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

[Xan]

Oh, sure, Mike.  2/3 of the country is against making abortion illegal and you're polling at what?  2%?  3%?  That's gonna really pull them in, huh?

[fraurosena]

This is a long, and devastatingly sad read.

She Wasn't Able to Get an Abortion. Now She's a Mom. Soon She'll Start 7th Grade.

Quote

Ashley just had a baby. She’s sitting on the couch in a relative’s apartment in Clarksdale, Miss., wearing camo-print leggings and fiddling with the plastic hospital bracelets still on her wrists. It’s August and pushing 90 degrees, which means the brown patterned curtains are drawn, the air conditioner is on high, and the room feels like a hiding place. Peanut, the baby boy she delivered two days earlier, is asleep in a car seat at her feet, dressed in a little blue outfit. Ashley is surrounded by family, but nobody is smiling. One relative silently eats lunch in the kitchen, her two siblings stare glumly at their phones, and her mother, Regina, watches from across the room. Ashley was discharged from the hospital only hours ago, but there are no baby presents or toys in the room, no visible diapers or ointments or bottles. Almost nobody knows that Peanut exists, because almost nobody knew that Ashley was pregnant. She is 13 years old. Soon she’ll start seventh grade.

In the fall of 2022, Ashley was raped by a stranger in the yard outside her home, her mother says. For weeks, she didn’t tell anybody what happened, not even her mom. But Regina knew something was wrong. Ashley used to love going outside to make dances for her TikTok, but suddenly she refused to leave her bedroom. When she turned 13 that November, she wasn't in the mood to celebrate. “She just said, ‘It hurts,’” Regina remembers. “She was crying in her room. I asked her what was wrong, and she said she didn’t want to tell me.” (To protect the privacy of a juvenile rape survivor, TIME is using pseudonyms to refer to Ashley and Regina; Peanut is the baby’s nickname.)

The signs were obvious only in retrospect. Ashley started feeling sick to her stomach; Regina thought it was related to her diet. At one point, Regina even asked Ashley if she was pregnant, and Ashley said nothing. Regina hadn’t yet explained to her daughter how a baby is made, because she didn’t think Ashley was old enough to understand. “They need to be kids,” Regina says. She doesn’t think Ashley even realized that what happened to her could lead to a pregnancy.

On Jan. 11, Ashley began throwing up so much that Regina took her to the emergency room at Northwest Regional Medical Center in Clarksdale. When her bloodwork came back, the hospital called the police. One nurse came in and asked Ashley, “What have you been doing?” Regina recalls. That’s when they found out Ashley was pregnant. “I broke down,” Regina says.

Dr. Erica Balthrop was the ob-gyn on call that day. Balthrop is an assured, muscular woman with close-cropped cornrows and a tattoo of a feather running down her arm. She ordered an ultrasound, and determined Ashley was 10 or 11 weeks along. “It was surreal for her,” Balthrop recalls. "She just had no clue.” The doctor could not get Ashley to answer any questions, or to speak at all. “She would not open her mouth.” (Balthrop spoke about her patient's medical history with Regina's permission.)

At their second visit, about a week later, Regina tentatively asked Balthrop if there was any way to terminate Ashley’s pregnancy. Seven months earlier, Balthrop could have directed Ashley to abortion clinics in Memphis, 90 minutes north, or in Jackson, Miss., two and a half hours south. But today, Ashley lives in the heart of abortion-ban America. In 2018, Republican lawmakers in Mississippi enacted a ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The law was blocked by a federal judge, who ruled that it violated the abortion protections guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court felt differently. In their June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion that had existed for nearly half a century. Within weeks, Mississippi and every state that borders it banned abortion in almost all circumstances.

Balthrop told Regina that the closest abortion provider for Ashley would be in Chicago. At first, Regina thought she and Ashley could drive there. But it’s a nine-hour trip, and Regina would have to take off work. She’d have to pay for gas, food, and a place to stay for a couple of nights, not to mention the cost of the abortion itself. “I don’t have the funds for all this,” she says.

So Ashley did what girls with no other options do: she did nothing.

Clarksdale is in the Mississippi Delta, a vast stretch of flat, fertile land in the northwest corner of the state, between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. The people who live in the Delta are overwhelmingly Black. The poverty rate is high. The region is an epicenter of America’s ongoing Black maternal-health crisis. Mississippi has the second-highest maternal-mortality rate in the country, with 43 deaths per 100,00 live births, and the Delta has among the worst maternal-healthcare outcomes in the state. Black women in Mississippi are four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as white women.

Mississippi’s abortion ban is expected to result in thousands of additional births, often to low-income, high-risk mothers. Dr. Daniel Edney, Mississippi’s top health official, tells TIME his department is “actively preparing” for roughly 4,000 additional live births this year alone. Edney says improving maternal-health outcomes is the “No. 1 priority” for the Mississippi health department, which has invested $2 million into its Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies program to provide extra support for new mothers. “There is a sense of following through, and not just as a predominantly pro-life state,” says Edney. “We don’t just care about life in utero. We care about life, period, and that includes the mother’s life and the baby’s life.”

Mississippi’s abortion ban contains narrow exceptions, including for rape victims and to save the life of the mother. As Ashley's case shows, these exceptions are largely theoretical. Even if a victim files a police report, there appears to be no clear process for granting an exception. (The state Attorney General’s office did not return TIME’s repeated requests to clarify the process for granting exceptions; the Mississippi Board of Medical Licensure and the Mississippi State Medical Association did not reply to TIME’s requests for explanation.) And, of course, there are no abortion providers left in the state. In January, the New York Times reported that since Mississippi's abortion law went into effect, only two exceptions had been made. Even if the process for obtaining one were clear, it wouldn’t have helped Ashley. Regina didn’t know that Mississippi’s abortion ban had an exception for rape.

Even before Dobbs, it was perilous to become a mother in rural Mississippi. More than half the counties in the state can be classified as maternity-care deserts, according to a 2023 report from the March of Dimes, meaning there are no birthing facilities or obstetric providers. More than 24% of women in Mississippi have no birthing hospital within a 30-minute drive, compared to the national average of roughly 10%. According to Edney, there are just nine ob-gyns serving a region larger than the state of Delaware. Every time another ob-gyn retires, Balthrop gets an influx of new patients. “These patients are having to drive further to get the same care, then they're having to wait longer,” Balthrop says.

Those backups can have cascading effects. Balthrop recalls one woman who had to wait four weeks to get an appointment. "That’s unacceptable, because you don't know if she’s high risk or not until she sees you," the doctor says says. Her patient "didn’t know she was pregnant. Now the time has lapsed so much that she can’t drive anyplace to terminate even if she chose to."

Early data suggests the Dobbs decision will make this problem worse. Younger doctors and medical students say they don't want to move to states with abortion restrictions. When Emory University researcher Ariana Traub surveyed almost 500 third- and fourth-year medical students in 2022, close to 80% said that abortion laws influenced where they planned to apply to residency. Nearly 60% said they were unlikely to apply to any residency programs in states with abortion restrictions. Traub had assumed that abortion would be most important to students studying obstetrics, but was surprised to find that three-quarters of students across all medical specialties said that Dobbs was affecting their residency decisions.

“People often forget that doctors are people and patients too,” Traub says. “And residency is often the time when people are in their mid-30s and thinking of starting a family.” Traub found that medical students weren’t just reluctant to practice in states with abortion bans. They didn’t want to become pregnant there, either.

And so Dobbs has compounded America's maternal-health crisis: more women are delivering more babies, in areas where there are already not enough doctors to care for them, while abortion bans are making it more difficult to recruit qualified providers to the regions that need them most. “People always ask me: ‘Why do you choose to stay there?’” says Balthrop, who has worked in the Delta for more than 20 years. “I feel like I have no choice at this point."

The weeks went on, and Ashley entered her second trimester. She wore bigger clothes to hide her bump, until she was so big that Regina took her out of school. They told everyone Ashley needed surgery for a bad ulcer. “We’ve been keeping it quiet, because people judge wrong when they don’t know what’s going on,” Regina says. She’s been trying to keep Ashley away from “nosy people.” For months, Ashley spent most of the day alone, finishing up sixth grade on her laptop. The family still has no plans to tell anybody about the pregnancy. “It’s going to be a little private matter here,” Regina says.

