Gilead is Real - The War on Women and Abortion Part 3

[Howl]

Josh Hawley's wife argued the mifepristone case in front of Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.

Just want to note that this strategy is the tip of the iceberg.  They really do want to go after outlawing birth control ultimately.

The ONLY good to come from this is it will politically fire up younger people, especially younger women, who will finally get out and vote for women's reproductive rights. 

 

 

[Ozlsn]

Two women with PPROM pre-viability, one nearly died.

It just shocks me so much that no care was able to be given until the risk was so high. Both in Florida.

l hadn't even considered how relatively common complications like PPROM could come under this legislation. It's appalling.

[Dandruff]

On 4/9/2023 at 2:48 PM, Howl said:

The ONLY good to come from this is it will politically fire up younger people, especially younger women, who will finally get out and vote for women's reproductive rights.

I hope younger people choose to avoid living/working in states that are removing abortion rights and access, though that would also remove their ability to vote there.  Still, if enough young people refuse to attend college or join the labor forces in those states perhaps companies would leave and tax revenues would drop accordingly.  Might take a couple of years but the effects could be potent.

[GreyhoundFan]

I’m sure DerSantis will have a huge ceremony to sign this horrible law. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Supreme Court temporarily restores full access to key abortion medication"

Quote

The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily restored full access to a key abortion medication, putting on hold a lower court’s decision suspending government approval of the pill used in more than half of all abortions in the United States.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. granted the government’s request for a stay until Wednesday, and asked for additional briefing by next Tuesday.

The government and drug manufacturer Danco Laboratories urged the court not to second-guess the expertise of the Food and Drug Administration, which relied on data from dozens of clinical trials when it approved mifepristone more than 20 years ago. Leaving the ruling in place, they said, will create confusion and uncertainty for abortion providers and have devastating consequences for the pharmaceutical industry’s ability to bring new drugs to market.

“If allowed to take effect, the lower courts’ orders would thwart FDA’s scientific judgment and undermine widespread reliance in a healthcare system that assumes the availability of mifepristone as an alternative to more burdensome and invasive surgical abortions,” Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar told the court in the government’s filing. “Those harms would be felt throughout the Nation because mifepristone has lawful uses in every State -- even those with restrictive abortion laws.”

Justice Department lawyers and the drug company asked the justices to temporarily block the decision last week from a federal judge in Texas who suspended approval of the drug. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit on Wednesday refused to undo FDA approval of mifepristone for now, but reinstated limits on how patients obtain the drug and how late into pregnancy it can be used.

Those restrictions will take effect at 1 a.m. Saturday, the government said, if the court does not immediately put the ruling on hold while litigation continues. Prelogar said the Supreme Court could also quickly schedule full briefing and oral argument to review the case before the court’s summer recess.

Erin Hawley, senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative group behind the lawsuit, said in a statement Friday that the FDA “illegally approved chemical abortion drugs and has evaded its legal responsibility to answer the American people’s questions for two decades. The 5th Circuit rightly required the agency to prioritize women’s health by restoring critical safeguards, and we’ll urge the Supreme Court to keep that accountability in place.”

The 5th Circuit’s order is directly at odds with a separate ruling from a federal judge in Washington state who directed the FDA not to make any changes to the availibility of mifepristone in 17 states and the District of Columbia, whose officials filed suit there. By contrast, the 5th Circuit panel reinstated restrictions prohibiting mailing of the drug directly to patients and rolls back the period of time in which it can be used from 10 weeks of pregnancy to seven weeks.

Prelogar’s petition said both the Texas judge and the 5th Circuit countermand FDA’s scientific judgment and unleash “regulatory chaos.”

“In 2000, FDA approved mifepristone for termination of early pregnancy based on the agency’s expert judgment that the drug is safe and effective,” she wrote. “FDA has maintained that scientific judgment across five presidential administrations, and it has modified the original conditions of mifepristone’s approval as decades of experience have conclusively demonstrated the drug’s safety.”

