Falsehoods Unchallenged Only Fester and Grow
https://thefogbow.com/forum/
Anthony Michael Kreis
@AnthonyMKreis
It’s not limiting access to “legal birth control” if you make it illegal.
Lindsey Graham
@LindseyGrahamSC
The last thing Republicans will do is shut down fertility clinics and limit access to legal birth control.
@HillaryClinton, your latest attacks are BS and they are not going to work.
Group tied to anti-abortion Trump mega-donors pours money into Alabama supreme court race
Organization affiliated with Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein spends half a million on candidate who believes life begins at fertilization
Jessica Glenza
Thu 29 Feb 2024 11.00 CET
A group connected to anti-abortion, billionaire Trump mega-donors has funneled more than half a million dollars to an Alabama supreme court judicial candidate who said “embryos were human beings whose lives begin at fertilization”.
Alabama’s supreme court was thrust into the limelight earlier this month when eight of the court’s nine justices ruled that embryos created for in vitro fertilization (IVF) were “extrauterine children” in the eyes of the law.
The decision forced three of the state’s eight fertility clinics to stop providing advanced treatments, infuriated doctors, and left hundreds of would-be parents with few options for continuing treatment. At least one company that ships frozen embryos has paused business in the state, making it difficult to ship existing embryos elsewhere.
Donald Trump, now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has attempted to back away from the Alabama supreme court’s ruling. Trump reportedly sees extreme abortion bans as a threat to Republican victories. Republicans more broadly have struggled to respond to the decision.
The group funding the Alabama candidate, Fair Courts America, is connected to anti-abortion billionaire mega-donors Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein. Fair Courts America represents the only outside group donating in Alabama’s upcoming primary race for supreme court chief justice, scheduled to take place next week.
The race pits the long-shot candidate Bryan Taylor, backed by the Uihlein-affiliated Fair Courts America, against the sitting supreme court justice Sarah Stewart. A recent Fair Courts America ad told voters: “If you like Trump’s judges, you’ll love Bryan Taylor.” Trump confirmed three justices to the US supreme court, including at least one who supported a group that opposes aspects of IVF treatment.
In a statement on the IVF decision, Taylor said he believed “we can uphold the sanctity of life without subjecting IVF clinics to lawsuit abuse”, but that resolving the legality of IVF in the state is “within the purview of the legislature”.
“I hope they can act quickly with the dual aim to protect life and support families,” he said.
Whether the legislature can, in fact, resolve the legal status of IVF in the state is unknown. In a 2011 case, the state supreme court found fetuses had the rights of children in wrongful death suits. Further, an Alabama constitutional amendment to protect “the sanctity of life” that was cited by the court’s recent decision could be used to invalidate new laws meant to protect IVF, as the constitution would override laws passed by the legislature.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... court-race
A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday upheld a Texas law requiring family planning clinics to notify parents if their minor children seek birth control and get their consent to provide it.
The unanimous opinion from a three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals largely affirmed a lower court ruling in favor of a father who sued the federal government over its policy barring so-called Title X family planning clinics that receive federal funding from notifying parents that their child requested birth control.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which administers the Title X clinic program, and a lawyer for plaintiff Alexander Deanda did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Title X program at the center of the case, established in 1970, provides grants to family planning clinics around the country. Its budget has been about $286 million for the last five years.
The law behind the program requires that it both serve "adolescents" and that it "to the extent practical...encourage family participation." In 2014 guidance, codified in a 2021 regulation, HHS said Title X clinics could not notify parents if their children ask for birth control.
Nick Knudsen 🇺🇸 @NickKnudsenUS wrote: Literally every woman in the country should see this video.
Share it everywhere! #SaveWomensHealthCare
PHOENIX (AP) — An Arizona lawmaker announced Monday on the state Senate floor that she plans to have an abortion after learning that her pregnancy is not viable.