Ashley has ADHD and trouble focusing, and has an Individualized Education Program at school. She had never talked much, but after the rape she went from shy to almost mute. Regina thinks she may have been too traumatized to speak. At first, Regina couldn’t even get Ashley to tell her about the rape at all.

In an interview in a side bedroom, while Ashley watched TV with Peanut in another room, Regina recounted the details of her daughter’s sexual assault, as she understands them. It was a weekend in the fall, shortly after lunchtime, and Ashley, then 12, had been outside their home making TikToks while her uncle and sibling were inside. A man came down the street and into the front yard, grabbed Ashley, and covered her mouth, Regina says. He pulled her around to the side of the house and raped her. Ashley told Regina that her assailant was an adult, and that she didn’t know him. Nobody else witnessed the assault.

Shortly after finding out Ashley was pregnant, Regina filed a complaint with the Clarksdale Police Department. The department's assistant chief of police, Vincent Ramirez, confirmed to TIME that a police report had been filed in the matter, but refused to share the document because it involved a minor.

Regina says that another family member believed they had identified the rapist through social-media sleuthing. The family says they flagged the man they suspected to the police, but the investigation seemed to go nowhere. Ramirez declined to comment on an ongoing investigation, but an investigator in the department confirmed to TIME that an arrest has not yet been made. With their investigation still incomplete, police have not yet publicly confirmed that they believe Ashley’s pregnancy resulted from sexual assault.

Regina felt the police weren’t taking the case seriously. She says she was told that in order to move the investigation forward, the police needed DNA from the baby after its birth. Experts say this is not unusual. Although it is technically possible to obtain DNA from a fetus, police are often reluctant to initiate an invasive procedure on a pregnant victim, says Phillip Danielson, a professor of forensic genetics at the University of Denver. They typically test DNA only on fetal remains after an abortion, or after a baby is born, he says.

But almost three days after Peanut was born, the police still hadn’t picked up the DNA sample; it was only after inquiries from TIME that officers finally arrived to collect it. Asked at the Clarksdale police station why it had taken so long after Peanut's birth for crucial evidence to be collected, Ramirez shrugged. “It’s a pretty high priority, as a juvenile,” he says. “Sometimes they slip a little bit because we’ve got a lot going on, but then they come back to it.”

Ashley doesn’t say much when asked how it felt to learn she was pregnant. Her mouth twists into a shy grimace, and she looks away. “Not good,” she says after a long pause. “Not happy.”

Regina’s own feelings about abortion became more complicated as the pregnancy progressed. She got pregnant with her first daughter at 17, and was a mother at 18. “I was a teen,” says Regina, now 33. “But I wasn’t as young as her.”

Regina had considered abortion during one of her own pregnancies. But her grandmother admonished her, “Your mama didn’t abort you.” Now Regina felt caught between her family’s general disapproval of abortion and the realization that her 13-year-old daughter was pregnant as the result of a rape. “I wish she had just told me when it happened. We could have gotten Plan B or something,” Regina says, referring to the emergency contraceptive often known as the “morning-after pill.” “That would have been that.”

Balthrop often sees this kind of ambivalence. Clarksdale is in the heart of the Bible Belt, and many of her patients are Black women from religious families. Even if they want to terminate their pregnancies, Balthrop says, many of them ultimately decide not to go through with it. Since the Dobbs decision, however, Balthrop has seen an increase in “incomplete abortions,” which is when the pregnancy has been terminated but the uterus hasn’t been fully emptied. Medication abortions— abortions managed with pills, which are increasingly available online—are overwhelmingly safe, but occasionally can have minor complications when the pills are not taken exactly as directed. “They're having complications after—not serious, but they'll come in with significant bleeding, and then we still have to finish the process,” Balthrop says, explaining that they sometimes have to evacuate dead fetal tissue.

According to Balthrop, Ashley didn’t have complications during her pregnancy. But she didn’t start speaking more until she felt the baby move, around her sixth month. “That’s when it hit home,” Balthrop says. “She’d complain about little aches and pains that she had never had before. That’s when her mom would come in and say, ‘She asked me this question,’ and the three of us would sit and talk about it.”

How did Ashley feel in anticipation of becoming a mother? “Nervous,” is all she will say. Toward the end of the pregnancy, she was terrified of going into labor, Balthrop recalls. Most of her questions were about pushing, and delivery, and how painful it would be. She was focused on “the delivery process itself,” Balthrop says. “Not, ‘What am I going to do when I take this baby home?’”

The Clarksdale Woman’s Clinic, where Balthrop practices, is across the street from the emergency room at Northwest Regional Medical Center, where Ashley first learned she was pregnant. The clinic is large and welcoming, with comfortable chairs and paintings of flowers on the walls. The staff is kind and efficient, the space is clean, and it helps that the three ob-gyns on staff are Black, since most of the patients are Black women. The clinic’s strong reputation attracts patients from an hour away in all directions. It is a lifeline in a vast region with few other maternity health options.

Even for healthy patients, it can be dangerous to be pregnant in such a rural area. “We have patients who walk to our clinic. They don't have transportation,” says Casey Shoun, an administrative assistant at Clarksdale Woman’s. Some can get Medicaid transportation, but it’s notoriously unreliable. The trip can be hard even for local residents: the roads leading to the clinic don’t have good sidewalks, and temperatures in the Delta regularly reach 100 degrees in the summer.

Shoun says the clinic gets patients who are six months pregnant by the time they have their first prenatal appointment. “We've had patients who go to the hospital, and they've already delivered,” Shoun says. Balthrop recalls one woman who went into labor about seven weeks early, and had to drive 45 minutes to get to the hospital. She was too late. “By the time she got here, the baby had passed already,” Balthrop says.

Clarksdale Woman's is equipped to handle routine appointments for a healthy pregnancy like Ashley’s. But a pregnant woman with any complication at all—from deep-vein thrombosis to diabetes, preeclampsia to advanced maternal age—will have to make a three-hour round trip drive to Memphis to see the closest maternal-fetal-medicine specialist. The most vulnerable patients are often the ones who have to travel the farthest for pregnancy care.

One morning in August, as the clinic filled, Balthrop allowed TIME to interview consenting patients in the waiting room and parking lot. One of them was Mikashia Hardiman, who is 18 years old and pregnant with her first child. Hardiman had just had her 20-week anatomy scan, and learned that she has a shortened cervix, which means her mother now has to drive her to Memphis to see a specialist.

Jessica Ray, 36, was 13 weeks pregnant with her third child. Three years ago, when she suddenly went into labor with her second child at 33 weeks, she drove herself 45 minutes to the hospital and delivered less than half an hour after she arrived. Ray knows the travel ordeals ahead of her: because she had preeclampsia with her first two pregnancies, she’ll have to go see the specialist in Memphis each month. “You have to take off work and make sure somebody's getting your kids,” Ray says.

Balthrop, who has three kids of her own, has long considered moving to a different region with a better education system. "I feel like I can’t," she says. "I would be letting so many people down."

But the clinic is under serious financial strain. Between overhead, malpractice insurance, the increasing costs of goods and services, and decreasing insurance reimbursements, Balthrop and her colleagues can barely afford to keep Clarksdale Woman's open. They’re considering selling the practice to a hospital 30 miles away. If that happened, Balthrop says, babies would no longer be delivered in Clarksdale, a city of less than 15,000. Some of her patients would have to leave the Delta—possibly driving an hour or more—to get even the most basic maternity care.

For the patients who already struggle to make it to Clarksdale, that would spell disaster. "They just wouldn't get care until they show up for delivery at the hospital,” says Shoun, the administrative assistant. “Imagine if we weren't here. Where would they go?"

Ashley started feeling contractions on a Saturday afternoon when she was 39 weeks pregnant. She called Regina, who came home from work, and together they started timing them. They arrived at the hospital around 8 p.m. that night. An exam revealed Ashley was already six centimeters dilated. Her water broke soon after, and she got an epidural. She delivered Peanut within five hours. Ashley describes the birth in one word: “Painful.”

For Regina, the arrival of her first grandchild has not eased the pain of watching what her daughter has endured. “This situation hurts the most because it was an innocent child doing what children do, playing outside, and it was my child,” Regina says. “It still hurts, and is going to always hurt.”

Ashley doesn’t know anybody else who has a baby. She doesn’t want her three friends at school to find out that she has one now. Regina is working on an arrangement with the school so Ashley can start seventh grade from home until she’s ready to go back in person. Relatives will watch Peanut while Regina is at work. Is there anything about motherhood that Ashley is excited about? She twists her mouth, shrugs, and says nothing. Is there anything Ashley wants to say to other girls? “Be careful when you go outside,” she says. “And stay safe.”

There is only one moment when Ashley smiles a little, and it’s when she describes the nurses she met in the doctors’ office and delivery room. One of them, she remembers, was “nice” and “cool.” She has decided that when she grows up, she wants to be a nurse too. “To help people,” she says. For a second, she looks like any other soon-to-be seventh grader sharing her childhood dream. Then Peanut stirs in his car seat. Regina says he needs to be fed. Ashley’s face goes blank again. She is a mother now.

 

[Audrey2]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

This is a long, and devastatingly sad read.

She Wasn't Able to Get an Abortion. Now She's a Mom. Soon She'll Start 7th Grade.

 

This makes me livid! I have subbed quite extensively in Middle schools and I am beyond livid at the number of ways this young lady was failed. The response of the nurse in the emergency room is beyond words.

[Smash!]

@fraurosena Fuck those fuckers! This is not about life or babies, it’s about control of women. No, this is about their view of women: Only white men are human and deserve a life of dignity. Women are second class citizens at best, here to serve the men and birth their babies. They can be assaulted and raped without consequences because a man felt the urge to do so. Or are they just slaves whose life is disposable?

Yeah I believe the GOP sees women as mere slaves.

/sarcasm

[GreyhoundFan]

Sigh. "Appeals court embraces abortion-pill limits, sets up Supreme Court review"

Quote

A federal appeals court said Wednesday that it would restrict access to a widely used abortion medication after finding that the federal government did not follow the proper process when it loosened regulations in 2016 to make the pill more easily available.

Food and Drug Administration decisions to allow the drug mifepristone to be taken later in pregnancy, be mailed directly to patients and be prescribed by a medical professional other than a doctor were not lawful, a three-judge panel of the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit said.

Mifepristone will remain available for now under existing regulations while the litigation continues, in accordance with a Supreme Court ruling this spring. Wednesday’s decision, which only partially upheld a lower-court judge’s ruling in favor of a coalition of anti-abortion challengers, can be appealed to the Supreme Court.

If the appeals court ruling eventually takes effect, the abortion pill would still be available in the United States, but it would be more difficult for patients to get it.

“In loosening mifepristone’s safety restrictions, FDA failed to address several important concerns about whether the drug would be safe for the women who use it,” Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote in Wednesday’s opinion. “It failed to consider the cumulative effect of removing several important safeguards at the same time.”

Mifepristone is part of a two-drug regimen used in more than half of U.S. abortions and first approved for use in this country more than 20 years ago. The legal battle over the medication has intensified since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade’s grant of a constitutional right to abortion in June 2022, a decision that spurred multiple states to further limit or ban the procedure.

The challenge to mifepristone was brought by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, an association of antiabortion doctors and others. The group asserted that the FDA did not sufficiently consider safety concerns when it approved the drug in 2000 or when it removed some restrictions years later — extending the approved use of mifepristone, for instance, through 10 weeks of pregnancy instead of seven.

The challengers had argued that the abortion pill should never have been approved and should be removed entirely from the market. They filed their lawsuit in Amarillo, Tex., where U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk — a Trump nominee with long-held antiabortion views — is the sole sitting judge.

Kacsmaryk sided with the challengers and issued an unprecedented ruling in April, for the first time suspending FDA approval of a human drug over objections from the agency. His ruling embraced language used by antiabortion activists, referring to abortion providers as “abortionists” and to fetuses and embryos as “unborn humans.”

It was quickly put on hold so the federal government and the drug manufacturer could appeal.

Two of the three judges on the appeals court — Elrod and Cory T. Wilson — did not go as far as Kacsmaryk in their opinion Wednesday. They ruled that too much time has lapsed for the challengers to mount a court challenge to the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone. Because that statute of limitations has passed, the judges did not address whether the FDA followed proper protocol when it originally approved the drug.

They did rule, however, that the agency years later did not properly vet whether the medication would still be safe if it is not administered in-person.

The Justice Department, representing the FDA, and the drug manufacturer Danco Laboratories, have emphasized the FDA’s reliance on dozens of studies involving thousands of patients to approve the medication, which has been used by more than 5 million women. Serious side effects occur in fewer than 1 percent of patients.

Lawyers defending the drug said the antiabortion challengers had no legal right — or standing — to file the lawsuit because they were not directly harmed by the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill. They also argued that allowing a court to revoke approval of an approved medication would jeopardize access to non-abortion drugs and more broadly harm medical research and innovation.

At oral argument in May, all three appeals court judges, who have previously supported abortion restrictions, seemed prepared to limit access to the medication.

 

Wednesday’s decision essentially echoed an earlier, initial review of Kacsmaryk’s opinion, in which a separate three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit declined to suspend approval of mifepristone but reversed actions taken by the FDA since 2016 to loosen restrictions on how to obtain the medication.

The Supreme Court temporarily put that appeals court decision on hold, opting to leave the current FDA regulations for mifepristone in place while the litigation continues.

Judge James C. Ho dissented from part of Wednesday’s opinion, saying said he believes that the statute of limitations for challenging the initial approval of mifepristone has not lapsed and the challengers have standing to contest it. Ho, an outspoken conservative and former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that he would have invalidated the FDA’s initial approval and believes the agency’s decisions are subject to review by the courts, just like decisions made by any other agency.

“The scientists at the FDA deserve our respect and our gratitude, but not our blind deference,” Ho said.

This is a developing story. It will be updated.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Sad, but not surprising:

 

[BensAllergies]

I found out that I met one of the women who sued Texas. I met her before the pregnancy complications happened that led her to sue. It’s possible that I’ll see her again but not likely. Luckily her story has a more happy ending than the others but all I can think about is how compassionate and empathetic she was in my interaction with her, and how proud I am of her strength and courage.

[GreyhoundFan]

Of course Trumpkin is pushing this crap as a compromise. It isn't. His dream would be a total ban. "Virginia Gov. Youngkin eyes a 15-week abortion ban as a 'consensus' voters will back"

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Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and his political team are devoting significant resources to gaining Republican control of the General Assembly this fall, hoping to enact a conservative agenda that would include passing new abortion legislation, according to several sources familiar with the governor’s plans.

Virginia is the last state in the South without significant restrictions on abortion rights, and advocates see it as the next big battleground on the issue.

Passing a ban on abortion after 15 weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest and saving the life of the mother, would be a legislative priority for Youngkin if his party succeeds in the November legislative elections, the sources familiar with his plans said. The governor and his campaign team believe that 15 weeks is a “consensus” limit — one that many Virginians across political ideologies can agree upon. And they’re betting the measure is modest enough to avoid spikes in Democratic turnout more stringent bans have triggered in other states.

Their view is informed by the all-women focus groups they conducted on abortion throughout the summer as part of GOP efforts to hold the Virginia House and win the Senate, NBC News has learned. Zack Roday, the coordinated campaigns director, for Youngkin's state PAC Spirit of Virginia, said the women's views on abortion were "complicated" and "nuanced." But, he said, "15 weeks with exceptions, is a place where a lot of people start nodding their head."

Youngkin is eyeing new abortion limitations as elected Democrats in the Commonwealth sound the alarm that the national party isn't doing enough to prevent the Republican governor and his allies from winning the state Senate — or from keeping their hold on the House of Delegates.

Some Republicans in the state don’t view abortion, and especially a 15-week ban, as an issue that will drive voters to the polls, or give Democrats an edge as it has in other recent elections.

In a Spirit of Virginia briefing with reporters this summer, where Youngkin’s political team laid out its priorities for November, cost of living, safety and education were mentioned as the three issues they believe Republican voters care most about.

Abortion was not on that list. In fact, the topic didn’t even come up until a reporter asked about it.

“I don’t think it’s the priority,” said Republican state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant, a practicing OB-GYN. “I think that Democrats want to make it a priority.”

Dunnavant, who is in a tough re-election fight, agreed with Youngkin's camp that 15 weeks seemed just about right. “It’s compassionate, and it’s consensus,” she said. “Fifteen weeks gives ample opportunity.”

According to a recent Gallup survey, nearly 70% of Americans believe abortion should be legal during the first three months of pregnancy. And there's some evidence that Republican voters might be as satisfied with a 15-week restriction on the procedure as they are with more stringent bans that have turned off independent and Democratic voters. A recent NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll of Iowa Republicans found close to the same percentage supported the state's six-week abortion ban (60% said it gets the issue "about right") as those who said they were “more likely” (54%) to support a hypothetical candidate who backed a 15-week ban.

Virginia currently allows abortions up to 26 weeks and six days of pregnancy — through the first two trimesters — with exceptions in the third trimester if three physicians find that the woman’s health is at risk. Earlier this year, Democrats, who control the state Senate, prevented several pieces of abortion-related legislation from moving forward, including one that would have limited abortion after 15 weeks.

Democrats are betting that any new threats to abortion rights will help them in November. State House Democrats last week launched a series of digital ads highlighting abortion restrictions in other states since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and warned voters that Virginia could “be next” if Republicans gained a majority in the state legislature this year. Republicans, for their part, have fired back with an ad first shared with NBC News that paints Democrats as extreme on abortion.

“They want to continue to downplay and dismiss women’s rights and abortion rights, like women don’t have a voice,” Democratic state Sen. Aaron Rouse, focus on abortion rights helped him win a special election in the Virginia Beach area earlier this year, said of Republicans. “Women have been very loud and clear in the state of Virginia: Don’t touch my rights, my freedom, when it comes to making a really tough health care decision.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Pretty soon Texas will prohibit women from riding in vehicles. "Highways are the next antiabortion target. One Texas town is resisting."

Quote

LLANO, Tex. — No one could remember the last time so many people packed into City Hall.

As the meeting began on a late August evening, residents spilled out into the hallway, the brim of one cowboy hat kissing the next, each person jostling for a look at the five city council members who would decide whether to make Llano the third city in Texas to outlaw what some antiabortion activists call “abortion trafficking.”

For well over an hour, the people of Llano — a town of about 3,400 deep in Texas Hill Country — approached the podium to speak out against abortion. While the procedure was now illegal across Texas, people were still driving women on Llano roads to reach abortion clinics in other states, the residents had been told. They said their city had a responsibility to “fight the murders.”

The cheers after each speech grew louder as the crowd readied for the vote. Then one woman on the council spoke up.

“I feel like there’s a lot more to discuss about this,” said Laura Almond, a staunch conservative who owns a consignment shop in the middle of town. “I have a ton of questions.”

More than a year after Roe v. Wade was overturned, many conservatives have grown frustrated by the number of people able to circumvent antiabortion laws — with some advocates grasping for even stricter measures they hope will fully eradicate abortion nationwide.

That frustration is driving a new strategy in heavily conservative cities and counties across Texas. Designed by the architects of the state’s “heartbeat” ban that took effect months before Roe fell, ordinances like the one proposed in Llano — where some 80 percent of voters in the county backed President Donald Trump in 2020 — make it illegal to transport anyone to get an abortion on roads within the city or county limits. The laws allow any private citizen to sue a person or organization they suspect of violating the ordinance.

Antiabortion advocates behind the measure are targeting regions along interstates and in areas with airports, with the goal of blocking off the main arteries out of Texas and keeping pregnant women hemmed within the confines of their antiabortion state. These provisions have already passed in two counties and two cities, creating legal risk for those traveling on major highways including Interstate 20 and Route 84, which head toward New Mexico, where abortion remains legal and new clinics have opened to accommodate Texas women. Several more jurisdictions are expected to vote on the measure in the coming weeks.

“This really is building a wall to stop abortion trafficking,” said Mark Lee Dickson, the antiabortion activist behind the effort.

Conservative lawmakers started exploring ways to block interstate abortion travel long before Roe was overturned. A Missouri legislator introduced a law in early 2022 that would have allowed any private citizen to sue anyone who helped a Missouri resident secure an abortion, regardless of where the abortion occurred — an approach later discussed at length by several national antiabortion groups. In April, Idaho became the first state to impose criminal penalties on anyone who helps a minor leave the state for an abortion without parental consent.

But even in the most conservative corners of Texas, efforts to crack down on abortion travel are meeting some resistance — with some local officials, even those deeply supportive of Texas’s strict abortion laws, expressing concern that the “trafficking” efforts go too far and could harm their communities.

The pushback reflects a new point of tension in the post-Roe debate among antiabortion advocates over how aggressively to restrict the procedure, with some Republicans in other states fearing a backlash from voters who support abortion rights. In small-town Texas, the concerns are more practical than political.

Two weeks before the Llano vote, lawmakers in Chandler, Tex., held off passing the ordinance, citing concerns about legal ramifications for the town and how the measure might conflict with existing Texas laws.

“I believe we’re making a mistake if we do this,” said Chandler council member Janeice Lunsford, minutes before she and her colleagues agreed to push the vote to another time. She later told The Washington Post that she felt the state’s abortion ban already did enough to stop abortions in Texas.

Then came the Llano City Council meeting on Aug. 21. Speaking to the crowd, Almond was careful to emphasize her antiabortion beliefs.

“I hate abortion,” she said. “I’m a Jesus lover like all of you in here.”

Still, she said, she couldn’t help thinking about the time in college when she picked up a friend from an abortion clinic — and how someone might have tried to punish her under this law.

“It’s overreaching,” she said. “We’re talking about people here.”

***

About a month earlier, Dickson had arrived in Llano with an urgent warning.

A “baby murdering cartel” was coming for the pregnant women of Central Texas, he recalled telling a group of about 25 Llano citizens in the town library, wearing his signature black blazer and backward baseball cap.

“By trains, planes and automobiles, I say we end abortion trafficking in the state of Texas,” he said.

Dickson brought along a laminated map of his state, black and red Sharpie marking each of the 51 jurisdictions across Texas that had passed ordinances to become what he calls a “sanctuary city for the unborn.”

He hoped Llano would be next.

A director of Right to Life of East Texas, Dickson joined forces with former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell in 2019, when abortion was still legal in Texas until 22 weeks of pregnancy. Together, the men set out to ban abortion city by city, focusing on conservative strongholds. The Texas ordinances relied on the novel enforcement mechanism that empowers private citizens to sue, creating the model for the statewide “heartbeat ban” that took effect exactly two years ago, on Sept. 1, 2021.

Since Roe fell, triggering a new ban that outlawed almost all abortions in Texas, Dickson and Mitchell have changed their strategy. Along with passing ordinances in conservative border towns in Democrat-led states, where abortion providers may look to open new clinics, the team has zeroed in on those helping women leave Texas for abortions — a practice they call “abortion trafficking.”

By Dickson’s definition, “abortion trafficking” is the act of helping any pregnant woman cross state lines to end her pregnancy, lending her a ride, funding, or another form of support. While the term “trafficking” typically refers to people who are forced, tricked or coerced, Dickson’s definition applies to all people seeking abortions — because, he argues, “the unborn child is always taken against their will.”

The law — which has the public backing of 20 Texas state legislators — is designed to go after abortion funds, organizations that give financial assistance to people seeking abortions, as well as individuals. For example, Dickson said, a husband who doesn’t want his wife to get an abortion could threaten to sue the friend who offers to drive her. Under the ordinance, the woman seeking the abortion would be exempt from any punishment.

Abortion rights advocates say the ordinance effort is merely a ploy to scare people out of seeking the procedure. To date, no one has been sued under the existing “abortion trafficking” laws.

“The purpose of these laws is not to meaningfully enforce them,” said Neesha Davé, executive director of the Lilith Fund, an abortion fund based in Texas. “It’s the fear that’s the point. It’s the confusion that’s the point.”

While these restrictions appear to violate the U.S. Constitution — which protects a person’s right to travel — they are extremely difficult to challenge in court, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who focuses on abortion. Because the laws can be enforced by any private citizen, abortion rights groups have no clear government official to sue in a case seeking to block the law.

“Mitchell and Dickson are not necessarily conceding that what they’re doing is unconstitutional, but they’re making it very hard for anyone to do anything about it,” Ziegler said.

Mitchell declined to comment for this story.

Asked about the constitutionality of his ordinances, Dickson cites the Mann Act, a federal law from 1910 that makes it illegal to transport “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” If the Mann Act is constitutional, he says, so is this.

Llano was a particularly attractive target, Dickson said, because the town sits at the crossroads of several highways. Travelers driving west toward New Mexico from Austin, for example, would likely take Highway 29 or 71 — both of which pass through Llano.

When Dickson first came to town to drum up interest for his ordinance, Councilwoman Almond was well aware of his endeavors. She’d seen his flier, advertising “the effort to protect Llano residents from abortion across state lines.” Then a friend reached out to ask if Almond and her husband would sit down with Dickson for a meeting.

“I’ve got a lot going on in my life,” Almond said she told her friend. “And right now, that’s just not where my energy is.”

Almond says she was thankful when Roe was overturned. A 57-year-old former elementary school teacher, she voted twice for Trump, and says she plans to vote for him again. Her friends call her a “pistol-packing mama.” Every time she gets a text message, her phone spits out the sound of two gunshots.

But Almond — who wears flower earrings and glittery orange nail polish — is also known as a bit of a city council wild card. At her consignment store, “Possibilities,” she employs an eclectic staff whose beliefs span the political spectrum. Her store manager is one of the only married, openly gay men in town — and if anyone has a problem with him, Almond says, they’d better hope she doesn’t hear about it.

Almond had Llano’s community of “cowboys and hippies” in mind when she chose her store’s slogan: “Where you meet awesome people and the possibilities are endless.”

Llano — just beyond the radius of Hill Country most trodden by Austin weekenders — is known as a deer and dove hunting destination, peppered with taxidermy studios and wild game processors. Every April, residents come together to cook roughly 25,000 pounds of crawfish for a festival that draws people from all across Texas.

But Almond — who wears flower earrings and glittery orange nail polish — is also known as a bit of a city council wild card. At her consignment store, “Possibilities,” she employs an eclectic staff whose beliefs span the political spectrum. Her store manager is one of the only married, openly gay men in town — and if anyone has a problem with him, Almond says, they’d better hope she doesn’t hear about it.

Almond had Llano’s community of “cowboys and hippies” in mind when she chose her store’s slogan: “Where you meet awesome people and the possibilities are endless.”

Llano — just beyond the radius of Hill Country most trodden by Austin weekenders — is known as a deer and dove hunting destination, peppered with taxidermy studios and wild game processors. Every April, residents come together to cook roughly 25,000 pounds of crawfish for a festival that draws people from all across Texas.

The whispers in the back of city hall grew louder as the crowd realized that Almond would not be voting as they had expected.

“Laura can’t do this by herself,” said an advocate for the ordinance, leaning over to the other people in her row. “She needs someone to second. There’s still a chance.”

Then the other woman on the council, Kara Gilliland, chimed in with her own hesitations.

“I’m not for abortions and that’s my personal belief,” Gilliland said. “But I cannot sit up here knowing that there are 3,400 other citizens in this town who don’t have the same belief necessarily as I do.”

Four of the five members of the Llano City Council voted to table the ordinance for another time.

“You can be mad at me if you want to,” Almond said to her town. “But I’ve got to sleep with myself at night.”

***

Combing through the ordinance that morning, Almond said in an interview, she scribbled furious notes in the margins, trying to identify every potential issue. She feared the law’s civil enforcement mechanism would turn members of the Llano community against each other. While she’d supported the implementation of the Texas “heartbeat ban,” which relied on the same provision, she said she hadn’t given much thought to how that could pit neighbor against neighbor.

Now it was her job to “peel the layers” — and she didn’t like where the law could lead.

As the city council moved on to other matters, Dickson ushered the angry crowd out to the porch.

The ordinance was tabled, he reminded his audience — not dead. The city would have another opportunity to consider the proposal as soon as early September.

“Is this the city council of Austin or is this the city council of conservative Llano?” Dickson said. “This is far from over. ... Show up at their businesses with some signs.”

“I know where Laura works,” offered the wife of a local pastor.

Dickson recalled what happened in Odessa, a far larger city in West Texas that failed to advance an earlier version of a “sanctuary city” ordinance several years earlier. With help from antiabortion residents, he said to the group, some of the council members who opposed the measure were ultimately voted out of office.

“Now Odessa has a 6-1 majority that is in favor of this,” Dickson said.

Odessa passed the ordinance in December.

***

The next night, Dickson drove 40 minutes to Mason, Tex. to try to convince another small, conservative community to pass the same law.

More than 20 people gathered around plates of pizza and pasta at a restaurant that doubles as a gun store. In the window, next to a sign for “fresh oysters,” someone had painted the message, “Let’s go, Brandon,” an insult aimed at President Biden. On one wall of the restaurant is a confederate flag taller than Dickson; above the bar, a flag for “Trump 2020.”

Dickson chose this location for his next meeting, inviting local pastors and other antiabortion advocates in the area to hear a version of the same speech he delivered a month earlier in Llano.

“Guys, I don’t care if there’s only one person on your city council who wants to pass this,” Dickson said. “If you have a personal relationship with a council member, reach out.”

Mason residents smiled and nodded, digging through their purses for pens to write down Dickson’s email.

Less than 24 hours later, the “abortion trafficking” ordinance was added to the official agenda for the Mason board of county commissioners.

They would take up the matter at their next meeting.

 

 

[ADoyle90815]

Women and girls are treated worse than livestock in those states, as even farm animals will have a dead fetus removed before it becomes septic and kills the female. I agree with the slave definition, as that's exactly what women and girls are, just slaves only good for breeding. 

Edited September 1, 2023 by ADoyle90815

[GreyhoundFan]

[Ozlsn]

14 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Pretty soon Texas will prohibit women from riding in vehicles

Seriously. What happens if you drive interstate with a pregnant friend, something goes wrong and they need a D&C? Under this it sounds like you could be sued, whether the intent was to obtain a termination or not. 

I really wonder how it will go when a much wanted pregnancy goes badly and suddenly they have middle-class, white women needing/wanting an abortion - and now having the risk of their friends/family being sued by "do-gooders".

[Jana814]

This story about this Texas is just plan sad. 

[BensAllergies]

3 hours ago, Ozlsn said:

Seriously. What happens if you drive interstate with a pregnant friend, something goes wrong and they need a D&C? Under this it sounds like you could be sued, whether the intent was to obtain a termination or not. 

I really wonder how it will go when a much wanted pregnancy goes badly and suddenly they have middle-class, white women needing/wanting an abortion - and now having the risk of their friends/family being sued by "do-gooders".

I’m planning a road trip to NM this fall and I’ll be visibly pregnant by then. I just looked up our route which takes us through Amarillo which confirms that we aren’t traveling through any of those counties, thank goodness. But geez, now we can’t stop for food/gas in some places of Texas without being scrutinized by the local citizens? I would likely pass the sniff test with my two other children in tow, who are blond and blue eyed like their dad. But other women wouldn’t get a pass.

In the end I do think this is something that just makes these tiny towns feel good about themselves, allows them to gossip about outsiders more than usual, but (hopefully) won’t actually lead to civil suits.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Abortion fight unites the left and rattles the right in key Wis. battleground"

Quote

DOOR COUNTY, Wis. — The Republican Party tent’s centerpiece sign blared appeals to potential voters: Defend America! We stand for our flag. Protect women’s sports. #Bidenflation.

If that failed to catch eyes at this summer’s Door County Fair, there was always the four-foot plastic elephant wearing an American flag top hat. But the wallet-size cards featuring illustrated fetuses? Those stayed on a table in the back-left corner. You’d have to look down, perhaps through glasses, to see anything about abortion.

“We’ve got disagreements on this issue within our own party,” said Stephanie Soucek, the GOP chairwoman in this stretch of northeast Wisconsin, who’d set up the booth between a lemonade stand and the hypnosis stage. “That’s the challenge: Finding a message we can all agree on.”

Across the fairgrounds, past a woman selling cheesecake on a stick, the Democrats had readily plunged their most popular yard banners into the grass:

Free to Choose.

Roe, Roe, Roe Your Vote.

“Fires people up, 100 percent,” said Carol Jensen-Olson, the vice chairwoman in charge of membership, beckoning the August crowds toward her email sign-up sheet.

The opposing displays captured how the Supreme Court’s move to overturn Roe v. Wade 14 months ago has reshaped the landscape of American politics, right down to the familiar ritual of county fair politicking. Long a rousing issue among conservatives, abortion is stirring voters on the left and mobilizing independents troubled by the government’s policing intimate decisions.

Most Americans aren’t in favor of revoking the option to end a pregnancy, and growing numbers of political moderates indicate that the issue will influence their vote. Republicans felt the impact in November when five states across the political spectrum put abortion referendums on the ballot, and voters in each case chose to safeguard access. Even in conservative strongholds, typically sleepy statewide contests have seen unusually high turnout when abortion access was at stake — most recently in Ohio, where a hearty majority rejected a measure that would have made it tougher to enshrine protections.

In Wisconsin, the high court’s decision reactivated a 174-year-old law interpreted as forbidding the procedure except to save a woman’s life — and ignited a fierce legal battle over whether that rule will stay on the books. The state’s Democratic attorney general, Josh Kaul, has pledged to repeal the ban through litigation expected to land as early as next year before Wisconsin’s Supreme Court — which flipped to a liberal majority after voters this spring elected a justice who had campaigned on abortion rights.

Abortion is a galvanizing topic in Door County, a peninsular expanse between Green Bay and Lake Michigan known as “the Cape Cod of the Midwest” — and the swingiest place in what’s shaping up to be a crucial 2024 battleground. It’s one of nine U.S. counties that has sided with every presidential election’s winner since 2000. In fact, Door voted for the winning White House contender all but twice in the past 50 years — in 1992 and 1976. The county’s role as a barometer of political opinion extends to other races, too: the winners of Wisconsin’s state and federal races last year — including the governorship and House — all won this region of roughly 30,000.

In late-summer interviews with dozens of county residents, conservatives said they are feeling the fallout of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision on the ground — and are worried that Republicans will be hurt politically by a backlash in 2024. Buoyant Democrats, meanwhile, said they are benefiting from a surge of new energy from both their base and those who are not regular party activists.

No county is a crystal ball, but politicos here on both sides of the aisle say Door County offers a strangely reliable taste of the broader mood: You’ll find more Trump signs in the rural southern end, where dairy farms stretch for miles; more “RESIST” buttons on the northern tip, where transplants from bluer cities have settled into lake houses; and a kaleidoscope of expression in the fisherman’s haven of Sturgeon Bay, the county seat, where everyone converges at the fair.

For five days at this summer’s expo, the Republicans operated a straw poll asking who should be the GOP nominee as the Democrats steered passersby toward Mason jars, each labeled with what they considered America’s most pressing issues.

“Drop a bean into the ones that are important to you,” said Jensen-Olson, the membership specialist, as a woman with cropped blond hair, red-framed glasses and a can of Mug root beer walked up.

“Let me see,” replied Susan Lindner, 53, a dishwasher at a lakefront resort in town.

Inflation? The environment? Affordable child care? Reproductive rights?

She plunked a bean into reproductive rights.

“Thank you!” Jensen-Olson said. “Would you like to sign up for our emails?”

No, Lindner replied. She wasn’t a Democrat or a Republican. She liked to vote by candidate — though, during the 2020 election, she hadn’t voted at all. She’d just moved and wasn’t sure where to find her polling site.

This time around, Lindner felt more motivated, recalling how, 15 years ago, she was almost raped by a man she trusted.

“If I’d gotten pregnant …”

Lindner didn’t like to think about what could happen to a victim of sexual assault today.

“It’s the women who are punished,” she said.

Warning signs

Joel Kitchens, the conservative Wisconsin State Assembly member whose district includes Door County, sensed his party had a problem even before the biennial survey of his constituents went out.

It wasn’t scientific or even neutral — the Republican state speaker’s office had crafted the questions, and Kitchens’s staff had modified them — but the response this summer validated his concerns: Less than a fifth supported banning abortion except to save a woman’s life.

The issue could box in the GOP, Kitchens fears.

He’d watched Republican businessman Tim Michels lose the gubernatorial race last year after championing the 1849 law — then backpedaling to say he’d sign a bill allowing exceptions for rape and incest.

Incumbent Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who’d campaigned on restoring the state’s pre-Dobbs access of 22 weeks, became Wisconsin’s first gubernatorial candidate to win while his party occupied the White House in more than three decades.

“If we’re going to be so dogmatic on that — no abortions no matter what — it’s not going to be a winning thing for us,” said Kitchens, a retired veterinarian who has held office since 2015. “And I think we’re already seeing that.”

He’d rather leave it up to the people. He thought Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who won his third term in 2022, had been wise to call for a statewide vote on abortion rights, rather than defend tighter restrictions. (Johnson has claimed most Wisconsinites could get behind a 12-week prohibition but declined to say how he would vote. He previously backed a 20-week nationwide ban with exceptions.)

That messaging — though the referendum Johnson proposed could not change Wisconsin law — seemed to resonate better with voters who oppose abortion yet feel squeamish about the government imposing reproductive restrictions.

Johnson acknowledged this spring that the issue has been an “important factor” in the Democrats’ recent victories, and Kitchens agreed.

“At some point, the law has to reflect what people want,” Kitchens said.

Another survey out of Marquette University Law School — this one scientific and neutral — showed that, since the Dobbs ruling, Republicans and right-leaning independents in Wisconsin were less likely to say they supported the most restrictive policies. (The share who favored abortion being “illegal in all cases” had dropped from 24 percent in February 2020 to 12 percent in June.)

Even in Door County, people who call themselves “pro-life” are struggling to reach a unifying stance. Kitchens is okay with exceptions for rape, incest and if the woman’s life is in jeopardy. Soucek, the county GOP chairwoman, is not okay with exceptions for rape and incest. (Adoption is the better answer, she said — or guiding women toward public resources like food stamps and Medicaid.) Others won’t accept termination for any reason.

The Democrats, however, seem amped up by a common cause — and are seeing political energy in unexpected places.

The political becomes personal

Before the Supreme Court struck down Roe, Emma Cox described herself as a liberal who just voted. Beyond that … did selling RESIST buttons in her family’s fair-trade gift shop count as activism?

Now the 35-year-old store manager co-leads an advocacy group in the northern Door County village of Sister Bay, population 1,180.

Eleven days after the Dobbs decision, she and two friends organized a march down the main drag, protesting a right they’d been shocked to see rescinded. They collected about 100 email addresses that July afternoon, hoping to keep the momentum going.

“It was mind-blowing to see the amount of people show up in a community as small as ours,” Cox said.

Perched on a stool in her family’s cottage-turned-shop — a maze of children’s books, rosemary candles and rainbow birdhouses, among other novelties — she outlined her strategy moving forward: Fight complacency with protests. (June’s “One Year Without Roe,” for instance, drew 10 women with “pro-choice” signs to a busy corner of Bay Shore Drive.) Alert neighbors to key races. (Cox and a team of volunteers went door-knocking before the midterm elections.) Inform people that a Republican president could push a federal abortion ban.

And restock the store’s best-selling bumper stickers, which say: My body. My choice.

Down in Sturgeon Bay, one of the county’s two full-time OB/GYNs had weighed her own choices when the law changed.

Beth Gaida, 42, moved here from Ocean Springs, Miss., three years ago, searching for fresh air and small-town charm. She loved that her three children under 12 could all go to school in the same building through senior year.

Then Roe fell, triggering Wisconsin’s pre-Civil War abortion law, and Gaida suddenly wrestled with a grim calculation: Before she could terminate a pregnancy, how close must a patient be to death?

Blood transfusion close? Chest compressions close?

“I know what the proper medical treatment is,” Gaida said, “but if I can’t do that because of a state law — then what?”

It didn’t make sense to her patients, she said — not the Democrats, not the Republicans. (She’d always voted left.) She’d thought about relocating to Minnesota, where abortion is allowed until fetal viability, which is typically around 22 to 24 weeks of pregnancy.

But her hospital had been trying for more than a year to fill an OB/GYN vacancy. She and the one other doctor were already overwhelmed. If Gaida was gone and the other doctor was out sick, someone in Sister Bay, for instance, would have to drive two hours to reach the next-closest OB/GYN in Green Bay.

Performing abortions had been a rare part of Gaida’s role — her Catholic employer prohibited elective procedures — so she’d normally refer women to centers in Green Bay or Sheboygan. Still, she hadn’t had to worry about criminal charges when dealing with a pregnancy complication.

Now she advises patients to drive to Illinois, where abortion is allowed until the fetus is viable — a costly trek, she said, that delays their care. One charity in town has offered to fly women to Chicago by private plane.

Pregnancy is a life-threatening condition, Gaida thought. The United States, she knew, has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, and the risk tended to be higher for women in rural areas like this one.

“Better to stay and fight,” she said.

Fourteen years ago, when she was an Air Force physician in Texas, she’d started bleeding out. She’d been 21 weeks pregnant with twins conceived through in vitro fertilization when her doctor acted quickly to induce labor — effectively a termination, she knew, as the fetuses would not survive at that stage of development.

If the doctor would have hesitated, she said, she could have lost her uterus.

“Or I could have died hemorrhaging,” Gaida said.

A winning issue

Bill Krueger, 79, brought the wallet-size cards featuring illustrated fetuses to the Republican Party tent. As head of Door County’s Right to Life chapter, he often distributed literature meant to steer women away from abortion.

“Her life began when sperm united with your egg,” the cards said.

On this August evening, the retired steelworker who’d moved here from Milwaukee sat in a plastic chair next to the four-foot elephant, chatting with folks who stopped by. One man said he couldn’t wait to vote for Donald Trump, adding that all those indictments were phony. Another asked him what they were going to do about President Biden and Nancy Pelosi.

He wasn’t sure about that, but he planned to support Trump, who took credit for the high court’s ability to “kill” Roe and declared the federal government should play a “vital role” in stopping abortion. Krueger had heard YouTube audio of a fetus’s beating heart — was it eight years ago? — and gradually morphed from a Christian who had never liked the procedure to an activist striving to abolish it.

Lately, his group had talked about reframing its message, making it more woman-centered. He’d also packed pamphlets that listed addresses for places that supplied free baby formula and clothes. In an ideal world, he thought, there would be no exceptions to an abortion ban.

If a woman dies?

“That’s God’s plan,” he said.

Up walked a conservative friend, another 79-year-old retiree, Tom Post, who used to make catalogues for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“I think there should be exceptions,” Post said.

“What do you mean by exceptions, Tom?” Krueger replied.

“Saving the mother’s life, if that’s an issue,” Post said. “Even a strong risk to the mother’s life.”

Krueger stared down at his white tennis shoes.

Behind him, people slid their straw poll votes in a neon-green shoe box. Days later, the results would reveal a winner, with 66 percent of the vote: Donald Trump.

A couple hundred yards away, Ashley Kuzay, 37, rested on a wooden bench while her 12-year-old daughter was off roaming with friends.

The self-described independent tended to agree with the anti-Biden signs at the fair — she wasn’t a fan of what she saw as the current administration’s overreach.

“I lean toward less government regulation,” said Kuzay, who home-schools her daughter in Sturgeon Bay.

Which was why, at the moment, she disliked talk about federal efforts to limit abortion. She’d considered voting for Trump in 2024, but now, she wasn’t sure.

“The government doesn’t have a place in regulating that, either,” she said.

Over at the Democrats’ booth, more beans tumbled into Mason jars labeled with hot-button issues.

Safe roads.

Clean water.

Veterans.

Reproductive rights.

Every voter received five beans in a tiny paper cup. Julie Thyssen, a 52-year-old software analyst, dumped all of hers into reproductive rights.

“I have an 11-year-old daughter,” Thyssen, a Democrat, said. “I can’t believe she’ll grow up without the same rights as I had.”

More voters wandered over. More beans rattled into glasses.

Inflation.

Reproductive rights.

The environment.

Reproductive rights.

As the fair wound down, the Democrats tallied the winning issue — not that they had to. It was obvious from looking at the jars, just like last year:

Reproductive rights.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Because of course: "Alabama threatens to prosecute those helping women get an abortion"

Quote

Remember all that happy talk about our federal system and letting states decide for themselves whether to allow abortion in the wake of the Dobbs ruling last year? Some states would prohibit abortion; some would allow it; and, as Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh assured us, women in abortion-banning states would be free to travel elsewhere to obtain the procedure.

Well, not so fast — at least according to Alabama. The state prohibits almost all abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. Now comes Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall to say that’s doesn’t go far enough. According to Marshall, helping women travel to other states to obtain abortions could amount to a “criminal conspiracy” under state law, one that he’s prepared to prosecute.

“An elective abortion performed in Alabama would be a criminal offense; thus, a conspiracy formed in the State to have that same act performed outside the State is illegal,” Marshall wrote in a court filing last week. Whether an abortion would be legal in the state where it was performed didn’t matter, Marshall asserted; the state’s criminal conspiracy law covers acts that would be illegal under Alabama law.

Therefore, he said, “the legality of abortion in other states is irrelevant” and “Alabama can criminalize Alabama-based conspiracies to commit abortions elsewhere.”

This is the reality of post-Roe America, where women in red states have only the reproductive rights that the most extreme state officials are willing to grant.

Marshall’s position wouldn’t apply to the pregnant woman herself, since the state’s criminal law — at least so far — applies only to those who perform or otherwise facilitate the abortion.

But given the scant availability of abortion in the Deep South and other red states, and given the distances one must travel to find an abortion provider, the ability to access funding and other logistical support is important for women seeking to exercise what was once their constitutional right.

Of the four states bordering Alabama, for example, two (Mississippi and Tennessee) have imposed near-total bans, Georgia prohibits abortion after six weeks, and Florida’s current 15-week limit is set to give way to a six-week ban.

Abortion rights supporters who provide funding and other assistance to women seeking abortions out of state filed suit in federal court against Marshall after he made remarks on a radio program calling such efforts “potentially criminally actionable for us.”

The cases — there are two lawsuits that have been combined — assert that Marshall’s threat of prosecution violates the abortion rights advocates’ due process, freedom of speech and right to travel.

One plaintiff, obstetrician-gynecologist Yashica Robinson, said she can’t provide pregnant patients who want to terminate their pregnancies with information about abortion access out of state for fear of being prosecuted. Another, the Yellowhammer Fund, which arranges funding and transportation for low-income women seeking abortions, similarly stopped such activities after Dobbs because of threatened criminal liability.

To call Marshall’s response insulting and dismissive would be an understatement. His motion to dismiss the case compared Alabama’s interest in preventing out-of-state abortions to efforts to combat heroin trafficking in jurisdictions that had decriminalized the drug. He said the state had an interest in regulating the use of money to travel for out-of-state abortions “just like it regulates paying someone to travel to obtain out-of-state illegal drugs.”

Arguing that the state legislature had likened abortion to “murder,” he said, it therefore “can criminalize Alabama-based conspiracies to commit abortions elsewhere, even if the State lacked jurisdiction to prosecute out-of-state crime.”

As to free speech, Marshall said, “One cannot seriously doubt that the State can prevent a mobster from asking a hit man to kill a rival because the agreement occurred through spoken word. So too here for conspiracies to obtain an elective abortion.”

And he pooh-poohed the notion that the threat of prosecution interfered with the constitutionally protected right to travel. “Their clients’ right to travel is not implicated here; and even if it was, Alabama law does not present an unconstitutional burden on it given the State’s strong interests in protecting unborn life and maternal health.”

Marshall is an antiabortion zealot, but he’s not alone in targeting efforts to obtain abortions outside states that ban the procedure. A new Idaho “abortion trafficking” law makes it a crime — punishable by two to five years in prison — to help a pregnant minor obtain an abortion out of state without parental consent. That law is being challenged in federal court. Several jurisdictions in Texas have passed statutes making it illegal to transport women seeking to obtain an abortion on roads within their limits, and empowered private citizens to sue anyone suspected of a violation.

Drug traffickers and heroin dealers. Mobsters and hit men. It’s no surprise that those who believe abortion is tantamount to murder would resort to such overheated rhetoric and tactics.

But make no mistake: This was never about restoring contested issues to the wisdom of the democratic process. It was and will be about depriving women of the choice to control their own bodies, by whatever means necessary.

 

[CTRLZero]

Just another confirming article on the subject that @GreyhoundFan posted directly above.  Here is an excerpt from the Seattle Times/New York Times showing the effects on other states - namely Idaho, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.  We read about Idaho’s issues quite often here in Washington state, because women must cross the border between the states to get various types of health care.  It’s so unnerving to think of women being hunted down on the highways to prevent them getting care.  Note:  bolding is mine.  Seattle Times (paywall) - medical staff leaving red states

 

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SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

The New York Times

McCALL, Idaho — One by one, doctors who handle high-risk pregnancies are disappearing from Idaho — part of a wave of obstetricians fleeing restrictive abortion laws and a hostile state legislature. Dr. Caitlin Gustafson, a family doctor who also delivers babies in the tiny mountain town of McCall, is among those left behind, facing a lonely and uncertain future. 

When caring for patients with pregnancy complications, Gustafson seeks counsel from maternal-fetal medicine specialists in Boise, the state capital two hours away. But two of the experts she relied on as backup have packed up their young families and moved away, one to Minnesota and the other to Colorado. 

All told, more than a dozen labor and delivery doctors — including five of Idaho’s nine longtime maternal-fetal experts — will have either left or retired by the end of this year. Gustafson said the departures have made a bad situation worse, depriving both patients and doctors of moral support and medical advice. 

“I wanted to work in a small family town and deliver babies,” she said. “I was living my dream — until all of this.”

Idaho’s obstetrics exodus is not happening in isolation. Across the country, in red states like Texas, Oklahoma and Tennessee, obstetricians — including highly skilled doctors who specialize in handling complex and risky pregnancies — are leaving their practices. Some newly minted doctors are avoiding states like Idaho. 

The departures may result in new maternity care deserts, or areas that lack any maternity care, and they are placing strains on physicians such as Gustafson who are left behind. The effects are particularly pronounced in rural areas, where many hospitals are shuttering obstetrics units for economic reasons. Restrictive abortion laws, experts say, are making that problem much worse.

. . . .

In Tennessee, where one-third of counties are considered maternity care deserts, Dr. Leilah Zahedi-Spung, a maternal-fetal specialist, decided to move to Colorado not long after the Dobbs ruling. She grew up in the South and felt guilty about leaving, she said. 

Tennessee’s abortion ban, which was softened slightly this year, initially required an “affirmative defense,” meaning that doctors faced the burden of proving that an abortion they had performed was medically necessary — akin to the way a defendant in a homicide case might have to prove he or she acted in self-defense. Zahedi-Spung felt as if she had “quite the target on my back,” she said — so much so that she hired her own criminal defense lawyer. 

“The majority of patients who came to me had highly wanted, highly desired pregnancies,” she said. “They had names, they had baby showers, they had nurseries. And I told them something awful about their pregnancy that made sure they were never going to take home that child — or that they would be sacrificing their lives to do that. I sent everybody out of state. I was unwilling to put myself at risk.”

 

[Ozlsn]

Florida Supreme Court to hear pivotal abortion case.

On September 8, the court will hear oral arguments in Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida v. Florida, which is a challenge to Florida’s 15-week abortion ban, H.B. 5. The 15-week ban was modeled on the Mississippi law that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. However, if Florida wins, then a new six-week abortion ban will be triggered because of another recently enacted law lying in wait.  

[GreyhoundFan]

"Planned Parenthood in Wisconsin will resume offering abortions"

Quote

MADISON, Wis. — Planned Parenthood plans to resume offering abortions in Wisconsin next week, more than a year after it stopped providing the service because of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning the right to abortion.

Planned Parenthood and others stopped providing abortions after the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization because of an 1849 law that was broadly viewed as banning nearly all abortions.

The Wisconsin attorney general, a Democrat, sued in state court to try to overturn that law. A judge in July issued an initial ruling that concluded the 1849 law did not ban anyone from seeking abortions but rather barred someone from battering a pregnant woman and killing her unborn child. The judge is expected to issue a final ruling in the case soon, but Planned Parenthood announced Thursday it was not waiting for that ruling and instead would resume offering services on Monday at clinics in Milwaukee and Madison.

“With patients and community as our central priority and driving force, we are eager to resume abortion services and provide this essential care to people in our State,” Tanya Atkinson, president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, said in a statement.

The case before the Dane County judge is expected to continue and other lawsuits could be filed in response to Planned Parenthood’s resumption of abortion services.

Kristin Lyerly, an OB/GYN who performed abortions in Wisconsin before Roe v. Wade was overturned, said she will immediately return to providing abortions in her home state.

While it’s “uncomfortable” to resume abortion care before the judge issues a final ruling, she said, she trusts the Planned Parenthood lawyers, who she says have had several conversations with her about this decision.

“I’m not a lawyer. I have to trust the people on my team,” Lyerly said.

To provide abortions again in Wisconsin, she said: “I’m willing to put my career on the line.”

Heather Weininger, executive director of Wisconsin Right to Life, criticized Planned Parenthood for not waiting for the final ruling.

“We’re hugely disappointed for the moms and the pre-born babies here in the state,” Weininger said.

Planned Parenthood clinics are already scheduling appointments, Lyerly said — and the slots are likely to fill up quickly.

Wisconsin borders Illinois, which has become a major destination state for women traveling from states with abortion bans, with clinics there struggling to absorb patients from across the South and Midwest. In 2019, before the fall of Roe, 6,430 abortions were performed in Wisconsin, according to data compiled by KFF, a nonpartisan health research organization.

While this development is an important step toward restoring abortion access in Wisconsin, Lyerly said, there’s still more to do. The Planned Parenthood clinic in Sheboygan, Wis., will not resume abortion care, Lyerly said — which means women in the northern part of the state will continue to have to drive several hours for care.

“I’m fearful that people will think it’s over, and it’s not nearly over,” she said.

The Democrat district attorneys in Milwaukee and Dane counties, where Madison is located, have said they would not enforce an abortion ban. The district attorney in Sheboygan County is a Republican who has said he would enforce the ban.

Seventeen states have banned all or most abortions as the abortion landscape has fundamentally shifted since the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision overturning Roe, the 1973 ruling that established a right to an abortion. Abortion rights groups have turned to state courts as one of the quickest and only ways to attempt to restore access in a post-Roe America in some states — and they’ve had mixed results.

The development in Wisconsin comes six weeks after liberals took a 4-3 majority on the state Supreme Court, which is likely to review the case in the coming months. The newest liberal member of the court, Janet Protasiewicz, championed abortion rights when she ran for the court this spring, and her critics have questioned whether she could participate in cases on abortion. If she were to step aside in any case, the court would be ideologically divided, with three liberals and three conservatives.

Republicans who control the legislature have threatened to impeach Protasiewicz if she does not step aside in separate cases over gerrymandering. Protasiewicz has not said if she will participate in those cases, and it’s unclear if Republicans will carry through with their warnings on impeachment.

After the trial court judge rules on the abortion law, the case will likely go to an appeals court. If the state Supreme Court were to split 3-3, the appeals court ruling would stand.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[Audrey2]

Just when you thought you could sleep at night, the Progress Action Fund has come out with another commercial that they're supposed to be playing in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an excellent ad.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Stories like this make me sad for all women of childbearing age.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Rethugs are trying something new in Virginia, with a plan to take it nationwide, if it works. They're not using the word "ban". I hope the people of Virginia don't take the bait.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is horrible. TW:abuse

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