She noted: "Public health authorities around the world have likewise approved mifepristone, and the World Health Organization has included it on a list of ‘Essential Medicines.’ ”

She said the court of appeals judges “badly misread” documents about its safety and said the number that might require emergency care is “extremely low.”

Moreover, Prelogar wrote, " As of June 2022, only 28 deaths had been reported among the more than 5 million women who have taken mifepristone, and some of them had obvious alternative causes -- including homicide, drug overdose, and other factors entirely unrelated to mifepristone."

She said the group of anti-abortion doctors who challenged the FDA’s approval of mifepristone in U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s court should never have been granted legal standing, because their interests are not implicated.

“They neither take nor prescribe mifepristone, and FDA’s approval of the drug does not require them to do or refrain from doing anything,” Prelogar wrote. “Yet the Fifth Circuit held that the associations have standing because some of their members might be asked to treat women who are prescribed mifepristone by other providers and who then suffer an exceedingly rare adverse event. This Court has squarely rejected that statistical approach.”

The emergency requests filed Friday return the issue of abortion to the Supreme Court less than a year after the justice’s landmark decision that overturned the guarantee of abortion rights provided in Roe v. Wade, in a case with both short- and long-term consequences for nationwide availability of the procedure.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court’s majority said, was an attempt to “heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote that the goal was to remove the courts from the controversial issue.

“After today’s decision, the nine Members of this Court will no longer decide the basic legality of pre-viability abortion for all 330 million Americans,” Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion. “That issue will be resolved by the people and their representatives in the democratic process in the States or Congress.”

But the new challenge calls into question just that — the availability of abortion nationwide, as well as the authority of a government agency to decide on the safety and use of certain drugs.

In its filing Friday, the drug manufacturer noted that the court in Dobbs announced it was “returning the issue of abortion to the political branches. If the Court denies a stay, it abandons that assurance. Allowing the Fifth Circuit’s opinion to stand eviscerates the sovereign authority of States that wish to expand and protect access to medication abortion in their jurisdictions,” wrote Jessica Ellsworth, the lead attorney for Danco.

Kavanaugh could be key to the court’s deliberations, as could Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

Roberts was not among the court’s conservatives who voted to overturn Roe. In the Dobbs decision, he wrote that he was reluctant to deny a woman a “reasonable opportunity to choose” whether to end her pregnancy. Colleagues to his left and right, he wrote, “display a relentless freedom from doubt on the legal issue that I cannot share.”

Dobbs concerned constitutional questions, but the court now returns to a statutory issue that has divided it before along familiar ideological lines — when to defer to the FDA’s expertise on the safe use of mifepristone.

The court’s consideration of the issue several years ago was with a different backdrop — the then-constitutional right to abortion — and with the FDA at the time opposing efforts to ease access to the drug.

In 2020, during the pandemic, U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang of Maryland lifted the FDA requirement that a patient travel to a doctor’s office to receive mifepristone. He said that travel restrictions during the pandemic put a burden on those seeking the medication and that experience had shown the visits were unneccessary to safely prescribe the drug.

The Trump administration strongly objected. After a long delay, the court declined to undo Chuang’s order immediately.

That brought a strong dissent from Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas. “If the FDA is right in its assessment” that mifepristone should be picked up in a doctor’s office even if ingested by the patient at home — which was the FDA’s position at the time — “non-enforcement of the requirement risks irreparable harm.”

And Alito was critical of Chuang. “A District Court Judge in Maryland took it upon himself to overrule the FDA on a question of drug safety,” Alito wrote, saying Chuang disregarded the court’s guidance against “second-guessing of officials with public health responsibilities.”

In the closing days of the Trump administration, the government went back to the Supreme Court, and the justices reimposed the requirement.

Roberts wrote that he was deferring to the expertise of the government agency, as he had in other decisions about pandemic restrictions.

“The question before us is not whether the requirements for dispensing mifepristone impose an undue burden on a woman’s right to an abortion as a general matter,” Roberts wrote.

“The question is instead whether the District Court properly ordered the Food and Drug Administration to lift those established requirements because of the court’s own evaluation of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. I do not see a sufficient basis here for the District Court to compel the FDA to alter the regimen for medical abortion,” he wrote.

Liberal justices objected. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan said the court was allowing the FDA to impose unfair restrictions.

“Of the over 20,000 FDA-approved drugs, mifepristone is the only one that the FDA requires to be picked up in person for patients to take at home,” Sotomayor wrote. She said the years of experience in women taking the drug early in pregnancy had shown its safety.

But the FDA restrictions, she said, were part of a pattern. “This country’s laws have long singled out abortions for more onerous treatment than other medical procedures that carry similar or greater risks.”

Now, the FDA, under the Biden administration, has done away with the requirement that patients pick up the drug from a doctor’s office or clinic and allows health professionals besides doctors to prescribe it.

And now it is conservative judges who say the FDA has not demonstrated that it properly considered the safety concerns in implementing its new regulations.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The cruelty is always the point. 

[Ozlsn]

I just saw this too... I am utterly appalled by this.

[Xan]

Do you get a receipt from the police or do you just ask your rapist for one?  

[GreyhoundFan]

Foghorn Leghorn is a jerk. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

CW: incest

Spoiler

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

You couldn’t make this up. 

 

Full text:

[GreyhoundFan]

[Becky]

9 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I am so proud of those women!

[Coconut Flan]

It's about time:

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3981821-two-hospitals-may-have-violated-federal-law-in-denying-woman-an-emergency-abortion-hhs-says/

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

How horrible:

 

[libgirl2]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

How horrible:

 

I would have sat in the lobby right by the front door on the floor and bled all over the place. 

[CTRLZero]

2 hours ago, libgirl2 said:

I would have sat in the lobby right by the front door on the floor and bled all over the place. 

Or the state legislature, since apparently now politicians are medical experts.  

[47of74]

Then this happened recently.

Quote

The FBI is now offering a $15,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest for the vandalization of a Des Moines pregnancy resource center that happened last year.

Agape Pregnancy Resource Center, located at 2550 Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway, provides reproductive healthcare services to women.

The building and an associated building, at 2222 Bennett Avenue, were vandalized on June 3, 2022.

The vandals broke windows and spray-painted graffiti. The next day, the same resource center was vandalized again. Some of the graffiti included the words “FAKE CLINIC” and “Not a safe place.”

I tested negative for fucking sympathy towards this "pregnancy center."  At the same time though I do have some concerns this isn't gonna do our side all that much good and drum up support for the reich to lifers.

[GreyhoundFan]

[Ozlsn]

Hang on. "Carries the risk of stillbirth" =/= "life-limiting abnormalities with variable lengths of life".  That makes literally no sense at all.

Amniocentesis carries a risk of still birth as well as a risk of injuring the infant but those are two risks, one of which may lead to the other (or not). I am really not sure what the North Carolina legislation says but the way it's described there is nonsensical.

On 5/6/2023 at 5:04 AM, libgirl2 said:

I would have sat in the lobby right by the front door on the floor and bled all over the place. 

I am actually surprised that she wasn't admitted - monitoring her would seem to be a reasonable course of action?

As to the woman who carried to term and had her baby die in her arms... the pro-life crowd really don't factor in a lot of things including mental and physical health of the mother and pain and suffering of the infant. There are a few syndromes out there that are my absolute nightmare because the baby is in constant pain, including in utereo. Pain and suffering are not a glorious sacrifice to God, no matter how much some people (who are not doing the suffering) seem to think they are.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is already starting:

More:

Spoiler

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I’m sure the rethuglikan supermajority will overturn the veto:

[GreyhoundFan]

"Three states are still working to pass abortion bans this spring"

Quote

Many state legislative sessions are wrapping up across the country, but three conservative-leaning states are set to again consider measures to significantly narrow the window for legal abortions. 

They’re the final abortion battles in the spring legislative season – the first to take place since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in June, opening the door for states to ban abortion earlier than viability.

In North Carolina and Nebraska, Republicans are pursuing a 12-week abortion ban — the first restrictions since the fall of Roe v. Wade that don’t outlaw all or most abortions. And in South Carolina, a fight is brewing over a limit on most abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected, named “heartbeat” bills. 