State Sen. Eva Burch, a registered nurse known for her reproductive rights activism, was surrounded by fellow Democratic senators as she made the announcement, The Arizona Republic reported.
Burch said that she found out a few weeks ago that “against all odds,” she was pregnant. The mother of two living children from west Mesa who is running for reelection said she has had “a rough journey” with fertility. She experienced her first miscarriage 13 years ago, was pregnant many times and terminated a nonviable pregnancy as she campaigned for her Senate seat two years ago, she said.
Now, Burch said that her current pregnancy is not progressing and not viable and she has made an appointment to terminate.
“I don’t think people should have to justify their abortions,” Burch said. “But I’m choosing to talk about why I made this decision because I want us to be able to have meaningful conversations about the reality of how the work that we do in this body impacts people in the real world.”
The next Clarence Thomas? Abortion pill case spotlights rightwing judge and his wife’s shadowy connections
Judge James Ho ruled to restrict mifepristone. His wife Allyson is linked to the anti-abortion group that brought the case
Melissa Segura
Mon 25 Mar 2024 17.02 CET
When the former president Donald Trump appointed the Texas attorney James Ho to the fifth circuit court of appeals in 2017, lawyers at the prominent law firm Gibson Dunn – where Ho worked before his appointment – had a problem: how to replace the politically connected Ho. Turns out, they didn’t even need to change the home address for his replacement. Ho’s wife, Allyson, moved into her husband’s position and his old office.
Few people outside of legal circles have heard of the Hos, yet the couple is tied to the case before the US supreme court that will determine women’s access to mifepristone, a drug commonly used in medication abortions. The court hears arguments in the case on Tuesday.
Ho served on the three-judge panel last summer that ruled to restrict access to mifepristone. The legal group behind the mifepristone case, Alliance Defending Freedom, made at least six payments from 2018 through 2022 to his wife, Allyson, a powerhouse federal appellate lawyer who has argued in front of the supreme court and has deep connections to the conservative legal movement that has led the attack on the right to abortion in the US.
The payments don’t violate the court’s code of conduct, according to Stephen Gillers, a New York University emeritus professor of law and author of Regulation of Lawyers: Problems of Law and Ethics. But some court watchers argue that Ho’s failure to recuse himself from the case illustrates why public trust in the judiciary is eroding. One recent survey found that 63% of judges noted a dip in the public’s positive perception of them.
“When Americans see a case like this – so clearly concocted and motivated by special interests, and with evident connections between those interests and the judges on the case, it does tremendous damage to the reputation of the courts, and to the public trust in their ability to give all litigants an even shake,” said Alex Aronson, the executive director of the nonpartisan group Court Accountability and a former chief counsel to the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
In an email to the Guardian, James Ho wrote that he “consulted our court’s ethics advisor prior to sitting in that case, and was advised that there was no basis for recusal. In any event, my wife’s practice is to donate honoraria to charity.”
The Hos are just one of the increasing number of power couples in the conservative movement in which the wife of a prominent official works in the background, laying the groundwork for Republican policies that their spouses will rule upon or legislate. In the mifepristone case, the wife of the Missouri senator Josh Hawley, Erin, is the attorney of record for Alliance Defending Freedom and argued the case before Ho. The supreme court justice Clarence Thomas rankled the legal world when he refused to recuse himself from a case involving questions about the January 6 insurrection and the “Stop The Steal” campaign to which his wife, Ginni Thomas, was closely tied.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/ ... rtion-pill
‘Idaho’s seen as a war zone’: the lone abortion activist defying militias and the far right
Jen Jackson Quintano is her region’s only abortion rights organizer. Faced with a ‘culture of silence’, she’s platforming women – and changing minds
by Cassidy Randall
Tue 12 Mar 2024 12.00 CET
Last January, Jen Jackson Quintano stepped into a theater in Sandpoint, a tiny city in northern Idaho, to debut a production that could best be described as The Vagina Monologues meets The Moth – a night of Idahoans sharing stories about their own reproductive agency.
Quintano was nervous. Idaho, where Republicans outnumber Democrats five to one, has one of the most punitive abortion bans in the country. Further, Quintano lives in a region of the state that keeps making national headlines for bold displays of armed intimidation by militia, white supremacists, and Christian nationalists. This was not necessarily a safe place to talk about abortion.
So that afternoon, as people began filing into the theater, she considered worst-case scenarios – even though she’d promoted the event mostly by word of mouth to avoid alerting disruptors, ensured law enforcement had patrols in the area, and brought in a peacekeeper force of local volunteers trained in de-escalation tactics. One attendee, wearing high heels, stashed sneakers in her bag in case she had to run. Another kept her coat on and her purse on her shoulder for a hasty exit.
Quintano wasn’t a full-time activist; she’d pulled this event together in her spare time between running a chainsaw and driving one-ton trucks for her family’s arborist business. She empathized with attendees’ apprehension: “My husband had volunteered as a peacekeeper, my mother-in-law was in the audience, we were all there. And I had this morbid thought: what is my daughter left with if shit goes down?”
Quintano, 44, isn’t an inconspicuous target. Tall and lanky, with a purple streak in her blond hair and a silver ring glinting in her nose, she’s easy to pick out of a crowd. In a year-plus as north Idaho’s lone abortion rights organizer, she’s had no qualms about showing herself; her face appears all over the website and Instagram of the Pro-Voice Project, the organization she founded last March to encourage abortion storytelling in Idaho. “How can I ask other people to put themselves out there, if I’m not willing to do that myself?” she says.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ho-stories
Facing an April 1 deadline to rule, the court sided with Floridians Protecting Freedom, a coalition of abortion rights groups sponsoring the initiative. By greenlighting the measure, the court dealt a serious blow to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and GOP Attorney General Ashley Moody, who opposed it.
Supporters had already gathered more than enough signatures to qualify for the ballot pending the Supreme Court review.
If passed, the initiative would roll back the state’s current 15-week ban to the point of viability, about 24 weeks, when the fetus can survive outside the womb.
The measure needs to reach a 60 percent threshold to be approved. Citizen-led ballot initiatives face a steep path to getting on the ballot, as the GOP-majority Legislature has changed requirements over the years to make it more difficult.
Jim Boyle @JimGBoyle wrote: The radicalization of Texas Republican legislators continues. Ten Rs who won their primary race for a House seat in R districts have signed the pledge of Abolish Abortion Texas (AATX). The pledge provides that a 𝐰𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐦𝐚𝐲 𝐛𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐦𝐮𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐧 𝐁, the morning after pill. Consistent with the pledge, clinic workers can be charged with murder for destroying embryos resulting from IVF.
Video of Paul Brown, Policy Director of AATX.
Josh '𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕹𝖔𝖙𝖔𝖗𝖎𝖔𝖚𝖘 𝕵𝕻𝕲' Gray 🌵 @AZNotoriousJPG wrote: To all my fellow Arizona #GirlDad's, this is now the world we live in:
#AbortionRights #AbortionIsHealthcare
#RememberInNovember
The Recount @therecount wrote: Arizona State Sen. Eva Burch (D): "A couple weeks ago, I had an abortion — a safe, legal abortion here in Arizona for a pregnancy that I very much wanted."
"Somebody took care of me," she continues. "And now we're talking about whether or not we should put that doctor in jail."
Acyn @Acyn wrote: Crockett: Would you consider erectile dysfunction as a lifesaving usage for Viagra.
Dr. Califf: Not lifesaving.
Crockett: I’m going to tell you, based on my research, Mifepristone actually has life saving characteristics…
Senate Democrats @MoSenDems wrote: This week, Senate Democrats filed legislation to protect IVF treatments in Missouri. Also this week, Senate Republicans said women who freeze embryos are “reckless” and it should be a crime to freeze IVF embryos. Take a #moleg minute to hear the Republicans’ plan for IVF parents: