote

I have seen and heard a lot over the past two weeks.  I met with many people barely surviving on Skid Row in Los Angeles, I witnessed a San Francisco police officer telling a group of homeless people to move on but having no answer when asked where they could move to, I heard how thousands of poor people get minor infraction notices which seem to be intentionally designed to quickly explode into unpayable debt, incarceration, and the replenishment of municipal coffers, I saw sewage filled yards in states where governments don’t consider sanitation facilities to be their responsibility, I saw people who had lost all of their teeth because adult dental care is not covered by the vast majority of programs available to the very poor, I heard about soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by prescription and other drug addiction, and I met with people in the South of Puerto Rico living next to a mountain of completely unprotected coal ash which rains down upon them bringing illness, disability and death.

Quote

American exceptionalism was a constant theme in my conversations.  But instead of realizing its founders’ admirable commitments, today’s United States has proved itself to be exceptional in far more problematic ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights.  As a result, contrasts between private wealth and public squalor abound.

And then there's this sad and sorry list: 

Spoiler

• By most indicators, the US is one of the world’s wealthiest countries.  It spends more on national defense than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan combined.
• US health care expenditures per capita are double the OECD average and much higher than in all other countries. But there are many fewer doctors and hospital beds per person than the OECD average.
• US infant mortality rates in 2013 were the highest in the developed world.
• Americans can expect to live shorter and sicker lives, compared to people living in any other rich democracy, and the “health gap” between the U.S. and its peer countries continues to grow.
• U.S. inequality levels are far higher than those in most European countries
• Neglected tropical diseases, including Zika, are increasingly common in the USA.  It has been estimated that 12 million Americans live with a neglected parasitic infection. A 2017 report documents the prevalence of hookworm in Lowndes County, Alabama.
• The US has the highest prevalence of obesity in the developed world.
• In terms of access to water and sanitation the US ranks 36th in the world.
• America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, ahead of Turkmenistan, El Salvador, Cuba, Thailand and the Russian Federation. Its rate is nearly 5 times the OECD average.
• The youth poverty rate in the United States is the highest across the OECD with one quarter of youth living in poverty compared to less than 14% across the OECD.
• The Stanford Center on Inequality and Poverty ranks the most well-off countries in terms of labor markets, poverty, safety net, wealth inequality, and economic mobility. The US comes in last of the top 10 most well-off countries, and 18th amongst the top 21.
• In the OECD the US ranks 35th out of 37 in terms of poverty and inequality.
• According to the World Income Inequality Database, the US has the highest Gini rate (measuring inequality) of all Western Countries
• The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality characterizes the US as “a clear and constant outlier in the child poverty league.” US child poverty rates are the highest amongst the six richest countries – Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden and Norway.
• About 55.7% of the U.S. voting-age population cast ballots in the 2016 presidential election. In the OECD, the U.S. placed 28th in voter turnout, compared with an OECD average of 75%.  Registered voters represent a much smaller share of potential voters in the U.S. than just about any other OECD country. Only about 64% of the U.S. voting-age population (and 70% of voting-age citizens) was registered in 2016, compared with 91% in Canada (2015) and the UK (2016), 96% in Sweden (2014), and nearly 99% in Japan (2014).

 

[fraurosena]

Yes!

I wonder which judge tipped the scales in the right direction?

[GreyhoundFan]

A positive step in AZ, though we know the repugs will try and push the bill again in the next session:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This state legislator in FL is a real prince of a guy.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Sigh. Another reason I'm glad I don't live in MO: "Missouri could become the first state without an abortion clinic"

Spoiler

Missouri could become the first state without a clinic that performs abortions, Planned Parenthood officials warned Tuesday, saying they are suing the state to allow their clinic in St. Louis to continue offering the procedure.

Planned Parenthood officials said the state’s health department is threatening not to renew the organization’s license to offer abortions in St. Louis, the only place in Missouri that provides the procedure.

The license expires Friday, and if it isn’t renewed, Planned Parenthood president Leana Wen said, “this will be the first time since 1974 that safe, legal abortion care will be inaccessible to people in an entire state.” Planned Parenthood said the closure of the St. Louis clinic would leave “more than a million people in a situation we haven’t seen since Roe v. Wade.”

The St. Louis clinic plans to file a lawsuit in state court Tuesday seeking permission to keep providing abortions if its license expires, Planned Parenthood said in a statement. The nonprofit said the clinic “has maintained 100 percent compliance” with the law.

“What is happening in Missouri shows that politicians don’t have to outlaw abortion to push it out of reach entirely,” Jennifer Dalven, director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a statement.

The facility in St. Louis will continue to provide other services if its license to perform abortions is not renewed, Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Emily Trifone said in an email.

The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services could not immediately be reached for comment.

Gov. Mike Parson (R) signed a bill last week that criminalizes abortion at eight weeks of pregnancy, following a wave of similar laws across the country. He had said that the bill provided Missouri “the opportunity to be one of the strongest pro-life states in the country."

As The Washington Post’s Lindsey Bever reported:

The vote came just hours before the state’s legislative session was set to end, and was preceded by an emotional debate in the House, during which some lawmakers recounted their own experiences with abortion. Aside from some outbursts from spectators in the gallery and quiet sobbing at times that appeared to come from the House floor, the chamber was largely silent during the arguments about the bill.

Supporters said the bill would protect unborn children’s lives, but opponents argued it would also put the mothers’ lives at risk, forcing them to either suffer or go underground to seek illegal and unsafe procedures.

The ban on abortions at eight weeks, when some women do not know they are pregnant, provides exceptions for medical emergencies. The law defines these emergencies as “a condition which, based on reasonable medical judgment, so complicates the medical condition of a pregnant woman as to necessitate the immediate abortion of her pregnancy to avert the death of the pregnant woman or for which a delay will create a serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.”

Rape and incest are not exceptions under the state law, called the Missouri Stands for the Unborn Act. The legislation says a doctor who performs an abortion could be charged with a Class B felony that is punishable by five to 15 years in prison. Doctors could also lose their professional licenses.

Although five clinics in Missouri performed abortions in 2008, that number fell to two by 2018. It dropped to one facility in October after Planned Parenthood’s Columbia Health Center could not meet new state requirements that abortion providers receive admitting privileges at hospitals within 15 minutes of their clinics, according to NPR.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, which advocates for abortion access, five other states have just one clinic that performs abortions: Kentucky, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota and West Virginia.

Eleven states have passed laws limiting access to abortion this year, and restrictions in three other states are pending. New York and Vermont passed laws that protect abortion access.

Conservative-leaning states hope to prompt the Supreme Court to reconsider its ruling in Roe v. Wade now that two justices appointed by President Trump sit on the court.

“I have prayed my way through this bill,” Alabama state Rep. Terri Collins (R), who sponsored that state’s abortion ban, previously said. “This is the way we get where we want to get eventually.”

 

[countressrascal]

It is sad state of affairs when one of the richest countries in the world has one of highest maternal fetal death rank and we are debating when a fetus is a person when we don't want to give the mother and fetus the services that they need to survive and thrive. Let's debate that instead all the other BS. This is a true story-I am a PP provider proud to be one, about four years ago there was a women who was out in front of our clinic everyday yelling at the staff van as we were coming to work. One day my MA came into my office and said you know that women who yells at us everyday is your next appointment, I said bring me her chart and then I will let you know, read it and she was carrying a fetus that was not comparable with life. I told my MA to bring her in, we sat and talked for about 1 hour about her decision, I never brought up that she protested and threw things at the van. I treated her as a person in need, which she was. At the end of the appointment, she said you have not said anything about my protesting, told her that did not matter to me because she was a women in need of my services and I was a professional and would provide the care she needed. After the event I never her again. So the moral of this story until they need the service Pro-Life Anti Abortion can take the high road however when they need the services they are glad the services are available to them. Plus we should remember that Michelle Duggar took the abortion pill to have a miscarriage with her last one. 

[RosyDaisy]

we should remember that Michelle Duggar took the abortion pill to have a miscarriage with her last one. 

Wait. What?

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘Not on my watch’: As abortion bans multiply, some states move to affirm a woman’s right to choose"

Spoiler

Alabama. Ohio. Kentucky. Mississippi. Georgia. Utah. Arkansas. Missouri.

These are the states on the front lines of the cultural battle intensifying over abortion.

Next up?

Illinois is the latest place to advance legislation addressing access to the medical procedure. But the aim in Springfield, Ill., is vastly different.

“To our neighbors in Illinois who hear the news around the country and worry that this war on women is coming to Illinois, I say, not on my watch,” Kelly Cassidy, a Democrat in the Illinois House of Representatives, said in chamber debate on Tuesday. “To the people in Missouri and Alabama and Georgia and Kentucky and Mississippi and Ohio, I say, not on my watch.”

In a rebuke to states curtailing abortion rights, the Illinois House on Tuesday approved Cassidy’s Reproductive Health Act by a 64-50 vote, with six Democrats in opposition. The measure, which now goes to the Democratic-controlled state Senate, would remove restrictions on certain late-term abortions and scrap criminal penalties for doctors arising from a 1975 law whose enforcement has been blocked by the courts.

Illinois isn’t alone in its approach, as lawmakers in red and blue states alike begin to envision a world without Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that a woman has a constitutional right to choose whether to bear a child.

In Vermont, both houses of the state’s General Assembly endorsed a measure earlier this month that recognizes reproductive choice as a “fundamental right.” The state’s Republican governor, Phil Scott, has pledged not to veto the measure. Last week, lawmakers in Maine advanced legislation expanding abortion providers. Meanwhile, the majority-female Nevada Assembly approved a bill doing away with the requirement that doctors inform women of the “emotional implications” of an abortion.

Legislation is pending in additional Democratic-controlled states, such as Massachusetts, where the ROE Act would authorize abortion after 24 weeks in certain situations. Elsewhere, Democratic governors are promising to use their veto power to block Republican-led efforts to limit access to the procedure.

The legislative counterpunch shows that Isaac Newton’s dictum about equal and opposite reactions is truer nowhere than in the area of abortion, which bitterly divides voters. And it indicates how uneven access to the procedure could become if states’ rights were fully to prevail on the policy.

The contest over reproductive rights has taken on existential stakes with the solidification of a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Antiabortion activists, who have worked for decades to chip away at state protections, believe their moment has come to achieve a more sweeping change.

But the nation’s top court left both sides dissatisfied on Tuesday, upholding part of an Indiana law regulating what happens with fetal remains while declining to revive another aspect of the legislation. The apparent compromise was a sign that the justices were not prepared to move decisively to reconsider the constitutional right to an abortion set forth in Roe.

Still, the legal schism that runs in parallel to the political split was on full display. Justice Clarence Thomas, in a 20-page concurring opinion, characterized the types of abortions proscribed by Indiana’s law — signed in 2016 by Mike Pence, then the state’s Republican governor — as “modern-day eugenics.” In a separate opinion of her own, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took issue with the terminology used by Thomas. “A woman who exercises her constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy is not a ‘mother,’" she wrote in a footnote.

As the battle lines were drawn in the Supreme Court, tears flowed in Springfield over what suddenly seemed like a precarious legal guarantee.

Cassidy, who said an abortion two decades ago saved her life and preserved her ability to have her three children, emphasized that her aim was “creating protections in a post-Roe world.”

Republicans, led by state Rep. Avery Bourne, argued that the measure went too far in easing limitations, primarily in the area of fetal viability.

“This is not about keeping abortion legal in Illinois; this is about a vast expansion of what is allowed,” said Bourne, who is currently pregnant. “Please, for the viable babies who are waiting to be born, vote no.”

But Cassidy stressed that the bill was designed to “codify current practice.”

“As attacks escalate around us, Illinois can respond with equal force to defend reproductive freedom,” said the Democratic lawmaker, who is one of four openly LGBT lawmakers in the Illinois General Assembly.

Castigating leaders in other states, her Democratic colleagues heralded Illinois as a “beacon” for women.

“Is that truly what we want in Illinois?” asked state Rep. Emanuel “Chris” Welch, pointing to the spate of new restrictions introduced in recent months and dwelling in particular on the possibility that women could be held criminally liable under Georgia law. “This is not the legacy that I want to leave for my daughter.”

But lawmakers in Illinois didn’t have to look that far for an illustration of the future they were trying to avert.

Perhaps the most striking example lay just across the state’s southwest border, in Missouri. The eight-week ban signed into law last week by Republican Gov. Mike Parson includes a trigger clause banning abortion at any stage of pregnancy, except in cases of medical emergencies, if Roe is overturned.

In fact, the legal status of abortion in Missouri could soon become a technicality. The state is on track to become the first in the nation without a single abortion clinic, if the license for the lone provider, in St. Louis, is allowed to expire on Friday.

Planned Parenthood, which is suing the state to continue offering services at the clinic, said the closure would leave “more than a million people in a situation we haven’t seen since Roe v. Wade.”

Many of the participants in Tuesday’s debate in Springfield were too young to recall a pre-Roe era. But Democratic state Rep. Joyce Mason rose shortly before the vote was tallied to recount a story passed down from her mother, who once found herself in the emergency room with a gallbladder issue, lying one bed over from a woman who had tried to end her own pregnancy.

“My mother described listening to the doctors and the police that accompanied her berate and scream at her and treat her like a hardened criminal because she had broken the law by trying to abort her baby with a coat hanger,” Mason said. “My mother then listened to the woman hemorrhage and die right next to her.”

The lesson her mother learned in that moment, Mason said, which the Democrat relayed to her colleagues, was that, “Women will continue to fight for the right for their bodily autonomy, and that no woman should ever die as a result of it.”

I'm glad we are seeing some good news about women's rights.

[countressrascal]

9 hours ago, RosyDaisy said:

 

 

Wait. What?

 

Since she could not miscarry on her own, she was having some medical issue (can't remember what they were) so they gave her a choice of either having a D&C or take the abortion pill and have a miscarriage at home. She chose the pill, at least she had a choice. Either way technically she had an abortion and it would have been medically coded as a termination of a pregnancy i.e. abortion. So every time they come out an protest against abortion, they should look at themselves in the medical world she had one, however it was their choice. Why don't they let other's have the same.

[GreyhoundFan]

This author makes many good points: "Why the Fight Over Abortion Is Unrelenting"

Spoiler

In her classic 1984 study, “Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood,” the sociologist Kristin Luker addressed the fundamental question posed by the medical termination of a pregnancy:

Why is the debate so bitter, so emotional? Part of the answer is very simple: the two sides share almost no common premises and very little common language.

Luker elaborated further:

Those who oppose abortion usually begin by stipulating that since the embryo is an unborn child, abortion is morally equivalent to murder. But for those who accept abortion, this initial stipulation is exactly what is problematic; from their point of view, the embryo has the capacity to become a child but it is not a child yet, and therefore belongs to a very different moral category.

Over the years, the abortion debate has become a linchpin in the political battle between Democrats and Republicans, mobilizing Christian evangelicals on the right and supporters of the women’s movement on the left.

Why has the abortion issue had such staying power, compared, for example, with the steady liberalization of views on homosexuality and interracial marriage?

Part of the reason for this is that the abortion issue taps into competing, deep-rooted views on the role of men and women in society. The sexual revolution and the radical transformation of the work and personal lives of women after the introduction of the contraceptive pill in the early 1960s — and the guarantee of women’s reproductive rights by the Supreme Court decisions Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 and Roe v. Wade in 1973 — brought these antithetical beliefs about abortion to the fore.

President Trump’s appointment of two conservative justices to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, opened the anti-abortion floodgates this year. Republican legislatures in eight states — Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Utah — have enacted stringent anti-abortion legislation, gambling that the five-member conservative bloc on the court will weaken or overturn Roe — or, if that strategy fails, that anti-abortion supporters will be galvanized for the 2020 election.

Over the 46 years since Roe was decided, the constituencies on both sides of this issue have changed radically, and the debate has become increasingly complex and increasingly politicized.

In the last decade, support for unrestricted abortion rights has grown from 21 to 29 percent, while the percentage backing a complete ban has fallen from 21 to 18 percent, according to Gallup.

From 1975 to 1988, the views of Democrats and Republicans on abortion were virtually identical, again according to Gallup, when 18 to 21 percent of voters in both parties agreed that abortions should be allowed “under any circumstances.” Since 1988, the parties have diverged: by 2018, 46 percent of Democrats, but only 11 percent of Republicans, said abortion should be “available under any circumstances.”

Contemporary polling shows that there are a number of contradictions in the public view of abortion. In some respects, majority opinion is supportive of abortion rights, in others it is opposed.

For example, on the abortion rights side, last year Gallup found that a clear majority — 64-28 — opposed overturning Roe v Wade. By 60-34, the public believed abortion should be legal during the first three months of pregnancy.

In further support of abortion rights, overwhelming majorities in 2018 supported abortion during the first trimester if the mother’s life was endangered (83-15); when the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest (77-21); and by slightly smaller majorities when “the child would be born mentally disabled” (56-41) or “with a life-threatening illness” (67-31).

On the anti-abortion side, Gallup found that majorities opposed abortion in the second trimester (65-28) and by a larger margin in the third trimester (81-13). The public continued to support abortion in the third trimester when the life of the mother was in danger (72-22), but was much more lukewarm toward third trimester abortions when the pregnancy result ed from incest or rape, supporting the procedure 52-42.

In addition, in 2018, the public opposed third-trimester abortions when the child would be born with a mental disability (61-35) and split (48-49) on third-trimester abortions if the child would be born with a life-threatening illness.

The states in the process of restricting abortion are either seeking to prohibit it after a set number of weeks, ranging from six to 20 depending on the state; or to prohibit abortion after a heartbeat can be detected (roughly six weeks); or, in the case of Alabama, to ban all abortions except those to save the life of the mother.

The abortion debate is a key element in the larger division of opinion in America about the sexual revolution, pitting those who believe that sexual autonomy is crucial to the achievement of gender equality against those who, in the words of the Southern Baptist Convention, honor the rich and valuable contributions of full-time wives and mothers who through their service and self-sacrifice have strengthened their families, enriched our nation, and pleased our God by honoring His purposes in their lives each day.

Leaders of the anti-abortion movement are explicit in placing blame on the sexual revolution for what they see as the larger corruption of the social order, the demand for women’s autonomy and for abortion.

“The abortion license has helped to erode the moral foundations of the American civic community,” thirty nine prominent opponents of abortion wrote in a famous 1996 declaration, “The America We Seek: A Statement of Pro-Life Principle and Concern.”

How do its opponents believe abortion has undermined the American moral character? According to the statement,

The abortion license is inextricably bound up with the mores of the sexual revolution. Promotion of the pro-life cause also requires us to support and work with those who are seeking to reestablish the moral linkage between sexual expression and marriage, and between marriage and procreation. We believe that a renewal of American democracy as a virtuous society requires us to honor and promote an ethic of self-command and mutual responsibility, and to resist the siren song of the false ethic of unbridled self-expression.

Liberal proponents of women’s rights have, in turn, countered this idea with a set of arguments about the real stakes in the argument over abortion. As Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York formulated it recently:

Abortion bans aren’t just about controlling women’s bodies.

They’re about controlling women’s sexuality. Owning women.

From limiting birth control to banning comprehensive sex ed, US religious fundamentalists are working hard to outlaw sex that falls outside their theology.

Robert Kurzban, a co-author of “The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind,” argued in an email that abortion opponents want to “impose a cost on those having sex without wanting to reproduce.”

The underlying rationale for this, Kurzban contended, is that people who are in long-term committed relationships are threatened by extramarital relationships and they in fact want to impose this cost on others.

On the opposite side, according to Kurzban, are those who want to control their reproduction carefully while still having sex, who stand to benefit from the availability of abortion and related services. They want to avoid this cost; abortion restrictions make their lifestyle more difficult.

Kurzban’s argument is based on the premise that “morality” — judgments about which acts are wrong and which are not — is best understood strategically, a means by which one can try to prevent others from doing things that are (often in aggregate) bad for oneself.

Put another way, “ideology is just the narrative used to sell the strategy that is in one’s interests.”

Sarah B. Hrdy, professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California-Davis and the author of “Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species,” wrote in reply to my inquiry that the issues touched on in the abortion debate run deep:

Nature provides myriad examples of species where males attempt to control who females mate with and when. Among primates, male coercion of females has evolved many times and is expressed in many different ways.

Over the course of human history, Hrdy continued, some of these ancient impulses have become enshrined in patriarchal ideologies. This helps explain why the most extreme efforts to curtail female reproductive autonomy today are primarily funded by groups linked to Catholic, Orthodox Jewish, Islamic and other belief systems with deep patriarchal roots.

If, as Hrdy argues, anti-abortion legislation is part of the male “attempt to control who females mate with and when,” why are roughly equal numbers of men and women opposed to abortion? Her answer:

From Ancient Greece, Ching dynasty China, Victorian England to the American South, the trick has been to convince women that conforming to patriarchal ideals, being chaste, or modest, veiling one’s face, whatever, are in her interests in terms of her security, marriageability, and especially in the interest of her children, particularly sons. When the social status of their families and especially that of their offspring, depends on their “virtue,” women have an obvious stake in complying as well as in advertising their compliance. Supporting the ‘right’ political candidates can be just one more way of doing that.

According to many of the scholars whose views I solicited, the sexual revolution and the simultaneous entry of women into the work force have prompted two conflicting reactions.

Martie Haselton, a professor of psychology at U.C.L.A., and David Pinsof, a graduate student there, together argue that “the debate boils down to attitudes about promiscuity.”

Picking up the same theme as Kurzban, Haselton and Pinsof found in their research, that

the people who are most likely to oppose abortion are those that 1) believe that abortion promotes promiscuity, and 2) pursue a more restrictive mating strategy. These results show that self-interest, when construed in evolutionary psychological terms, plays a powerful role in predicting people’s attitudes toward abortion.

In the case of “sexually conservative individuals,” they write, laws that would seem to permit or endorse promiscuity are a fundamental threat. For example, one could invest decades of effort in reproducing within a committed family structure to have it undermined by a single promiscuous interloper: Men could be deceived into investing in another man’s offspring; women could be abandoned with multiple children and limited resources.

David Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas, argues that “attitudes toward abortion are linked to a key issue: sexual morality.”

One constituency, which Buss described in an email as “politically conservative and high on religiosity,” adamantly “abhors short-term mating, casual sex, promiscuity, etc.” For this group, “moral condemnation of promiscuity in others has a long and deep history.”

These particular conservatives, in Buss’s view, see abortion and other ruptures with traditional sexual morality as a threat to their own commitment to a lifelong faithful marriage. According to Buss, they recognize that men become less willing to commit to one woman to the degree that there exist women in the mating pool who are willing to engage in casual sex with them. So allowing women to have abortions may be viewed by women and men alike as tantamount to endorsing a promiscuous mating strategy.

In his response to my inquiry, Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, focused primarily on why men would be particularly concerned about any practice that would increase the sexual autonomy of women:

Restricting abortion is an example of men’s restrictions on women’s reproductive capacity, which has taken many forms in various cultures and historical periods: chaperones, veils, wigs, burkas, niqabs, chadors, segregation by sex, confinement, foot-binding, genital mutilation, chastity belts, restrictions on birth control, double standards for adultery, violent sexual jealousy and laws and customs that make a woman the property of her husband.

The evolutionary explanation, Pinker wrote, “is straightforward. Humans are unusual among mammals in that men invest in their children, feeding, protecting, and teaching them.” As a result, a father who invests in his children will have more successful children, which favors any genes that tilt a man toward investing in his children. But of course that only works if they are his children. Evolutionarily speaking, cuckoldry is the worst thing that can happen to a man, because his investment would be wasted in protecting another man’s genes.

Men, in Pinker’s analysis, seek to control the sexuality, and more generally, the reproductive capacity, of their wives and girlfriends (and for that matter their unmarried daughters, preserving their value in the arranged marriage market). Contraception and abortion, even though they are modern inventions, may press these emotional buttons.

Pinker stressed that these calculations are not conscious: the actual thoughts and emotions running through people’s brains are not about babies, cuckoldry, genes, investment, or any of the concepts that enter into the ultimate, long-term, evolutionary explanation of people’s motives.

The men who are pressing to make abortion illegal, some of whom would ban contraception as well, are not only, as Pinker says, unaware of the evolutionary forces motivating them, they appear to be in many respects ignorant of the havoc they would create if they are successful in their efforts.

In a sign of the hypocrisy that surrounds this issue, this would be an inconvenience to many Southern Baptist preachers and church volunteers, 380 of whom have been “accused of sexual abuse and misconduct over the past 20 years,” according to investigations by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News.

Conservatives argue that abortion and contraception have undermined family, paternal responsibility and long-term commitment and that Abortion-on-demand has given an excuse to men who shirk their responsibilities, claiming that the child they helped to conceive ought to have been aborted, or that the woman who declined to abort may not impose on him any responsibility for her “lifestyle choice.”

In some respects, the conservative analysis has some truth to it. In a 2009 paper “Social Change: The Sexual Revolution,” Jeremy Greenwood and Nezih Guner, economists at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Barcelona, described “the rocket-like rise in premarital sex that occurred over the last century.”

Greenwood and Guner attribute this to the dramatic decline in the expected cost of premarital sex, due to technological improvement in contraceptives and their increased availability.

George Akerlof, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and Janet Yellen, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, who are married, write interestingly on this same subject in “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States.”

“This paper,” the authors write, relates the erosion of the custom of shotgun marriage to the legalization of abortion and the increased availability of contraception to unmarried women in the United States. The decline in shotgun marriage accounts for a significant fraction of the increase in out-of-wedlock first births.

The anti-abortion conservatives proclaim that their goal, as enunciated in the “Statement of Pro-life Principle,” I mentioned above, is an America that is open, hospitable, and caring, a community of civic friendship in which neighbors reach out to assist neighbors in distress.

A problem with conservative thinking on this issue is that once the sexual and women’s rights revolutions were unleashed, there was no way women (or men, for that matter) were going to peacefully relinquish the sexual and other freedoms they had gained.

Abortion and contraception also perform a crucial safety-net function, preventing the “rocket-like” increase in sexual activity from producing even more unwanted children. If the social conservative agenda were to win out, the most likely outcome would be a surge in unwanted children — along with the costs those children bear — according to David A Grimes, a former chief of the abortion surveillance branch at the Centers for Disease Control. The Turnaway Study at the University of California-San Francisco confirms the likelihood of this outcome: The numbers of hard-pressed single mothers would grow, and there would be a revival of the illegal abortion industry.

In effect, conservatives are trying to ban the reproductive practices that were crucial in enabling the sexual and women’s rights revolutions. What they would achieve instead is a world where these revolutions continued to dominate, but without the tools to limit the costs in unwed motherhood, absent fathers and the spread of female poverty.

This is hardly an America that is open, hospitable and caring.

 

[Howl]

 

[RosyDaisy]

Since she could not miscarry on her own, she was having some medical issue (can't remember what they were) so they gave her a choice of either having a D&C or take the abortion pill and have a miscarriage at home.

I didn't know that. I thought she was given the choice to see if she could miscarry naturally first or have a D&C. Yeah, that's very hypocritical.

[smittykins]

I’m sure she justified it with “Since the baby is already gone, it’s not really an abortion.”

Edited May 30, 2019 by smittykins

[GreyhoundFan]

I wonder if Mother attended the meeting: "Canada’s Trudeau to raise U.S. crackdown on abortion with Pence"

Spoiler

Vice President Pence is scheduled to land in Ottawa on Thursday to talk up the renegotiated North American trade deal. But he might be in for a talking-to on access to abortion — at least according to his host, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

Trudeau said Wednesday that he plans to raise Canadian concerns about recent U.S. moves to curb access to abortion, and to address “backsliding” on women’s rights from conservative groups around the world, when he meets the vice president Thursday.

“Obviously, I am very concerned with the backsliding of women’s rights we are seeing from conservative movements here in Canada, in the United States and around the world,” Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa. “I will have a broad conversation with the vice president, in which that will of course come up, but we are mostly going to focus on the ratification process of NAFTA and making sure we get good jobs for Canadians.”

Pence is a staunch opponent of abortion. A spokeswoman for the vice president did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trudeau’s remarks could dampen what the White House billed as an upbeat trip focused on Trump administration priorities such as trade and growth. They also provide a glimpse of the growing political distance between the Trump administration and the Trudeau government.

The United States and Canada remain close allies with tightly integrated economies, but the last few years have been tough on the relationship.

President Trump, who was elected in part on promises to rewrite the rules of global trade, has repeatedly accused Canada of taking advantage of the United States. 

Last year, amid tense negotiations over the future of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the U.S. president shocked Ottawa by levying tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, citing national security concerns.

Then, after attending a contentious Group of Seven meeting in Quebec, Trump tweeted insults at Trudeau from his plane — an unusual display that many Canadians took personally.

After the United States, Mexico and Canada reached a tentative deal for the aptly, if awkwardly, named United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Canadians expected Trump to lift the tariffs. He did not.

It was not until this month that the three countries reached a deal on steel and aluminum, providing a happy news peg for Pence’s trip and — all sides seem to hope — paving the way for the deal’s ratification. 

Against this backdrop, the promise of a discussion on abortion adds an unknown element to the mix.

Abortion is mostly treated as a medical, not political, question in mainstream Canadian politics. But Trudeau and the journalists who pressed him on it are well aware of the significance of the issue to an American conservative such as Pence.

The question now is how Trudeau will raise the issue, and how Pence will respond.