North Carolina

Over the weekend, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed the state’s newly passed 12-week abortion ban at a rally with abortion rights supporters in Raleigh. The move sets up a showdown with the Republican-controlled legislature, which holds veto-proof supermajorities in both chambers.

But in the House, that supermajority is narrow. Cooper has been seeking to peel away GOP votes over the past week, specifically calling out four Republicans who he argues have previously indicated opposition to stricter abortion limits.

• Meanwhile, top Republican leaders in both the state House and Senate promised swift action to override the veto, though they didn’t lay out an exact timeline for a vote. North Carolina Senate leader Phil Berger accused the governor of spending the last week “bullying members of the General Assembly,” adding in a statement that he “look[s] forward to promptly overriding [Cooper’s] veto.”

North Carolina currently allows abortions up until 20 weeks of pregnancy, and the state has seen one of the largest post-Roe spikes in abortion since the Supreme Court’s decision. 

How we got here: North Carolina Republicans passed legislation earlier this month to ban most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, which is coupled with tens of millions of dollars in funding for child care, foster care and paid family leave. GOP lawmakers have sought to portray the measure as “mainstream,” and say the bill could serve as an alternative to strict abortion bans in other parts of the country. Over 93 percent of abortions were performed by 13 weeks in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But Cooper and abortion rights advocates have pushed back against this framing. They’ve particularly pointed to provisions of the bill that could make it harder for patients to get an abortion, such as requiring an in-person visit with a doctor 72 hours before the procedure. 

More from Cooper:

Nebraska

Tuesday will be a big day for Republican efforts to restrict abortion in this state. 

The one-chamber legislature is slated to take up a ban on most abortions at 12 weeks gestation — a debate that will come as part of a controversial bill to restrict gender transition-related care for youth.

How we got here: In late April, a “heartbeat” ban fizzled in Nebraska. The opposition came from state Sen. Merv Riepe — a longtime Republican in the technically nonpartisan chamber — who abstained from voting over concerns the measure wouldn’t give women enough time to know they are pregnant. Abortion is legal in the state until 22 weeks of pregnancy. 

• His resistance surprised antiabortion advocates in the state, who called it a “shocking betrayal,” and ignited furious conversations over the path forward.
• Those discussions culminated in an amendment introduced last week by state Sen. Ben Hansen, the chair of Nebraska’s health committee. His measure includes a 12-week ban on most abortions as well as changes to the bill limiting gender-affirming care for youth. 

Hansen’s effort is slated to go before the full chamber on Tuesday. The amendment will need 33 votes to move forward, and if adopted, the final vote on the gender transition care bill won’t occur on Tuesday, the speaker’s office wrote in an email. 

What to watch: All eyes will be on Riepe. The senator wanted the legislature to get behind a 12-week ban, but the proposal he’d originally pitched would bar most abortions 12 weeks after an egg is fertilized, which is a longer window than the 12-week gestational limit under consideration, which is measured by the first day of the woman’s last menstrual period.

South Carolina

The legislative season was supposed to be over in South Carolina last week.

But on Friday, Republican Gov. Henry McMaster ordered lawmakers back into session to complete unfinished work, including on legislation restricting abortions. Abortion is allowed in the state up to 22 weeks of pregnancy, and the state Supreme Court has already struck down a 2021 law prohibiting the procedure at around six weeks.

How we got here: The two GOP-controlled chambers in the legislature have been unable to agree, as of yet, on abortion limits. The House passed a near-total abortion ban, but the measure failed in the Senate in part due to opposition from the chamber’s five female lawmakers. 

Yet, in February, the South Carolina Senate passed legislation prohibiting most abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected. That’s the legislation the House is slated to take up soon. 

It’s unclear whether that bill would pass the Senate again. A House committee made some changes, and several of the senators who rebuffed the near-total abortion ban now appear opposed, per the Associated Press. In an interview with The Health 202, Republican state Sen. Katrina Shealy vowed a filibuster to prevent the measure from passing if it’s sent back to the Senate. 

More from McMaster: